Turkey’s Nuclear Ambitions in the Post-Iran War Environment
Turkish ambitions to develop nuclear weapons are not new, but the changing security environment is strengthening Ankara’s motivations and rationale for moving away from its longstanding role as a champion of nonproliferation and toward a strategy of preserving the option to build nuclear weapons without actually pursuing them. The challenge for Washington is to manage the nuclear trajectory of regional powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia rather than preventing them from acquiring greater nuclear capabilities altogether.
Trump’s South Caucasus Peacemaking Is His Most Successful, but It Remains Unfinished
Of all the fronts in President Trump’s peacemaking agenda, the South Caucasus has delivered the most concrete results. The August 2025 Washington Declaration, signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan and witnessed by Trump, marked an important step toward peace in the region. The two sides initialed a peace agreement and advanced plans to unblock regional connectivity, including through the establishment of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), which would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhijevan exclave through southern Armenia. Implementation of TRIPP has since made notable progress, but construction has yet to start. A breakthrough on those two tracks would, in turn, unlock Armenia–Türkiye normalization, transforming a long-fractured region into an area of trade and interdependence.
Wars don’t just end. They get interpreted, reinterpreted, and turned into strategic doctrine. That is what happened after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a conflict that saw the United States back Tehran’s Iraqi adversaries. The war taught Tehran three lessons it never unlearned: that Washington wants the Islamic Republic gone, that Iran stands essentially alone in the world, and that it cannot survive a direct, overt fight with the U.S. and Israel.
Are Iran’s leaders rational actors? This question matters when justifying any decision by Israel to preempt Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. An Iranian regime seen as driven to destroy the Jewish state has to be dealt with differently than one whose objectives are mediated by calculations of costs and benefits. Deterrents that would be normally expected to restrain a state would not work with an irrational Iran.
Policy Privatization and Empowerment of Sub-National Forces: The Case of Private English Language Institutes in Iran
Originally posted July 2010
In the past, there was no need for learning a foreign language. Today, however, learning foreign languages should be included in school curricula … Today is not like yesterday, when our voice could not reach beyond the national boundary. Today, we can stay in Iran but publicize [our ideology] and export our revolution to other parts of the world in different languages.
