"This Is the midnight – let no star
"Delude us – dawn is very far.
"This is the tempest long foretold
"Slow to make head but sure to hold."

Rudyard Kipling, England's greatest poet of Empire, who then became the unwilling prophet and witness of that empire's catastrophe and coming dissolution, published that frightening warning in 1932, the year after Japan seized Manchuria when the mighty British Empire that had dominated Asia for a century could not raise a fingernail to stop it.

Kipling published that poem only a year before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, with all that meant for England and the world. Today, his poems offer a prophetic warning yet again as the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the entire industrialized world reel from the latest Iranian strategic masterstroke: shutting down Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states' ability to export oil to the outside world in any significant quantities at all.

The United States and its ridiculous European Lilliputian military allies in Europe – by which I mean, of course, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland – have huffed and puffed endlessly about how they have strategically isolated Russia over the past four and a half years since Moscow launched its Special Military Operation into Ukraine. With China and India – and now Iran as well – as its solid, loyal trade and strategic partners, Russia, of course, has not been isolated at all. And it is NOT reeling economically after four and a half years of the most determined US, British and NATO efforts to collapse it, despite all the Wall Street and City of London fantasies to the contrary.

But now the boot is on the other foot.