The U.S.’s Iran approach: From ineffective to incoherent

The fall issue of the Washington Quarterly has just published what may end up being the worst, most garbled policy piece on Iran within the last decade or so. Curiously, the authors, Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh, are mainstream centrists… Continue Reading

What will “Doubling Down” on Iran Achieve?

In September Kenneth M. Pollack of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations published a paper in the Washington Quarterly endorsing a largely stick-based policy approach to Iran. Stephen M. Walt… Continue Reading

The Daily Talking Points

News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for February 23: The Wall Street Journal: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Emanuele Ottolenghi opines, “Arabs’ revolutionary awakening belies Western conventional wisdom in the Middle East,” and repeats a linkage-denying argument that “ordinary… Continue Reading

Takeyh: “Just how stable is Iran’s clerical regime?”

Council on Foreign Relations scholar Ray Takeyh has an intriguing op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. He asks: “Just how stable is Iran’s clerical regime?” Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology… Continue Reading

The Daily Talking Points

News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for December 15, 2010: The Diplomat: American Enterprise Institute Scholar Michael Rubin is interviewed on The Diplomat blog on “how sanctions can work with Iran.” Rubin says that sanctions are having both an economic and… Continue Reading