Why won’t Iran cut a deal? Its regime has taken an uncompromising line in renewed talks over its nuclear program. Although that has left the United States and its allies bewildered and frustrated, the regime has solid reasons for doing so. After all, it is currently managing to weather the tough U.S. and global economic …
Continue reading “Iran has good reasons to hang tough in nuke talks”
North Korea tested a powerful new intercontinental ballistic missile late last month, ending its five-year moratorium on long-range testing. Earlier this month, meanwhile, a majority of members in Iran’s parliament wrote to hardline conservative President Ibrahim Raisi, urging the regime to secure “stronger guarantees” from the United States as part of the ongoing negotiations in …
Continue reading “West’s response to Russia could augur a more nuclear world”
Foreign policy does not allow for compartmentalization when you’re the world’s leading power. What America does in response to any significant global challenge has important implications for other dilemmas and crises. With authoritarianism rising and freedom shrinking around the world for nearly two decades now, the United States should avoid steps that will embolden autocrats …
Continue reading “If we de-list the IRGC, what will the dictators think?”
“Society is in a state of explosion,” an official from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned in a leaked seven-page state document that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently reported on, and “social discontent has risen by 300 percent in the past year.” Iran’s clerical army has good reason to be worried. Rising public discontent, …
All the focus on whether the United States and Iran will resume talks over resurrecting the 2015 global nuclear deal obscures an issue of equal importance: escalating skirmishes between Washington and Jerusalem on the one hand and Tehran on the other that raise the risk of miscalculation and, in turn, war. In recent days, the …
Continue reading “Iran’s not feeling the pressure to change”
The Biden administration’s announcement that it will limit economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy could prove significant, since it follows two decades in which policymakers of both parties dramatically increased the use of sanctions against governments, individuals, and entities that they considered bad actors. “After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” the Treasury Department …
It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety. The scheme was straightforward and audacious: 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs and ignite a populist uprising that would topple a Soviet-backed communist revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro. …