As nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran in Vienna extend past yet another (largely US-imposed) deadline, the dysfunctionality of the Obama administration’s approach becomes increasingly apparent. Since April, when the parties announced a set of “parameters” for a...
Going to Tehran
Obama Fails to Make the Strategic Case for an Iran Nuclear Deal
by Going to Tehran | Jul 8, 2015 | Featured Articles
The Iran nuclear talks may be getting close to some sort of conclusion in Vienna, but American political and policy elites remain, to an appallingly large extent, clueless as to what is really at stake in the negotiations. And, while the headline from a recent NBC...
Saudi Arabia’s Yemen Offensive, Iran’s ‘Proxy’ Strategy, and the Middle East’s New ‘Cold War’
by Going to Tehran | Jun 11, 2015 | Featured Articles
Riyadh’s war in Yemen marks a dramatic escalation in its efforts to roll back Iran’s rising influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia portrays its Yemen campaign simply as a battle of “good” Arabs and Sunnis supporting Yemen’s legitimate government against “evil”...
Reality Check: America Needs Iran
by Going to Tehran | Apr 7, 2015 | Featured Articles
Since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was announced last week, the Obama administration—echoing previous pledges that nuclear talks with Tehran do not presage a US-Iranian “grand bargain”—has assiduously reaffirmed that progress on the nuclear issue...
Sami Al-Arian and the Defining Moral and Political Challenge of Our Time
by Going to Tehran | Feb 10, 2015 | Featured Articles
Earlier this week, the US government deported our friend and colleague, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, from the United States. Turkey has granted him sanctuary. Since we first met Dr. Al-Arian a few years ago, he and his family have set standards for faithfulness, moral...
The Rise of the ‘Petro-yuan’ and the Slow Erosion of Dollar Hegemony
by Going to Tehran | Jul 31, 2014 | Featured Articles
For seventy years, one of the critical foundations of American power has been the dollar’s standing as the world’s most important currency. For the last forty years, a pillar of dollar primacy has been the greenback’s dominant role in international energy markets....
America’s Middle East Delusions
by Going to Tehran | Jun 16, 2014 | Featured Articles
The explosive ascendance of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) underscores the thoroughgoing failure of America’s political class to devise an effective and sustainable strategy for the United States after 9/11. The failure cuts across Democratic and...
Don’t Compound the Damage Already Done in Iraq by Doubling Down in Syria
by Going to Tehran | Jun 13, 2014 | Featured Articles
The debate over America’s Middle East policy has reached a new level of surreality. In the wake of President Obama’s West Point commencement address last month — in which he pledged to “ramp up” U.S. support for Syrian rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar...
Critiquing America’s Brain-Dead Foreign Policy ‘Debate’
by Going to Tehran | Jun 11, 2014 | Featured Articles
Yesterday, Harvard’s Steve Walt posted an amusingly sharp piece on what’s wrong with America’s so-called foreign policy “debate.” Steve’s piece, titled “Take 2 Ambien and Call Me When It’s Over: I’d Rather Spoon My Own Eye Out Than Sit Through This Year’s...
America’s Shale Revolution and the Dangerous Myth of Energy Independence
by Going to Tehran | Jun 5, 2014 | Featured Articles
American elites have talked about “energy independence” for forty years—since the United States became a net oil importer in the early 1970s, around the time of the first major oil crisis. While they have rarely been precise or analytically rigorous in using the term,...
A Middle East Tragedy: Obama’s Syria Policy Disaster
by Going to Tehran | May 30, 2014 | Featured Articles
For over three years, the United States has sought to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by supporting an Al Qaeda-infused opposition that Washington either knew or should have known would fail. Yet, in his commencement address at West Point on Wednesday,...
The Sino-Russian Hydrocarbon Axis Grows Up
by Going to Tehran | May 22, 2014 | Featured Articles
Eight years ago, in the pages of The National Interest, Flynt Leverett and Pierre Noël identified a “new axis of oil”—a “shifting coalition of both energy exporting and energy importing states centered in ongoing Sino-Russian collaboration”—that was emerging as an...
Can the West Get Out of Its (Self-Made) Cul-de-Sac in Syria?
by Going to Tehran | Apr 7, 2014 | Featured Articles
In recent years, the limits on America’s ability to shape important outcomes in the Middle East unilaterally—or even with a few European partners—have been dramatically underscored by strategically failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Last year,...
The Use of Force, the Reflexive Resort to Economic Sanctions, and the Trials of America’s Hegemonic Mindset
by Going to Tehran | Mar 17, 2014 | Featured Articles
As negotiations toward a “final” nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran continue, it is important to consider to what extent the world might be witnessing a fundamental change in American foreign policy. We are inclined to think that the Obama administration would not...
America and the Arab Awakening: Déjà Vu?
by Going to Tehran | Feb 12, 2014 | Featured Articles
Three years ago, Washington experienced its own dose of “shock and awe” — the PR phrase used to sanitise its brutal invasion of Iraq — when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Arabs took to the streets to demand the overthrow of leaders more interested...
The Year of Iran: Tehran’s Challenge to American Hegemony in 2014
by Going to Tehran | Jan 31, 2014 | Featured Articles
Hassan Rohani’s election as Iran’s president seven months ago caught most of the West’s self-appointed Iran “experts” by (largely self-generated) surprise. Over the course of Iran’s month-long presidential campaign, methodologically-sound polls by the University of...
Is Obama Trying to Resolve or Prolong the Conflict in Syria?
by Going to Tehran | Jan 13, 2014 | Featured Articles
Suppose a great power declares that it supports a peace process aimed at finding a political solution to a terrible, ongoing conflict. Then suppose that this great power makes such declarations after it has already proclaimed its strong interest in the defeat of one...
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