By Ted Galen Carpenter
In the next week, the Obama administration could face its toughest test yet in handling Iran and North Korea’s quest for nuclear capabilities. If Washington continues to pursue the same sterile policies toward these distasteful regimes, little progress will be made. Diplomacy is still a workable option in each case, but the administration must seek [...]
Washington’s Dead Policies Toward Pyongyang and Tehran is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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According to a March 29 article in the Journal of Turkish Weekly, 54 percent of Turkish survey respondents favor Turkey developing its own nuclear weapons in response to an Iranian nuclear threat. The alternative provided to the respondents was for Turkey to rely on NATO’s security umbrella. Just 8 percent of the respondents favor the latter option. The survey was conducted by the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies. This survey’s results bolster a key conclusion in a 2010 report released by The Heritage Foundation. It followed the conduct … More
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By Malou Innocent
In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, my co-author Doug Bandow and I argue that Washington must engage Tehran in order to keep it from following the same course as Pyongyang—a nuclear regime ruling over a population anguishing under international sanctions. Negotiating with Iranian leaders will not resolve the nuclear issue in the next few months. What’s needed is [...]
Give Talks with Iran a Chance is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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As is frequently the case, petroleum futures markets are anxious about political instability in the Middle East. Of particular concern is the possibility that efforts to counter or eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons capability will lead Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes about one-fifth of the world’s petroleum. The impact of the strait’s closure and how the U.S. and its allies could respond was the subject of a Heritage Foundation Report in 2008 and a recent Special IHS Webcast (may require subscription). Modeling roughly similar scenarios, the … More
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Snap a few pics. Grab a falafel. Plan a terrorist attack. Eileen Sullivan reports for the Associated Press that the New York City Police Department is playing cat and mouse in Manhattan with the Iranian intelligence service. No big surprise here. Iranian intelligence has been busy in the United States and Canada for some time. Washington got another wake-up call recently when authorities foiled a plot aimed at bombing the Saudi ambassador in our own backyard. That was followed by a chilling admission from the head of the U.S. intelligence … More
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Iran continues to make steady progress in stockpiling supplies of increasingly highly enriched uranium far above the quantities that it needs for its civilian nuclear program. Yet the Obama Administration maintains that Tehran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear weapon. This despite the fact that Iran continues to stonewall the investigations of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), defy multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, and shrug off a growing list of international sanctions. The Obama Administration’s optimistic reading of the state of Iran’s nuclear program is based … More
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How to handle Iran? Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Fareed Zakaria complains that “Krauthammer, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and others denounce containment and deterrence and would lead us instead to a policy that culminates in a preventive war.” This summary of Heritage writings about dealing with the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran prompts a bit of head scratching—if Fareed actually reads anything Heritage writes. First of all, if you click the link to “Heritage” in his blog post, it takes you to a speech given at … More
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Not even a month after Azerbaijani counterintelligence services arrested Iranian agents planning terrorist attacks against Israeli diplomats and prominent members of the Jewish community, a network of 22 more Iranian agents were arrested Thursday. These alleged Iranian operatives were hired by the Iranian spy agencies to carry out terrorist attacks against the United States and Israeli targets as well as international oil companies, including BP. All of them are Azerbaijan citizens and were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. They were paid on a monthly basis. Recently, Azerbaijan’s ministers … More
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In a recent article, Jeff Stier, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, argued that the Administration’s proposal in the fiscal year 2013 budget to cut funding for the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) sends the “wrong message to Iran.” This SM-3 funding cut limits the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system and makes the country more vulnerable to rising threats. The U.S. Navy’s Aegis BMD system utilizes SM-3 interceptors to destroy short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles in the midcourse phase of flight. Additionally, according to Heritage research, … More
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By Malou Innocent
Commentators who believe that Iran would nuke another nation unprovoked tend to infer the clerical regime’s future intentions from its hyper-inflated rhetoric. The problem with this logic is that statements from its leadership often get cherry-picked. Anti-Israeli diatribes made by Iran’s fiery-tongued President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are typically taken at their word, while statements made by [...]
Iranian Rhetoric: Heard and Unheard is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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