Iran Archive

The first round of talks between Iran and the P5+1—China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.S. and the U.K.—in Geneva earlier this week ended on an upbeat note, with the concluding joint statement noting that the meeting had been conducted in a “positive atmosphere. A U.S. official was quoted as saying, “We really are beginning that type of negotiation where one could imagine that you could possibly have an agreement.” Having received the Iranian proposals, the negotiators are returning to consult with their respective governments and will reassemble in early November to assess the proposals submitted by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed […]

Western powers tried to keep their poker faces, displaying calculated restraint in describing positive signs from the meetings with Iran this week in Geneva. In keeping with the new tone since the election of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, the atmosphere is by all accounts much more conciliatory, with talk of an end-game for resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. While there is no denying the sharp contrast between the old insult- and evasion-laden interactions that characterized the days when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president, there are a number of worrisome signs that indicate the current process is not as […]

As the central drama of the just-concluded United Nations General Assembly played out, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the final speaker of the session, performed a supporting but crucial role. He came on stage as the mood spoiler, the man who disrupted the central narrative of a new, nonthreatening Iran under President Hasan Rouhani ready to reconcile with the world. Netanyahu told the world to wake up and realize that Iran’s new image was all a fiction. The prime minister’s stern words elicited a wide range of responses, including harsh criticism. In Israel, many found the address jarring. There was […]

Iran’s missile program does not make headlines as often as its nuclear efforts. But the missile program is tied to the nuclear program in two different ways: technically, because Iran has been keen to develop rockets that could carry a nuclear warhead; and legally, because United Nations sanctions against Iran target the missile program almost as much as the nuclear one. What would happen to Iran’s missiles in the event that a deal can be struck with Tehran regarding its nuclear program remains a largely unexplored issue. Iran has one of the largest and most diverse active missile programs in […]

In late-August and early September, when the Obama administration was still seeking to generate support for the use of force against Syria after Damascus had crossed the “red line” of large-scale use of chemical weapons, one of the arguments it used was that failure to do so would undermine the credibility of America’s threat to strike Iran if Tehran ever built nuclear weapons. That argument may have been true at the time, but the situation has become more complex since the U.S. and Russia reached an agreement to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons peacefully. By explicitly stating, partly for domestic reasons […]