SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Pepe Escobar: Washington is trying to use the Venezuela playbook on Iran, and he thinks it badly misunderstands who it is dealing with.

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2090492249192931385

 Pepe Escobar: Washington is trying to use the Venezuela playbook on Iran, and he thinks it badly misunderstands who it is dealing with.

Escobar says the Trump administration recently revived a back channel to the IRGC through Iraqi Kurdistan’s leader Nechirvan Barzani. The channel was originally set up for diplomacy. According to Escobar, it was later used to offer billions of dollars to senior IRGC figures in exchange for helping weaken Iran’s leadership from within.

The offer was rejected. Escobar says Ahmad Vahidi passed it up and the information moved up Iran’s chain of command.

His point is that Washington was essentially trying to buy a military coup. The problem: senior IRGC figures spent decades fighting the Iran-Iraq War and see themselves as defenders of Iran against foreign intervention. Taking American money to undermine the state would mean treason, not a payday.

Escobar sees the same misunderstanding in Washington’s wider strategy. Iran’s message that the U.S. should leave the region and accept a “new regional order” is, in his view, a statement that the old balance of power is changing.

Iran sits at the center of a growing network linking Russia, China, Central Asia and Pakistan. The North-South Transport Corridor, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and expanding Iran-China trade routes are creating alternatives to U.S.-controlled trade and finance.

That is why Escobar expects the sanctions campaign to hit more than Iran. Secondary sanctions put China, Russia and other countries trading with Tehran in the same fight.

China, he argues, has little reason to comply. Its 2021 anti-foreign-sanctions law explicitly targets the extraterritorial use of foreign sanctions.

So Escobar’s bigger point is simple: Washington is trying to isolate Iran, but the pressure may be pushing Iran, China, Russia and the wider Global South into closer cooperation.

The fight over Iran is increasingly a fight over who gets to shape the system around it.

@RealPepeEscobar