US President Trump’s approach toward Iran may better be explained by the political timing of the World Cup and the culture of New York real estate dealmaking: performance, delay, leverage and spectacle.
Iran’s ruling establishment has increasingly turned to threats and combative rhetoric as it faces mounting economic problems at home and growing diplomatic strain abroad, expanding a wartime language into everyday governance.
As the US-Iran gap widens and President Trump brands the truce “on life support,” three competing visions of international law are struggling for mastery over the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Each captures part of the truth. None fully resolves the tensions.
Washington and the tech industry have the means to help Iranians: expand the tools that bypass censorship and raise the price Tehran pays for shutting the internet down.
Any settlement of the Iran war that leaves the Revolutionary Guards in control would preserve the Islamic Republic's core of power and risk turning a military advantage for the US and Israel into a strategic defeat.
The fragile truce between Tehran and Washington expires on April 22. With it ends restraint. Conflict will return, though its scale remains uncertain.
For decades the IRGC relied on its ability to threaten closure of the Strait of Hormuz as its premier economic shield and golden get out of jail card.
Much of the global conversation about Iran revolves around security, conflict, and nuclear risk. What is less discussed is an environmental collapse already unfolding, with consequences that extend well beyond its borders.
I have learned as an Iranian-American scientist that war and politics rarely remain outside the laboratory for scholars from the Middle East, following us into our visas, our collaborations and even our ability to concentrate on our work.
The United States can seize the moment to support regime change and forge a strategic partnership with a democratic Iran that could yield over $1 trillion in revenue for American firms over the next decade.
From the vantage of the region’s coastal states, where these waters have long mirrored both promise and peril, the current chorus of criticism directed at the United States–Israeli campaign against Iran strikes a discordant note.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf may soon be called a pragmatist. That would be a mistake.
Moscow may be benefiting from the war between Iran and the United States and Israel, but the longer it continues, the less it serves Russia’s interests.
The real question is not whether the United States can destroy Iran’s capabilities, but whether it can end the Islamic Republic—and control what follows.
As President Trump weighs options against Iran, he faces a legacy‑defining choice that could reshape the century, with the Islamic Republic at its most precarious moment since 1979 after years of US pressure and a determined popular uprising.
The killings that swept Iran last month revived memories of 1988, when the Islamic Republic erased thousands of political prisoners in silence—my brother, Bijan, among them.
The Islamic Republic was bad news in 1979 and it is bad news in 2026, sending security forces to beat and murder peaceful protesters. Deporting Iranians to a country gripped by violent repression is hardly the ‘help’ the United States promised.
Israelis and Iranians have been cast as enemies for so long, but during Iran’s uprisings their voices tell a different story as Iranians drew a line between themselves and the Islamic Republic.
As Iran’s authorities impose silence through violence and disconnection, what the world is witnessing is not unrest but defiance at its most basic—people refusing to disappear, to be reduced to numbers, or to surrender their names.
Iran’s near-total internet blackout since January 8 did not only shut down social media but collapsed the country’s last channels to the outside world, isolating families and sharply limiting what evidence of the crackdown could escape.
The latest wave of protests in Iran once more demonstrated both the depth of popular opposition to the Islamic Republic and the limits of mass mobilization in the absence of a decisive breakdown in the regime’s coercive capacity.
What happened in Iran on Thursday night was not simply another protest. Coordinated mass demonstrations unfolded nationwide in response to a direct call from Prince Reza Pahlavi that specified not only the action but also the timing.