Iran is hosting an “I Can’t Breathe” international cartoon exhibition, with seventy-two pieces from twenty-seven countries, mocking America for its racial unrest and portraying its leaders and police as Nazis and Klan members. In China, officials are blasting America for its racism while the People’s Daily, the communist party’s official newspaper, ran a cartoon of …
The current debate over whether the United States should ease sanctions against Iran in light of the latter’s struggles with COVID-19 reflects a broader reality: More than four decades after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, we still lack a consensus about the nature of the regime in Tehran and how to deal with it. For Iran, …
With the coronavirus forcing Iran to dig mass graves for its victims, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejected U.S. aid offers of recent days and suggested that America “specifically built” the virus “for Iran using the genetic data of Iranians which they have obtained through different means.” “You cannot be trusted,” Khamenei told the United States …
Continue reading “Iran’s coronavirus response highlights authoritarianism’s dangers”
The New York Times’ decision of recent days to make a “clarification” to one sentence in the lead essay of its “1619 Project” won’t do much to quell a growing fight over the meaning of America’s founding — a fight with profound implications for the nation’s continuing influence around the world. That’s because the project …
Continue reading “New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ unjustly weakens America abroad”
In the escalating, multi-dimensional conflict between Washington and Tehran, the growing risk of armed conflict centers around the same danger that plagues international relations in general: miscalculation. President Donald Trump may believe that in sanctioning Iran’s central bank and sending more U.S. troops to the region in response to the recent suspected Iranian attack on …
Continue reading “Will US, Iranian miscalculation bring war?”
Moscow detains nearly 1,400 protesters after a bloody crackdown and returns its most prominent opposition figure to jail after what he suspects was a state-ordered poisoning that put him in the hospital. Beijing hints that it will send its army to quell protests against Hong Kong’s China-backed government. For all their outward self-confidence, the governments …
Continue reading “With autocrats on defensive, US has opportunity”
The latest U.S. offer of negotiations with Iran prompts the same question with which every administration of recent decades has grappled: Is behavioral change in Tehran possible without regime change? We Americans want to think so, but the evidence of four decades suggests otherwise. Consequently, President Donald Trump and his team may be headed toward …
Continue reading “More U.S. talks with Iran are doomed to fail”