Vatanka Reports
News and Analysis on the Greater Middle East 
 

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.

Iran and the U.S. were on a collision course as soon as President Donald Trump arrived at the White House in January 2017.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago this week, ties between Western and Eastern Europe were renewed.

In an Oct. 2 speech to the top commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, asked them to be ready for “big events.”

It has now been almost 18 months since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued 12 demands to Iran and imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign to compel Tehran to change behavior.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s visit to the G-7 summit in France late last month was a surprise to many in the West.