People are not protesting because they suddenly discovered activism. They are protesting because the habits of coping and waiting for conditions to improve have finally stopped working.
Last week, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei effectively greenlit mass killing to save his regime. His message was blunt: blood would be spilled to preserve the system. His security forces followed through, unleashing a level of violence against protesters that even by the Islamic Republic’s grim standards marks a dangerous escalation.
America’s dramatic capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has set the stage for the conduct of America’s national security strategy in 2026. It has also raised questions.
On Sunday, December 28, Iran’s latest wave of unrest began not on a university campus or in a symbolic political square, but in the very heart of the country’s economic sphere: the Grand Bazaar commercial center in downtown Tehran. What distinguishes the current moment is not simply the persistence of unrest but its emotional register. Iranian commentary increasingly describes not just hardship but a collapse of expectations of a better future.
Since Israel’s 12-day war against Iran, Tehran and its network of regional proxies and non-state allies, the so-called Axis of Resistance, have entered a phase of strategic dormancy — an outward calm concealing rearmament, financial adaptation, and ideological renewal.
Brian sits down with Robert Malley, a former US official best known for his role as the lead negotiator of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Malley discusses the motivations behind his new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, and offers his assessment of American perspectives on the war in Gaza. The conversation also explores his personal background as the son of an Egyptian Jewish father and an American Jewish mother—both outspoken on the political left—and how that upbringing shaped his worldview, alongside a career spanning the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.
MEI Senior Fellow Fadi Nicholas Nassar joins host Matthew Czekaj to share expert insights and personal reflections on Pope Leo XIV’s trip to Lebanon from November 30 to December 2. Nassar unpacks the significance of the visit, part of the pontiff’s first overseas tour since assuming office, and its potential impact on Lebanon’s untenable status quo. The conversation explores key questions, including the ability of spiritual and moral authority to compensate for the shortcomings of political leadership as well as whether Lebanon’s government will be able to capitalize on the momentum generated by this visit as the possible return of conflict looms on the horizon.
This backgrounder provides an overview of the Axis of Resistance, a loosely aligned network of armed groups and state actors led and supported by Iran to project its influence and military strength across the Middle East.
For Iran, Iraq is strategic depth, political sanctuary, and economic lifeline all at once. The results of the November 11 Iraqi elections will decide who in Baghdad controls the budgetary levers, internal security appointments, and committees that could codify, or constrain, Iraq’s Iran-backed militias.
For decades, the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran has symbolized the righteousness of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s revolutionary defiance and the legitimacy of “resistance” as state ideology. To question it is to pry open the logic of the entire enterprise.
Ambassador Ryan Crocker reports on his visit to Lebanon and Syria on October 12-17 as part of a small delegation organized by the Washington office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Seizing Lebanon’s once-in-a-generation opportunity hinges on its ability to resolve its core dysfunction: reclaiming the state’s monopoly on force and its exclusive authority to determine matters of war and peace. Beirut, backed by deepening US support, must focus on achieving tangible milestones and strategic victories that momentum, making Hizballah’s disarmament unstoppable and the state’s reassertion of authority irreversible.