by Charles Naas
At last the Obama Administration has found a reasonable Syria policy. The critics will continue to insist that the US provide arms to the rebels, but it will be difficult to get more traction for this while the initiative with the Russians holds out hopes, although slender, for the beginning of [...]
by Peter Jenkins
Readers who recall that four years ago a new US President seemed eager to defuse the West’s quarrel with Iran over its nuclear activities may wonder why we are all still waiting for white smoke. I am not sure I know the answer, but I have a hunch it has something to [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Naas
The second round of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan between the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and Iran ended just about where they started — no advance from the March talks and the glimmer of hope that perhaps some kind of momentum could be established. Unlike Almaty [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Naas
On the Washington Post’s front page February 2 there is a photo of Mrs. Clinton departing the State Department surrounded by admiring staff members with a big smile on her face. She already looks five years younger. And why not? The burden of the Secretary of State is [...]
via Lobe Log
By Erich C. Ferrari and Samuel Cutler
Contained in the Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2013, and signed into law by President Obama on January 2, are sweeping new sanctions targeting Iran over its disputed nuclear program. The new measures target foreign entities engaging in a wide array of transactions with [...]
via Lobe Log
As former top State Department intelligence specialist Wayne White points out for Lobe Log, in the absence of a tenable ceasefire agreement, the quagmire that is the Syrian civil war will likely intensify, thereby only worsening post-Assad scenarios.
“The bottom line is that a sort of Catch-22 situation is [...]
via Lobe Log
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report on December 6 titled “Iran’s Ballistic Missile and Space Launch Programs,” which the Federation of American Scientists has posted. It casts doubt on a long-held view by the US Intelligence Community that Iran could test-fly an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by 2015 if [...]
via Lobe Log
President Obama’s re-election last month raised hopes that the US government would at last be in a position, politically, to work with Iran towards a negotiated settlement centred on confidence-building and the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This was the basis of the understanding reached this April in Istanbul. It was therefore [...]
via IPS News
Iran is unlikely to agree to curb its nuclear programme unless the U.S. and its Western allies are prepared to ease tough economic sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic over the past decade, according to a major new report signed by more than three dozen former top U.S. foreign-policy [...]
via Lobe Log
By Richard Javad Heydarian
A key foreign policy consequence of President Barak Obama’s reelection is the growing possibility of face-to-face talks between the United States. and Iran. Both the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi have expressed, albeit conditionally, their respective governments’ openness [...]
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