News reports claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in the process of deploying Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missiles and is either negotiating for, or has already placed an order for, 300 T-90 main battle tanks and at least 30 Sukhoi Su-30 multirole fighter jets manufactured in the Russian Federation. In reality, very little of…
The unrelenting urge among American politicians to keep punishing Iran—or more precisely, to be seen supporting steps with that objective—continues to work against sensible statecraft and U.S. interests in multiple respects. One of those respects concerns how measures taken by the United States affect political competition within Iran. Here’s the current background to questions of…
Israel has 200 nuclear weapons “all targeted on Tehran,” so Iran would not dare use a bomb even if it could make one, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a 2015 email, which has surfaced this week as part of a hacking scandal. Unknown hackers have compromised Powell’s Gmail account, and the whistleblower…
At the end of August, a meeting of Muslim clerics and scholars convened in the Chechen capital of Grozny to forge a consensus on the subject of ‘who constitutes a Sunni.’ Sunnism, the 200 or so Sunni clerics from Egypt, South Africa, India, Europe, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Russia warned, “has undergone a dangerous deformation in…
Two US spy planes have flown within a mile of Iranian airspace, and have received warnings of a potential shootdown should they breach it. US military officials said Iran behaved “unprofessionally” and “unsafe[ly]” during the stunt designed to “test” its reaction. As confrontations between the two nations increase in the region, with Tehran allegedly threatening…
With Iran supporting the revival of the Great Silk Road that once connected East Asia with Europe, Sputnik asked Moscow-based Oriental-affairs expert Vladimir Sazhin to about the role Tehran will play in this major geopolitical project. “Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, confirmed Tehran’s backing for the Beijing-proposed…
