The first day of coverage regarding comprehensive talks between Iran and the P5+1 global powers revolved around pessimism from all sides regarding the prospect that talks would succeed, amid declarations by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that negotiations would “not lead anywhere” and statements by U.S. officials that the initial six-month negotiation period...

The State Department last week put itself on the defensive over the Obama administration’s policy toward Egypt’s army-backed government – which has ranged from a controversial aid freeze last October to a pointed diplomatic snub as recently as two weeks ago – with State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf being pressed for the second day in a row to...

The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake and Josh Rogin reported last week that the Obama administration’s diplomacy toward Iran was risking a cascade of new nuclear proliferators across the Middle East, with both Western and Israeli intelligence agencies telling the outlet that Saudi Arabia is developing uranium enrichment infrastructure that has long been ‘considered...

Foreign Policy on Thursday assessed that a spike in Iranian oil exports was “raising concerns” that the sanctions relief provided to Iran under the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA) – which the Obama administration declared would not rise much above $7 billion, and which critics insisted vastly undercounted relief due to a range of rudimentary and easily identifiable errors...

Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s trip to Moscow – where he is discussing among other things a multi-billion dollar arms sale – is being read as evidence that Egypt is actively seeking to bolster its relations with Russia. Foreign policy analysts had worried for months that U.S. snubs were...

Iranian figures continued this week to lengthen the list of red lines they intend to take into comprehensive nuclear negotiations, weeks after statements by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani – in which the revolutionary-era cleric rejected destroying nuclear enrichment centrifuges – had already led CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to declare that he wasn’t sure...