Robert Amsterdam

This bit comes from Jeff Stein at SpyTalk ... Robert Baer is the type to take seriously.

Depressed by the market news? Try this for a quick pick-me-up: "An emerging alliance between Iran and Russia will lead to a stranglehold over Gulf and Caspian oil exports, potentially threatening half the world's traded oil (equal to 24-25 million barrels per day) and Europe's gas supply," ex-CIA operative Robert Baer says in a new book, The Devil You Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

Of course, with oil tumbling below $90 a barrel today on the prospect of a global depression, Iran and Russia could also end up turning on each other in an old fashioned, gas station-style price war.

Baer, a CIA counterterrorism agent in Beirut, Tajikistan and Paris, among other assignments, also predicts "Pakistan will break apart, as will Iraq, all the more increasing America's need for new allies and a realignment of power."

And those allies would be ... ? Who's left?