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In recent years, the United States has imposed a punishing sanctions regime on Iran’s banking sector. To further increase Tehran’s level of financial pain, a great number of congressional and advocacy groups have repeatedly called on the White House to blacklist the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Doing so, the thinking goes, would seriously hamper the Islamic republic’s ability to abuse international markets in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet unbeknownst to most lawmakers and Washington policymakers, the U.S. Treasury actually hasblacklisted the CBI, and not once, but twice in recent years. The real question is why the U.S. government has not enforced its own sanctions regime.

Tragic is the word most often used to describe the life of Syed Saleem Shahzad. A celebrated Pakistani investigative journalist, Shahzad nearly became a household name in May 2011 after his mysterious murder made international headlines. Reviled by terrorists and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alike for his penetrating reporting, months before his murder the forty-year-old reporter repeatedly warned friends of specific threats to his life from Pakistani intelligence agents. One day after publishing a report about militant infiltration into Pakistan’s security services, Shahzad was kidnapped. His body was found, dumped in a canal and bearing obvious signs of torture, two days later. Widespread accusations leveled at the ISI inside Pakistan were privately echoed by U.S. officials, marking another grim chapter in the history of the world’s most notorious intelligence service.

It is something of a truism that in Washington, bad ideas never truly go away. Instead, they keep cropping up at the most inopportune moments. So it is with American policy toward Iran. Stymied in recent months by the resilience of Iran's increasingly mature nuclear effort and complicated by the unfolding turmoil of the “Arab Spring,” policymakers inside the Beltway are once again flirting with the idea that some sort of diplomatic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic is in fact possible.

WHEN the "Arab Spring" unexpectedly broke out late last year, Natan Sharansky waxed optimistic. Writing in the Washington Post in March, the former Soviet refusenik who ranks as Israel's best known pro-democracy activist argued that the grassroots revolts that unseated Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali and Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak marked the start of a democratic tsunami that could soon engulf the region. Regional conditions, he counseled, were ripe for just this sort of radical surgery.

These days, however, Israelis who share this hopeful outlook are exceedingly hard to find. A recent visit found policymakers and academics of all political stripes deeply apprehensive of the tectonic shifts that have taken place in their region this year. They have good reason to be. Israel's security environment, never favorable, has taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

The foiled Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, which was made public by the White House on Oct. 11, amounts to a dramatic escalation of the West's confrontation with Iran. In the wake of the disclosure, the Obama administration has talked tough, pledging new diplomatic pressure against Iran and emphasizing that "all options are on the table" as it contemplates its response.

But what can actually be done about Iran's clerical army and the radical regime that enables it? The most ready answer lies in the prominent role the IRGC now plays in the Iranian economy, which can be exploited by Washington and its allies in the service of a new economic offensive against the Islamic republic.

It's all over but the counting. Russia's presidential election may still be some six months away, but the outcome of that contest is already crystal clear: a return of Vladimir Putin to the country's top post.

On September 24th, Mr. Putin, who currently serves as Russia's prime minister, ended months of fevered speculation about his political plans when he confirmed that he intends to stand anew for the country's presidency—and that, if elected, he will switch places with his hand-picked protégé, current president Dmitry Medvedev.

That result is all but a foregone conclusion. Over the past decade, thanks to the machinations of Mr. Putin and his coterie, Russia has crept steadily back toward Soviet-style authoritarianism. Today, the "United Russia" political faction headed by Mr. Putin dominates the country's political landscape and controls both houses of Russia's legislature, while his loyalists stack virtually all meaningful leadership positions in Moscow and the country's 83 regions. And with political power increasingly centralized in the Kremlin, divergent viewpoints are given less and less legitimate outlet. Dissidents and activists who do not accept the prevailing status quo have found themselves in legal jeopardy—or worse.

You could be forgiven for dismissing the latest diplomatic spat between the United States and Pakistan as just another hiccup in a long-estranged marriage. Trading accusations and navigating diplomatic crises has become a weekly affair for this deeply troubled alliance. But the broadside launched against Pakistan by the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in congressional testimony on September 22 represents a rupture so dramatic that its significance is difficult to overstate.

Does the Islamic Republic of Iran pose a cyber threat to the United States? On the surface, the idea seems far-fetched. Squeezed by sanctions over its nuclear ambitions, suffering from widespread social malaise and weathering unprecedented divisions among its leadership, Iran hardly seems an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland - even if it does pose a vexing challenge to American interests in the greater Middle East.

