Publications

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear program has refocused world attention on the Iranian regime’s relentless pursuit of the bomb and on the global failure thus far to derail it. But a multilateral solution to the Islamic republic’s nuclear ambitions appears to be as elusive as ever, due in no small measure to the stances of its enablers — Russia among them. In recent days, Moscow has publicly rejected the new IAEA findings and argued for renewed diplomacy in response to Iran’s nuclear transgressions.

Some eight months after the ouster of its long-serving strongman, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s revolution remains the most prominent byproduct of the so-called “Arab Spring.” But where, exactly, is Cairo headed? While there remains no shortage of optimism about Egypt’s future in many quarters, a close look at the economic indicators suggests that the country may not be moving toward post-revolutionary stability at all. In fact, it is rapidly heading in the opposite direction.

TODAY, the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report on Iran’s nuclear program. It provides the most convincing evidence to date that Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon.

But as Iran nears the nuclear threshold, the best way to stop it may be by punishing the Chinese companies that supply Tehran and enable its nuclear progress.

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.