Policy debates over Iran have consistently – over the course of many years – been bound up with events in North Korea. The nuclear programs of both countries are deeply intertwined, with Iran helping to fund Pyongyang’s weapons development and the North Koreans providing a return on Iran’s investment in...

There has been confusion about Israeli sentiments regarding the country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and skepticism which he has declared regarding diplomatic overtures toward the West being made by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Netanyahu had emphasized that the Iranians may be duplicitiously using the prospect for negotiations to lock in...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people in a rare interview Thursday with BBC Persian. He emphasized that Iranian nuclear weapons acquisition would make it functionally impossible to challenge the regime either from within or from outside, and that the result would be tragedy: Israel’s prime minister says...

Analysts have recently begun analyzing the Middle East as a function of three emerging regional blocs: an Iranian-led bloc that includes Syria and Hezbollah, an extremist Turkey/Brotherhood bloc with which Qatar often aligns, and a U.S.-allied bloc that includes Israel and moderate Arab states. The interactions between these camps vary...

There have been halting suggestions that the U.S. – in order to encourage, or evaluate, or test Iranian intentions – should reevaluate whether to press economic sanctions against Iran. Commenting on those suggestions yesterday, Senators Mark Kirk (R-IL) expressed himself unimpressed: “The Senate should not aid and abet a European...

Iranian state media is crowing that it has been elected by a vote of the United Nations General Assembly to be the rapporteur of the U.N.’s Disarmament and International Security Committee. The election, according to Iran’s state-linked Fars news agency, was a defeat for the “Zionist regime representative” who had...