Yet mounting indicators suggest that Iran's leadership is actively contemplating cyberwarfare against America and its allies.

Ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11 and the start of the war on terror, it is fair to ask: Where do we stand in this struggle? Listening to the rhetoric of the White House, it would be easy to get the impression that Washington is just days away from declaring “Mission accomplished.” With the death in May of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. commandos, the United States “is within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda,” newly appointed Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters in July. “I think we have them on the run.” More recently, John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism czar, said much the same, telling the Associated Press that the group that carried out the most devastating attacks on the U.S. homeland in American history is “on the ropes.”

Such triumphalism, however, is both premature and unfounded. After all, the contemporary terrorist threat confronting the United States and its allies is considerably larger than just al Qaeda. America today faces a trio of distinct - and daunting - strategic challenges.

As the United States and other NATO countries begin to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, Afghan and US policymakers alike fear a return to the carnage that characterized the five year civil war (1996-2001) between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. In that conflict, battles over large population centres and campaigns of ethnic cleansing killed thousands. To prevent a repeat of that disaster, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration are now seeking to negotiate a truce with the Taliban. But just how likely is such a peace deal to materialize – or to hold, if it does?

With soaring inflation, chronic unemployment and rampant poverty, Iran is nobody’s picture of economic health. So when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its latest working paper on Iran last month, the rosy assessment contained therein raised more than a few eyebrows.

That study, “Iran - The Chronicles of the Subsidy Reform,” heaped praise on the regime in Tehran for launching a raft of much-needed rollbacks of costly subsidies on everything from energy to foodstuffs. This effort, the report says approvingly, “has created a unique opportunity for Iran to reform its economy and accelerate economic growth and development.”

That rosy view has gained quite a bit of resonance of late. In June, no less prominent a publication than the Economist - using the IMF’s preliminary conclusions as a point of departure - lauded the “exemplary” steps Iran has taken in commencing structural reforms to its economic sector. All of this, of course, must be music to the ears of Iran’s ayatollahs, who in recent months have redoubled their efforts to convince the world that the country is thriving despite the West’s best efforts to ratchet up the costs associated with its nuclear program.

But there’s good reason to think the opposite.

On August 18th, after months of dithering, President Obama finally took a firm stand on the unrest roiling Syria when he announced that “the time has come for President Asad to step aside.” By doing so, the United States has belatedly brought itself in line with the growing number of nations that have abandoned the Syrian dictator as a result of the brutal five-month-old crackdown he has waged against his own people.

But, now that America is well and truly engaged, is there anything that we can actually do to speed Assad’s ouster? In point of fact, there is. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States has at least two means at its disposal to pressure the Syrian government—if only it possesses the political will to use them.

Make no mistake: U.N. Security Council sanctions and additional U.S. and European pressures are hurting Iran. Tehran is having a harder time importing food and other key goods, its foreign investment is drying up, financial firms and shipping companies are turning down its business, and its central bank is running short of hard currency.

What sanctions are not doing, however, is achieving their goal - to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Not only is Iran making more progress in its nuclear program, it's acting more boldly in its region, threatening U.S. interests while distributing weapons that are killing U.S. troops. Because neither current nor additional sanctions alone will deter Tehran, and because a nuclear Iran would be a disaster for the United States and the world, Washington must seriously consider a military option.

Are sanctions capable of derailing Tehran's nuclear drive? Some skeptics reject such measures altogether, preferring to deal with Tehran by either accommodation or containment. Others point to the spotty historical record of sanctions in altering state behavior in arguing that they will similarly fall short of forcing the ayatollahs to rethink their long-standing nuclear ambitions. For example, sanctions were found to be successful in only a third of the 105 instances in which they were applied between World War I and the end of the Cold War.

As the past year has shown, however, Tehran may well turn out to be the exception to the rule—but only if the Obama administration (and Western governments more generally) make swift and skillful use of the economic and strategic means at their disposal.

Are Washington and Tehran headed for a showdown?

For much of the past decade, conventional wisdom has held that Iran’s dogged pursuit of a nuclear capability – carried out in spite of mounting pressure from the international community – will ultimately become a casus belli for Washington. Early on in his tenure, President George W. Bush even went so far as to declare that the U.S. “will not tolerate” Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons, and to indicate that he was prepared to use force to prevent it. Despite its more dulcet diplomatic tones toward Iran, the administration of Barack Obama has grudgingly repeated much the same thing since taking office: that all options, including the use of force, remain on the table for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Still, some eight years into the international standoff over Iran’s atomic program, it has become clear that a military option for dealing with an Iranian bomb, if not out of the question entirely, is an exceedingly remote possibility.

