This is a two-page excerpt from a book titled Muslims in Europe: Notes, Comments, Questions by Manfred Wolf, PhD. It comprises several dozen essays, written over the span of a decade.
I found the following brief section from "Muslims in Europe" of interest because Wolf wrote it in 2015. He had had a run of accurate short-term geopolitical predictions. I was sufficiently impressed, as I read with the benefit of hindsight, to give his longer term prognostications some consideration.
Some background about the scholar
After 40 or so years as a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University, Manfred Wolf worked part-time as a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching Dutch language and literature.
Wolf also wrote an autobiography of his early life. It details his and his family's journey from pre-WW2 Germany to the Netherlands. A happy childhood was soon interrupted by abrupt departure--as Nazi Germany invaded western Europe--transiting through France to Portugal, then travel by ship across the Atlantic, and finally, adolescence in the Dutch Antilles in Curacao. For many years, Wolf wrote a column in a San Francisco weekly newspaper and many other non-fiction works and literary articles. "Muslims in Europe" is self-published. Wolf is not what I would consider a professional author, although he is a very fine writer!
Be aware that Manfred Wolf was about 80 years old in 2015. He is a liberal non-observant Jew, maybe leftist in his youth, who probably voted Democrat, up and down ballot, for all his years as a naturalized American citizen. He seems to possess a greater propensity for supporting exercise of First Amendment rights than many people of that demographic.
 |
| Manfred Wolf's response to Bari Weiss's announcement of the new University of Austen |
Less background about me
Manfred Wolf is the father of my former boyfriend and fiance of many years ago, Michael Wolf. See the last paragraph of this interview for Michael's insightful question about his father's trek; I had wondered the same thing for many years. It is rather serendipitous to discover the answer today!
To my enduring regret, I broke our engagement.
As for me, I am conservative but not a neocon; I am more populist than Republican.
Let's get started!
I do wish Wolf had written more, or at least in more detail, than those two pages.
I don't recommend the next passage! It is a drawn-out analogy between being the subject of unreciprocated romantic affection from a woman and being terrorized by jihadis or a religious fatwa. Seems a bit unhinged to me, or at the very least, written by someone with an icy emotional attitude toward relationships.
Obama and the Middle East
In 2015, I would have found it very surprising that the United States might shift its long-time alliances with Sunni countries (both Arab and not Arab, e.g. Pakistan) and Israel to Iran. As time passed, I realized that one indicator was Obama's initiation of nuclear non-proliferation negotiations with Iran. Those began in November 2013, in the aftermath of the Stuxnet hardware virus and its successful attack on SCADA protocol ICS (industrial control systems) used by Iranian nuclear facility centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.
Founding of the Quincy Institute in 2016 was another peculiar but suggestive event. This tweet provides a mostly accurate description. The Quincy Institute is a think tank founded and financed by George Soros, Charles Koch, and a Washington D.C. resident who is an Iranian expatriate. The Institute's flagship publication is Responsible Statecraft. I occasionally read it especially for a more balanced view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
Lol. pic.twitter.com/8Owm4mANnl
— suri (@suri_washere) October 4, 2025
An initially secret transfer of $400 million from the New York Federal Reserve to the Central Bank of Iran on 17 January 2016 was not necessarily part of that shift. The prior day, former President Obama announced several important events pertaining to Iran.
- release of five Americans held as hostages (no, they weren't left behind from the 1979 seizure of our embassy during the revolution!)
- settlement of a 35+ year dispute over $600 million paid in advance by Iran for US military equipment purchases;
- Iran's compliance with the first stage of the JCPOA nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action);
- relief from selected sanctions.
This is important because the obligation is still not widely understood, i.e. the U.S. did not just "give" $400 million to Iran. That perception spread widely and persistently due to confusion regarding the rather complicated deal and American inter-party strife. The Brookings Institute article, linked above, explains very thoroughly.
In summary, during 2016, Obama returned $400 million in principal and $1.3 billion in interest, in several installments, always in cash via Switzerland. Former President George H.W. Bush had wisely returned $200 million of the original $600 million to Iran in 1990, otherwise the interest accrued would have been even more!
Biden era rapprochement with Iran?
Several key appointments during the Biden administration supported Manfred Wolf's prognostications. It is difficult to determine whether these appointments were part of a coherent policy shift. The Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI) network was the most visible locus of Iranian influence in the Obama and Biden administrations. Of course, with that name, they were hardly hiding!
Ariane Tabatabai was a founding member of IEI. She was a 1st generation Iranian-American who served in a Department of State senior role and then as Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. She was in a position to influence U.S. policy decisions and access sensitive intelligence information. She frequently was in contact with former Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif without reporting it. How do I know? Because Senator Tom Cotton said so. I don't know if anything much came of this.
