Trump has overcome internal resistance and external pressure to deliver an as yet uninterrupted string of foreign-policy successes : North Korea’s “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un hasn’t launched a rocket in ten months; America’s NATO allies are finally starting to deliver on pledges to increase defense spending toward the 2 percent of GDP target agreed in 2006 ; Mexico has […]
U.S. and Iranian leaders traded insults in public at the U.N. General Assembly this week, but that’s a minor skirmish compared to the coming battle between the two adversaries. The U.S. government is about to launch its toughest sanctions yet to tighten the noose around the neck of the Tehran regime — a bold but […]
In Donald Trump, the US may have finally found a president whose views on Iran are both unambiguous and immutable. They are, as social scientists would say, overdetermined. First among causes, the Iran deal, like the Affordable Care Act, stands as part of a repugnant Obama legacy and is therefore to be repudiated; whether or […]
If history is any indicator, India will not deprive itself of the benefits it stands to extract from the current situation. During the previous round of US sanctions on Iranian oil exports (2011-15), India maintained reduced oil imports from Iran. It greatly benefited from the situation largely due to an arrangement in which it withheld payments for a […]
The United States’ use of sanctions has exploded over the past decade. An analysis by the law firm Gibson Dunn found that President Donald Trump’s administration added nearly 1,000 people, companies, and entities to U.S. sanctions lists during 2017, nearly 30 percent more than the number added during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. Read Here […]
Over the past two years, however, Zarif’s power has dramatically waned. Although he has continued his speaking tours in the West, he has been supplanted on the regional policy portfolios that most matter to Tehran—including Iran’s presence in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—by a quieter but far more influential figure: Ali Akbar Velayati, the longtime foreign-policy […]
After a months-long stretch of merely sporadic violence and simmering tensions, the Middle East seems on the verge of another fiery eruption, and there are no outside powers with the interest or leverage to douse the flames. Read Here – Slate
The Iranian rial: crash. The Turkish lira: crash. The Argentine peso: crash. The Brazilian real: crash. There are multiple, complex, parallel vectors at play in this wilderness of crashing currencies. Turkey’s case is heavily influenced by the bubble of easy credit created by European banks. Read Here – Asia Times
The Syrian Civil War is the world’s bloodiest conflict, and much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Syria’s neighbours and the world’s major powers. So far, France, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, the United Kingdom and of course the United States have all intervened—and this long […]
The legal status of the Caspian Sea has remained unresolved for nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But now, the leaders of the five countries bordering the world’s biggest enclosed body of water have finally made significant headway after agreeing — at least, in principle — on how to […]
looking beyond borders 