That does not mean, however, that Tehran and Washington won’t soon find themselves embroiled in a war. Indeed, Iran’s escalating activity on the territory of its western neighbor, Iraq, could end up becoming the real catalyst for a U.S.-Iranian conflict.

Increasingly, the idea of being a modern Russian means to be detached from Russia itself. The problem has long, Soviet roots, and the ruling tandem acknowledges there is a problem. But are they capable of reversing the trend, wonders Wayne Merry ...

“Modernisation” is the mantra of the current Russian leadership. Both President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, albeit in somewhat different language, stress that modernisation is critical to Russia’s future both as a post-hydrocarbon economy and as a competitive state player on the global scene. They describe modernisation as essential to make Russia receptive for investment and entrepreneurship. In recent months, this goal has taken on tones of more than policy priority, but of actual urgency.

"There is no question that talented young Russians are compatible with modernisation, but there is a basic issue whether modernisation is compatible – or even tolerable – within today’s Russia"

For this discussion, “modernisation” may be understood to mean the ability and willingness to adapt to (or even embrace) contemporary ways of doing things in a global context, with the object of adding value to any particular field of human endeavor. It need not be limited to technical or business innovation, although that is the focus of Russian policy.

Welcome to “The Hangover,” Cairo edition. The widespread grass-roots protests that broke out in Egypt this spring succeeded in accomplishing what many skeptics doubted they could: ousting long-serving strongman Hosni Mubarak and ending his 30-year authoritarian rule. But now, some four months on, Egypt’s revolution is obviously on the skids.

The problems start with Egypt’s economy. Under Mr. Mubarak, Egypt’s economic fortunes were comparatively rosy, with the national gross domestic product growing an average of nearly 6 percent annually over the past three years. Today, by contrast, they are anything but rosy. Since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster in February, the Egyptian stock exchange has lost nearly a quarter of its value, prompting its chairman, Mohamed Abdel Salam, to embark upon a frantic tour of Gulf monarchies in an effort to drum up Arab investment. Tourism, the lifeblood of the Egyptian economy, likewise has plummeted, falling an estimated 60 percent over 2010 levels and costing the country more than a half-billion dollars in revenue to date in the process. Nor is a reprieve in sight. According to observers, it could take a decade for Egypt’s tourism industry to rebound fully - if, indeed, it rebounds at all. The prognosis is grim: As a recent analysis in the Asia Times put it, “Egypt’s economy is in free-fall.”

With the drama of the Arab Spring and the death of Osama bin Laden dominating the headlines, you might have missed the most important development in months surrounding Iran's nuclear program: Zimbabwe's emergence as a key enabler of the Islamic Republic's march toward the atomic bomb.

In recent days, officials in Harare have confirmed that the government of Robert Mugabe is finalizing a massive resources deal with Tehran, in defiance of United Nations sanctions aimed at derailing Iran's nuclear push. That agreement, in the works since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the African state in April 2010, would provide the Iranian regime with preferential access to the country's estimated 455,000 tons of raw uranium over the next five years.

The deal sheds light on what amounts to a major chink in the Islamic Republic's nuclear armor. For all of its atomic bluster, the Iranian regime lacks enough of the critical raw material necessary to independently acquire a nuclear capability. According to nonproliferation experts, Iran's known uranium ore reserves are limited and generally of poor quality. It desperately needs steady supplies of uranium ore from abroad, and without those supplies the Islamic Republic's nuclear plans would, quite simply, grind to a halt.

Is a new Cold War brewing in the Middle East? That’s the conventional wisdom surrounding the so-called “Arab Spring,” which has further corroded the already poor relations between the region’s Saudi-led bloc on the one hand, and Iran and its allies on the other. Yet the two competing sides have found common ground on at least one strategic issue: Syria. Each desperately wants the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to survive.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the recent death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American commandos is the reaction it has elicited throughout the Middle East. That is because, while most regional governments have welcomed news of the al Qaeda chief’s demise, not everyone is embracing the post-bin Laden era.

The Taliban, for example, have been quick to lionize the terror mastermind and threaten retribution against the coalition and its allies. “Pakistani rulers, President Zardari and the army will be our first targets,” a spokesman for the movement’s Pakistani branch has warned. “America will be our second target.”