Published by Al Majalla Offering both carrots and sticks is standard procedure in diplomatic negotiations, but US President Donald Trump takes it to new heights. Whatever else he might prevaricate on, he has always been consistent on Iran, giving it two options: Either agree to a deal that assures the world you are not building …
Monthly Archives: April 2025
Published by the National Late March is happy season in Iran as the festival of Nowruz marks the end of winter and the start of a new calendar year. But the government of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian had little to celebrate even as it marked its first Nowruz, having received blow after blow last month. …
Published by Perry World House A few months into the second Trump administration, its differences with the first are evident. One major difference concerns the balance of power between various forces inside the Trump camp. The second administration is more willing to be disruptive, but that also means its internal workings are more stable. To …
Published by the Atlantic In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly rejected the U.S. president’s offer of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, just as he had during Trump’s first term. Tehran would not talk to this U.S. administration, Khamenei insisted. And even if it did …
Published by the National If you hear of Iranian police forcibly bringing an end to a hijab-related rally in front of the parliament, you might imagine this was a classic case of the Islamic Republic suppressing its pro-democracy civil society. But on March 29, the Iranian police forces did this to an entirely different crowd: …
Published by the Atlantic Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme …