Nobody likely envies the challenge President Barack Obama faces getting his “messaging” right on Iran. He must meet the demands of election-year politics and continue to press Tehran’s back to the wall over its nuclear program, …
The breach among the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in Saturday’s vote on Syria’s increasingly bloody power struggle could have profound implications for Syria’s immediate future. But it may also signal …
Syria itself was the product of a “Great Game” among rival empires. The nation-state we know as Syria today was invented by France and Britain, which carved it out of the old Ottoman province of Syria (which back then included …
As geopolitical heavyweights gather in New York on Tuesday for a U.N. Security Council discussion on Syria’s increasingly bloody struggle for power, the Obama Administration insists the writing is on the wall: Syrian President …
In his State of the Union Address last week President Barack Obama seemed to link the fate of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad with that of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. “A year ago, Gaddafi was one of the world’s …
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are due to start three days of talks in Tehran, Sunday, “to resolve all outstanding substantive issues” over Iran’s nuclear work. They plan to hear Tehran’s response to questions raised in the most recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear work, which cited evidence of research activity — …
Strategic decision-makers in the Middle East, Europe and Asia who stayed up late to catch President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday may have initially wondered why they had bothered. In sharp contrast to the Bush era when three quarters of a typical SOTU address covered matters of national security and the projection …
Despite the deafening racket of the mass-media drums of war, neither President Obama nor the Pentagon has an appetite for a confrontation with Iran that could unleash havoc across the Middle East and would at best simply delay …
As Republican presidential contenders prepare for yet another televised primary debate in South Carolina on Thursday, much of the world may be wondering who’ll be the next victim of some ignorant insult. Already, the GOP primary …
It’s unlikely that President Barack Obama intends to go to the polls in November with the United States engaged in a hot war with Iran, but there is a growing danger that events could conspire to make the decision for him. The …
The fighting words from Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who vowed Tuesday to hold on to power and crush his opponents with “an iron fist”, were optimistically interpreted by some as the bluster of a doomed man. To be sure, the …
The bad news for Amir Mirzai Hekmati, the 28-year-old American sentenced to death in Tehran on Monday for allegedly spying for the CIA, is that the state of relations between Iran and the U.S. makes Iran’s leaders indifferent, at …
The White House believes the latest round of saber rattling from Iran is a sign that sanctions are beginning to bite. Perhaps. But as the U.S. and its European partners move to throttle Iran’s economy by cutting off its ability
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