Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi is a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the author, most recently, of “The EU’s sanction regime against Iran in the aftermath of the JPA.” Ms. Bassiri is a PhD candidate at King’s College London, where her research deals with the E3-EU diplomatic initiative on the Iranian nuclear […]
Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. Dr. Cagaptay has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals as well as key American and Turkish media outlets. He writes regularly as a columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and […]
Yesterday President Barack Obama spoke to media in the White House briefing room in order to provide an update on his government’s approach to the situation in Iraq. The Commander-in-Chief, looking visibly tired, told reporters that under his direction the U.S. has increased its intelligence capabilities in Iraq; will continue to support Iraqi security forces […]
I have been recently asked by LinkedIn to contribute writing for the professional social networking site. So, for my first piece I decided to write the following on the worsening situation in Iraq. The piece can be accessed in its entirety here. The crumbling of government authority in Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq under the alarming onslaught […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a book review by Reza Varjavand, associate professor of economics and finance at the Graham School of management, Saint Xavier University by Reza Varjavand Even though we still do not know for sure how we got to be on this planet, we have a long history of living on […]
Abdolhamid Masoumi-Tehrani is an Iranian Ayatollah based in Tehran, Iran. He is also a calligrapher and painter, who uses his art works to challenge openly Iran’s ruling clergy and power elite to adopt a more tolerant social and political order. A recent calligraphic art work by Ayatollah Masoumi-Tehrani sent shock waves through Iran’s ruling […]
As Iran and the United States, a key member of the P5+1 world powers, inch toward deicing their 35-year-old frosty and at times traumatic relations, jockeying from all sides of political spectrum target the direction of this process and whether the icy relations should ever start to melt. Regional opponents of improved ties between Iran […]
The [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is comprised of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. According to the GCC’s Charter, what unites these countries are their “special relations, common characteristics and similar systems founded on the creed of Islam.” “Their […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a contributing guest piece. Saeed Ghasseminejad is the cofounder of the Iranian Liberal students and Graduates (ILSG) and the International Center for Liberalism Studies (ICLS). His work on economy and politics of Iran and the Middle East and has been published in CNBC, The Weekly Standard, National Post, International Business […]
The Economist released an interesting chart on global military spending this week showing the increased spending on military assets by countries that have been considered in the past to not be pro-Western or an ally of the United States or EU. The largest spending boom was made by China. China has openly shown the People’s […]
There has been a lot of speculation lately about the impact of the Crimean Crisis on the situations in Syria and Iran. The current negotiations regarding these countries involve cooperation between Russia, the United States, and other countries now directly and indirectly involved on opposites sides of the Crimean question. Naturally, that bodes ill for […]
Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare, is a renowned investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy. Porter was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for journalism awarded by the Gellhorn Trust in the U.K. His previous book was Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and […]
February 11 marks the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a jolting socio-political and geopolitical event that transformed the dynamics of the Middle East, energy security, and global diplomacy. Iran, at the time a key regional ally of the U.S. and the West, became a virulently anti-U.S. and anti-Western state with a state ideology […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a contributing piece by Jahandad Memarian. Mr. Memarian is a senior research fellow at Nonviolence International and a contributor to Al-Monitor and the Huffington Post, He holds an M.A. in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran and was previously an Iranian Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Santa […]
Kamran Bokhari is Vice President of Middle Eastern and South Asian Affairs at Stratfor, a leading geopolitical and intelligence consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. Mr. Bokhari is a distinguished scholar and expert in Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs. He has given briefings to the U.S. and Canadian governments on important geopolitical issues in […]