While the world's attention is focused on the Middle East, as usual, where ISIS – the creation of Washington's Saudi and Gulf allies – is the focus of the latest alleged "terrorist threat," a potentially more dangerous crisis is being ramped up by our professional regime-changers in the volatile Balkans. 

The Russian-Turkish plan to pipe Russian gas through Turkey and then on to Macedonia and thence into southern Europe has long been opposed by the West, which is seeking to block the Russians at every turn. Now the Western powers have found an effective way to stop it: by overthrowing the pro-Russian government of Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.

The original plan was for the pipeline to go through Bulgaria, but Western pressure on the government there nixed that and so the alternative was to pipe the gas through Macedonia and Greece. With the Greeks uninterested in taking dictation from the EU – and relatively impervious, at the moment, to Western-sponsored regime change – the Macedonians were deemed to be the weak link in the pro-Russian chain.