Iran

‘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

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The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran

And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colors. They frothed day and night about a “murderous regime” – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum. It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors What is it about revolts in Iran that rankle the activist class? These people love to yap about “resistance” and “oppression.” Yet the minute

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Maduro’s fall could galvanize the Iranian opposition

On the afternoon of December 28 in a Tehran electronics bazaar, shopkeepers (known as bazaaris) shuttered their shops and walked out, outraged at a planned gas price rise and crippled at the continuing slide in the value of the Iranian currency and the government’s powerlessness to shepherd Iran’s economy toward something better than corruption, unemployment and inflationary cycles. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar was quick to follow suit. A day or so later, several of Tehran’s most prestigious universities staged demonstrations. Smaller cities and towns have since taken up the baton of resistance, with government offices attacked and people openly calling for Khamenei’s death and the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, at