Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The Iranian leadership confronts a thicket of national and international challenges at the outset of the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, including an upcoming presidential election, simmering sectarian conflict in the region, and talks on its controversial nuclear program.
Continued U.S. inaction in Syria risks leaving the country at the mercy of Iran and Sunni extremists—whose hatred of the United States dwarfs concerns they may have about Syrians’ well-being.
With Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still a formidable obstacle to any binding nuclear deal,the Obama administration should focus on motivating Iran to cap its nuclear development.
For months, Israel has threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear sites. The United States has urged restraint. If such an operation were launched, how might Washington react?
No country stands to lose more from the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria than its lone regional ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In “The Twilight War,” government historian David Crist examines Washington's missed opportunities with Iran and the problematic fact that Iranians who want to talk to America can’t deliver, and those who can deliver don’t want to talk to America.
In essence, the Iranian regime's approach toward sex, like its philosophy of governance, is marked by expediency and used alternately as a tool of suppression, inducement, and incitement.
The goal of coercive diplomacy should be to slow Iran’s nuclear progress and contain its political influence in the region until the regime is eventually transformed or changed through the weight of its internal contradictions and economic malaise.
Thirty-three years after the revolution, under a reeling economy, the leaders of Iran are struggling to maintain the viability of the Islamic Republic and are increasingly turning to the military instead of the mosque to do so.
The strongest argument against an attack on Iran is that while it may set back Tehran's nuclear clock by two to three years, it would also likely resuscitate the fortunes of a deeply unpopular Iranian regime, prolonging its shelf life by another decade or generation.
