iran Archives

Monday

February 2, 2026

Why Turkey wants to help Iran

The Iranian regime remains firmly in the crosshairs of American bombers. As President Trump mulls whether to strike, Turkey is using every available channel to halt a military intervention. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has personally offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington. At the same time, Turkish authorities have tightened their grip on exiled Iranian opposition figures. Turkey’s sudden support for Iran is not born of friendship. Over the past two decades, the two countries have repeatedly found themselves on opposing sides. In the Syrian civil war, Iran sent Shi’a proxies to prop up the dictator Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey armed and trained Sunni rebel groups. Ankara’s push for dialogue

Wednesday

January 28, 2026

Daniel DePetris

Iran is out of good options

Over the last week, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, additional F-15 fighter planes and naval vessels carrying sea-launched cruise missiles have been making their way to the Middle East in what can only be described as a bid by President Trump to squeeze Iran into submission. In case anybody doubted this is what Trump was after, he took to Truth Social early in the morning to send the Iranians a message: give me what I want or face bombing the likes of which you’ve never seen. “A massive Armada is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose,” Trump wrote. “Hopefully Iran will quickly

Douglas Murray

The censors are winning

They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it took place during the summer of 2020. If you remember those far-distant days, this was a time when America was obsessing over the story of alleged disproportionate police violence against black Americans. One of the cases was that of a woman named Breonna Taylor. Although the case for the police’s actions and the victim’s innocence

Tuesday

January 20, 2026

Cockburn

Playing ball with Team Trump

The State Department has a “secret playbook for using sports to advance Trump’s agenda,” according to Politico. Foggy Bottom has a tough assignment ahead. Witness the opening ceremonies of Sunday’s NBA game in London between the Memphis Grizzlies and Orlando Magic, the first NBA game in the UK in six years. As Vanessa Williams sang the National Anthem, someone shouted “Leave Greenland alone,” which the arena cheered. Cockburn doesn’t think Williams is much of a threat to Greenland. President Trump’s appearance last night at the College Football Championship – along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ivanka and Jared, Kai Trump and Steve Witkoff – went without a hitch. The real

Friday

January 16, 2026

Cockburn

Won’t somebody think of the freezing cold press corps?

Journos on ice How hot is the White House briefing room? Pretty scorching if you’re Niall Stanage, the Hill reporter who was drawn into a back-and-forth with press secretary Karoline Leavitt over ICE’s conduct. Leavitt asked for Stanage’s opinion on why Renee Good was shot, he gave it… and she branded him a “biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” “You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat, you’re pretending like you’re a journalist but you’re a left-wing activist,” Leavitt continued, in a moment that was rapidly clipped for Team Trump’s social media and posted by a flurry of White House staff. The temperature is considerably lower for most other journalists, however. During briefings, the

Thursday

January 15, 2026

Roger Kimball

Why can’t Democrats speak frankly about Iran?

The manicured grounds of Harvard University are tranquil. Ditto the expensive quads of Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Stanford. All across the fruited plain, the self-denominated paragons of virtue who just yesterday sported “Free Palestine” buttons and joined in “No Kings” rallies are greeting today’s greatest enormity – the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens by their insane Islamicist government – with the repetition of that hit by Simon and Garfunkel: “The Sounds of Silence.” Or, as the headline of a story in National Review put it: “Iranian Civilians Are Being Massacred to the Sound of Progressive Silence.” Accurate numbers are hard to come by since the murderous Islamic regime in Iran has shut down

Wednesday

January 14, 2026

Charlie Gammell

The rule of the Ayatollahs is broken. What happens now?

“Help is on the way,” promised Donald Trump to the people of Iran defying the Islamic Republic. In the same social media post, the President, characteristically light on detail, also urged Iranian protesters to take over the institutions of the Islamic Republic (presumably by force) and to keep a note of the names and numbers of their oppressors for retribution’s sake. Whatever these words presage – be it air strikes on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij facilities, or cyberattacks on Iran’s intelligence agencies, to blind the regime as the regime has blinded protesters by shutting down the internet – it remains to be seen if such an intervention

Saturday

January 10, 2026

Alissa Pavia

Will the Iranian regime finally collapse?

These are tense hours for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and head of state. Thousands of protesters are flocking to the streets to protest the economy. Iran has not seen a wave of unrest like this since the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, after Amini was killed for allegedly not wearing her veil properly. During a televised speech in Tehran Friday, Khamenei showed little restraint, vowing he “would not back down” in the face of what he described as “saboteurs.” The protests began in Tehran in late December and quickly spread across the country. They have since turned bloody, with Amnesty International reporting at least 28 people killed. “We have seen these protests before,” said Firas Maksad, managing director for the Middle East and North Africa at Eurasia Group. “In 2009, there was the

Thursday

January 8, 2026

David DesRosiers

‘Regime influence’: Trump’s foreign-policy third way

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, President Trump gave a New Year’s kinetic expression to his recently published National Security Strategy and what it means in the American hemisphere. If we take President Trump at his blustering word – which those in the administration’s Maduro-adjacent crosshairs should – this is just the first, big, shock-and-awe move by the United States in a resetting of the rules-based order that has governed our hemisphere. This time on America First terms. In Europe, those who take Trump seriously and see the long-term upside in his policies, call him “Daddy.” Last weekend Trump showed the “Papi” side of this national security strategy in our hemisphere. The Venezuelan people woke up

Wednesday

January 7, 2026

Justin Marozzi

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with Christ during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chávez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh,