Vatanka Reports
News and Analysis on the Greater Middle East 
 

The fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan comes at a particularly bad time for Iran.

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) took a different path than the rest of the financial world.

In recent weeks, reports of a potential 25-year, $400-billion deal between Iran and China have dominated the conversation about Tehran’s options for freeing itself from the punishing U.S.-imposed sanctions regime on the country.

Hopefully, the senior leadership in Tehran will look at the Covid-19 crisis as yet another reminder that it is high time for nation-building at home and bridge-building with neighboring states.

On July 27, the White House announced that President Donald Trump has appointed retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor to be the next American ambassador to Berlin.

On the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Stuxnet computer virus, designed by the U.S. and Israel to target Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic is facing a new wave of unclaimed acts of sabotage.

The first-generation of Iran’s militant clerics, who took control of the country after the Iranian revolution of 1979, are all either dead or dying off.

Officials in Tehran have a lot to worry about.

Iran’s once promising reformist movement is in a death spiral. It is not because the idea of reform has lost its appeal.

Covid-19 is undoubtedly the biggest health crisis in our lifetime. Pundits around the world, but also a long list of policymakers from Washington to Abu Dhabi to Beijing, wonder about the long-term implications of this deadly pandemic. While there is plenty of speculation about how this crisis might re-balance global power dynamics, other foreign policy implications are more immediately tangible.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani claims that Tehran has, all things considered, outperformed Western states in its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The outbreak of a Russian-Saudi oil price war earlier this month might offer some comfort to Iran, a country which has in recent years become unnerved by the increasingly close ties between Moscow and Riyadh.