For nearly half a century, the United States has tried to hobble the Iranian economy. The Carter administration first imposed sanctions in the wake of the 1979 American embassy takeover. Despite some periods of détente, like the Mohammad Khatami presidency of 1997-2004 and the immediate aftermath of the 2015 nuclear deal, the general trend has…
Tag: Iran
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-4 on Painter & Brew, The Struggle for Iran
In The Struggle for Iran, David Painter and Gregory Brew analyze the complex set of affairs that eventually led to the August 1953 coup against the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, with a sharp causal focus on the interplay of Cold War logic and oil control. The reviews that follow mostly praise the authors for deploying…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 170: Fitzpatrick on Szalontai & Jinil, “Maneuvering between Baghdad and Tehran”
While cooperation between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Iran over the past three decades in developing ballistic missiles and possibly in sharing nuclear-weapons-related technology has been well studied,[1] very little attention has been given to Pyongyang’s relations with Baghdad.[2] South Korea-based scholars Balázs Szalontai and Yoo Jinil fill this…
Article Review 116 on “The Grand Strategy of Militant Clients: Iran’s Way of War.”
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the American media paid little attention to the fact that the U.S. was about to end hundreds of years of Sunni supremacy in one of the Middle East’s most important countries. Among the farthest reaching consequences of America’s introduction of democracy to the Shiite-majority country was the…
Policy Series: “Maximum Pressure:” The Trump Administration and Iran
While campaigning for President in 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to attack the major foreign policy achievement of President Barack Obama: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement reached between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, European Union, China, and Russia in June 2015 that halted…
Roundtable 10-7 on Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy
With the Trump administration debating whether to certify that Iran is complying with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), colloquially known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, this Roundtable on the tortuous path to its conclusion is timely. Our reviewers bring special expertise to the task. Robert Gallucci was the lead negotiator for the…
Article Review 89 on “Causes of the U.S. Hostage Crisis in Iran: The Untold Account of the Communist Threat.”
In this detailed and scholarly article, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar is definitely on to something. He argues that those who captured and occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979-1981 (the so-called “Moslem Student Followers of the Imam’s Line”) were responding to serious challenges from Iranian leftists. By their action, he argues, the occupiers were pre-empting…
Policy Series: The Trump Administration and the Middle East
With one very important exception, and despite a number of rhetorical and stylistic differences, the Trump Administration’s approach to the Middle East is not substantially different from that of the Obama Administration.[1] President Barack Obama prioritized the fight against Salafi jihadist groups (al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], and their offshoots) above…
Forum 7 on “What Really Happened: Solving the Cold War’s Cold Cases.”
While covert action had been a staple of American national security policy long before the Cold War, it was with that conflict that it gained wide-spread recognition as a key instrument of policy. Even after decades of analysis, however, we still are grappling with the question of what benefits these operations have provided to America’s…
Roundtable 7-15 on The Kennan Diaries
An eleven year old George Kennan began keeping a diary on January 1, 1916. At the very start of the diary he wrote “In this simple, little book, A record of the day I cast; So I afterwards may look back upon my happy past” (684). Due to Kennan’s remarkably lengthy and prolific career as…