As President Hassan Rouhani is readying for reelection next May, he has come under growing pressure from his reformist supporters to improve the human rights situation in the country.
Iranian officials and media have reacted to Donald Trump’s election victory with a mixture of cautious optimism and alarm.
During the final stages of US presidential election, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and leaders of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) had implicitly supported Trump over Hillary Clinton. With Trump’s victory, they now hope that his pro-Moscow and anti-Saudi Arabia rhetoric translates into policy to favor Iran’s interests in Syria and the broader region.
On November 10, a number of US news outlets reported that President-elect Donald Trump was considering his top campaign surrogates for top cabinet positions.
In this special edition of our weekly briefing, MEI experts Paul Salem, Robert S. Ford, Eran Etzion, Gonul Tol, Alex Vatanka, and Gerald Feierstein provide analysis on the impact of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential Election on the future of Middle East policy, its particular effect on the crises in Iraq and Syria, and how the news has been received across the region, including in Turkey, Iran, and the GCC.
Read the full article on The National Interest.
The last few weeks has seen a flurry of important announcements in Iranian-Indian relations. It is usually the commercial transactions that capture most of the headlines, but the potential for closer ties between these two states runs much deeper.
As the Iraqi security forces are fighting the Islamic State to retake Mosul, a top Iranian general and his aides are reportedly playing a key role on the battlefield.
As the Iraqi security forces are moving deeper into eastern districts of Mosul, the Iranian media reports that militia groups from the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) are making territorial gains against the Islamic State in Mosul’s western region.
Tens of thousands of Iranians marched across Iran to mark the anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran following the Islamic Revolution in the country in 1979.
Iranian legislators on November 1 approved President Hassan Rouhani’s three cabinet picks.
On Monday, Lebanon’s lawmakers ended more than two years of political gridlock and elected Michel Aoun as the country’s president. The news was greeted with elation in Tehran as Aoun, a former general from Lebanon’s Christian community, is a close ally of Iran-backed militia and political party Hezbollah.
The Iranian media reports that Slovenia’s President Borut Pahor will soon visit Tehran to reopen his country’s embassy in the Iranian capital.
On November 2, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned that compromise with the United States would only aggravate the country’s problems. He accused Washington of continuing hostile policies against Tehran and not abiding by the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Read the full article on Foreign Policy.
“Kullun haramiyyeh” — “they’re all thieves” — is the most common sentiment about Lebanon’s politics on the streets of Beirut. You’ll hear it from street vendors, waiters, students, teachers, architects, taxi drivers, doctors, Muslims, and Christians. It’s a view, in short, that unites this perpetually fragmented country.
