Wikipedia:

Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas, that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser of the United States Navy. The aircraft, an Airbus A300, was destroyed and all 290 people on board, including 66 children, were killed.^[1]

Brian McDonald:

Russia’s relations with Western Europe now lie in rubble; ending over three decades of attempts to build “a common European home.” That leaves a proud, wounded power available at a discount, ripe for Chinese influence in ways the Kremlin itself once worked hard to avoid.

What Nechapurenko shows — with all the vivid detail of red lanterns, panda statues, and Mandarin catchphrases on Moscow’s metro — is the cultural dimension of that pivot. And culture matters. It is the deeper loom on which long alliances are woven. If young Russians grow up seeing China not as the Other, but as the partner, the model, even the friend, then the West may have lost them for generations, not merely for an election cycle.

There is a temptation in Washington and Brussels to treat this eastward drift as a temporary marriage of convenience, born of sanctions and Russian fear. But that underestimates how much a new generation can internalise, and how economic dependence soon bleeds into military partnership and eventually a kind of spiritual alignment.

And it would be a strategic blunder of historic scale for Western Europe, in particular, to sleep through that transformation. For centuries, the Kremlin was a rival, yes, but a European rival. It played by broadly European rules, traded in European markets, shared a Christian cultural memory however faint at times. That left at least a possibility of dialogue. A Russia steered by Beijing’s priorities, bolstered by Chinese industries and Chinese political concepts, will be a different beast altogether.

That beast, if allowed to grow, will assist Beijing’s goals, not Europe’s. And it will carry with it not just Russian oil and gas, but Russian missiles, Russian resentment, and Russian manpower. Imagine a Eurasian bloc coordinated in its opposition to Western interests, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, with China in command and Russia as its willing lieutenant. Like the traditional US-UK “special relationship” on steroids.

That is a nightmare scenario for the West that its current policy all but invites.

Juan Cole:

China is emerging as the world’s first electrostate, the advanced superpower of this century, which could well be the Chinese century. Trump’s doddering old tattered America, blighted with toxic fracking pools and oil spills, crowned with opulence for the carbon-farting millionaires in their gated communities and with penury for harried workers in the minimum-wage strip malls selling poisonous micro-plastics as their wares, is staggering into the new century on arthritic knees, packing useless high-tech side-arms for a contest it has already lost.

Thomas Fazi, UnHerd:

Merz’s vision is one of total mobilisation — a “whole-of-society” approach that seeks to prepare not just the armed forces, but the entire German economy and civil infrastructure for confrontation with Russia. Media, education, industrial policy and civil defence are all being aligned to support this new war footing. Dissent — whether political, journalistic, or academic — is increasingly stigmatised as subversive or even a threat to national security.

Ω Ω Ω

What we are witnessing is not a return of German nationalism, but its opposite. The policies now being implemented — from massive rearmament to the escalation of conflict with Russia — are not rooted in a cold pursuit of German national interests, but in their negation. They are the expression of a political class that has internalised the Atlantic ideology so thoroughly that it can no longer distinguish between national strategy and transatlantic loyalty.

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Merz, while publicly critical of Trump, is in fact executing Trump’s vision: pressuring Germany to drastically increase defence spending, take over leadership in the Ukraine war and sever energy ties with Russia. And yet they are presented as expressions of German and European sovereignty. Contrary to Schröder’s courageous stance against the US invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, Merz has also offered a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s recent attack on Iran.

The problem today then, is not German ambition, but German submission. And the tragedy is that this submission is being dressed up as strategic autonomy — a grim parody of sovereignty in an age of ideological dependency. If German leaders once understood that peace with Russia was in Germany’s fundamental interest, today’s leaders act as if permanent conflict is a condition of responsible statecraft. That reversal is not only dangerous for Germany, but for Europe as a whole.

There were more people than I could count on my fingers and toes!

A speaker verbosely informed us about why we were all there, which proved useful, as a certain faction of the audience persisted in chanting about Palestine however stopped when firmly instructed as to why we were there.

Before too long a squad of Polizei appeared to make sure this unruly crowd didn’t get out of hand.