Vatanka Reports
News and Analysis on the Greater Middle East 
 

What the Hijab Protests Mean for Iran’s Clerical Class

Ali Khamenei won’t give up power for anyone—not even his president.

During his most recent visit to Tehran, on July 19, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, vowed closer economic cooperation.

The Iranian authorities anticipate that President Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East is aimed at one top priority: to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to its partners in the region.

After a three-month-long suspension of the nuclear talks in Vienna, the U.S. and Iran appear set to resume diplomatic negotiations on June 28 in Doha, Qatar.

Since late September 2021, when Iran-Azerbaijan relations hit a low point, Tehran and Baku have engaged in a process of de-escalation.

In an interview, Alex Vatanka discusses his book on how the Khamenei-Rafsanjani relationship shaped post-revolution Iran

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a watershed moment on so many levels for so many countries.

As both a candidate and as president, Ebrahim Raisi has repeated a basic mantra: that he will seek to quickly improve relations with Iran’s neighbors, and particularly the Arab Gulf states. In terms of his motivations for this push, two points are undeniably important.

On March 13, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired missiles at targets in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil. The IRGC claimed the barrage of missiles was aimed at the operational bases of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.

The government of President Ebrahim Raisi has been in place since early August and yet Tehran is still unsure about when and how it should resume the nuclear talks with world powers in Vienna. Those talks were suspended in June, just before the Iranian presidential elections.

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan are high right now but both sides will very likely soon step down. Neither Tehran nor Baku can afford to let recent events lead to a full-fledged crisis or a military showdown between the two Shi’a Muslim-majority countries.