Was Rafsanjani’s Disqualification about Iran’s Nuclear Program?

by Jasmin Ramsey Dennis Ross, President Obama’s former top Middle East aide, writes that the exclusion of Hashemi Rafsanjani from Iran’s June 14 election signals that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is uninterested in a nuclear deal: I say that not because… Continue Reading

Iran: the Nuclear Dog that can’t Bark

Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability. Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright… Continue Reading

Gary Sick on Iran’s Foreign Policy

Gary Sick, who served as an Iran specialist on the National Security Council staffs of Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, speaks to Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose about an article that he wrote for the magazine in 1987, which still holds… Continue Reading

Ledeen Begins his Pivot

Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative polemicist and long-time Iran hawk who joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies after leaving the American Enterprise Institute in 2008, is being honest when he reminds us here that he has opposed direct US military intervention in Iran. For Ledeen, Iranian-regime… Continue Reading

View of the earth from the moon

In the 1970s, Edgar Dean Mitchell, a retired US Navy Captain and the sixth person to walk on the moon, summarized international politics while describing his experience of seeing the earth from the moon: It was a beautiful, harmonious, peaceful-looking… Continue Reading