Robert Malley was Biden's Special Envoy for Iran, and he led efforts to resuscitate the nuclear deal negotiations. 18 months later, his security clearance was suspended and he was placed on leave due to mishandling classified information. Who had hired Ariane Tabatabai? Robert Malley!
Digression
Iran, like its neighbors, whether friend or enemy, Sunni or Shia, is capable of conducting influence operations in the United States. I suspect that the powers that be in Iran were more competent (thus more likely to be effective) than the combo of a mentally-diminished Biden, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.
Jake Sullivan might have been the best of the three. Yes, he made that statement about how calm the often volatile Middle-East was, a few weeks before 7 October 2023, but as yet, in mid-year 2025, only Hamas knows the rationale for their timing. Biden was condemned and replaced by his own political party, and Blinken is a dim bulb. He's now the director of the University of Pennsylvania Biden Center. UPenn has tried to distance itself from THAT fiasco by subsuming it into one of its other programs.
Nuclear deal reset efforts
The Biden administration's efforts to pivot toward Iran were rather hamfisted; regardless, their objectives were incompatible. Biden and Blinken wanted to re-initiate the JCPOA deal while punishing Iran with sanctions for various non-democratic and terrorist acts by the Iranian government and its proxies.
The initial obstacle was US activity during the prior 4 years of the Trump administration, most significantly, the 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani. Just as the US could sanction Iranian proxies and individuals, so Iran seemed to realize that it could too. In December 2021, Iran imposed sanctions on (and requested Interpol to arrest) Trump, Pompeo, and eight others because of Soleimani. Meanwhile, the centrifuges at Natanz had increased uranium enrichment to 60%, their highest ever, and Blinken expressed concern over Iran's rapidly progressing ballistic missile development program as well.
U.S. entreaties for a nuclear deal in early 2022 during meetings in Vienna were at an impasse. Iran accused the U.S. of being the cause of the impasse.
In April 2022, something of a nadir was reached. According to Reuters reports, Iranian officials said Blinken had made frequent proposals to ease sanctions and extended various concession offers. Iran responded by
"declaring that even the assassination of all American leaders would not be sufficient to avenge the U.S. killing of Soleimani."
Efforts to revive the JCPOA were abandoned. The U.S. imposed sanctions on an Iranian-Russian oil smuggling network. Iran followed up with sanctions on Rudy Giuliani and more sanctions on Pompeo.
In August 2022, an Iranian plot to assassinate John Bolton for $300,000 and Mike Pompeo for $1,000,000 by IRGC operatives in the U.S. was uncovered.
Blinken did have one diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. After many months of secret then public negotiations, a prisoner swap of five Americans for five Iranians was completed on 18 September 2023. In addition to releasing the five Iranians being held on various charges in the U.S., Iran also demanded and received $6 billion in frozen oil funds held in South Korea.
Denouement
On 29 November 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered a speech on Twitter. He said that "U.S. plans for forming 'a New Middle East' have failed". He gloated that plans to eliminate Hezbollah resulted in its strength increasing by a factor of 10 and that Hamas's Al-Aqsa Flood was "an historic event that would de-Americanize the usurper regime" [Israel].
In the short-term (Wolf extended his prediction out to 2050 and it is merely 2025 now), views attributed to "the historian Glenn Young" were more prescient than Wolf's own. Glenn Young is Manfred Wolf's former brother-in-law, i.e. brother of Wolf's ex-wife.
Levity break
Why are they petting it?
— Bob Loblaw (@LoblawBobLaw) June 17, 2025
Aside: Russia and Crimea
I should have been more aware of the level of U.S. interest in Ukraine during the second term of the Obama administration. I was not; e.g. I didn't even know who Victoria Nuland, highly influential and very neocon State department Undersecretary of Eurasian Affairs, was until 2017.
I was also unaware that Crimea had been historically Russian, by population (lots of ethnic Tatars) and territorially. In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. In a supposed show of magnanimity, he responded to the persistent undercurrent for Ukrainian independence by "giving" the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was truly just another (the second?) Soviet socialist republic, so Khrushchev's gesture made no difference: It was all USSR.
I'm surprised that Manfred Wolf does not seem to be aware of this. Maybe he was, but thought Putin and Russia were too decrepit to do anything about NATO's eastward expansion, let alone take "kinetic" action to address the increasingly violent conflict between Kiev and its two eastern, ethnic Russian oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are most welcome! Some HTML is available for style and also for those with no style whatsoever.