U.S. foreign policy toward Iran is approaching a “back to the future” moment, with the Trump White House resurrecting the strategy pursued by President George W. Bush (and, for a while, President Barack Obama) of pressuring Iran economically into abandoning its nuclear pursuits. The question now is whether President Trump, or if necessary a successor, …
Continue reading “Can Iran Wait out Trump’s Pressure Campaign?”
When President Trump announced last month that America would leave the global nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose U.S. sanctions, Europe’s leaders vowed to create financial mechanisms that would enable their firms to do business with Tehran and protect them from U.S. financial retaliation. On the eve of Trump’s May 8 decision, for instance, senior …
Continue reading “When it comes to Iran, America is still running the show”
With President Trump’s pick of John Bolton as National Security Advisor raising the chances of a U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Washington must be ready in its aftermath to pursue a bold, broad, and effective strategy to restrain Tehran’s nuclear dreams and hegemonic ambitions. That’s because a withdrawal, which would probably come …
Continue reading “America has a plan to dismantle the Iran Deal; now it needs one for the aftermath”
MILITARY SKIRMISHES AND escalating threats between Iran and Israel of late are raising the risks of a catastrophic regional war, prompting questions about what the United States should do to prevent it. To date, President Donald Trump has focused more attention on defeating the Islamic State group in Syria than on preventing Iran from filling …
Recent events across the Middle East put the lie to one of the foreign policy establishment’s most enduring tenets of conventional nonsense: that Israeli-Palestinian peace is key to greater regional peace and stability. Sharing concerns over hegemony-seeking Iran and radical Islamic forces like the Islamic State group and Muslim Brotherhood, the key Arab states of …
Like an all-too-proud father rejecting a teacher’s legitimate criticism of his child, former Secretary of State John Kerry is defending the U.S.-led global nuclear agreement with Iran that he engineered from the legitimate concerns of Iran-watchers in the Trump administration, Congress and the private sector. President Donald Trump and his top foreign policy advisers are …
The western Asian nation of Iran is on the cusp of expanding its reach all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and Israel’s northern border – a drive that will make its nuclear pursuit, ballistic missile development and terror sponsorship that much more dangerous to the United States and its regional allies. This budding hegemony …