Posts tagged : "Diplomacy"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the Taliban moves to establish its new Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, neighboring Iran is divided on whether to grant the Islamist regime its stamp of diplomatic approval. While Iranian authorities no doubt welcome America’s military departure from neighboring Afghanistan, Tehran and the Taliban have their own troubled and turbulent history – one that will be hard to bridge and sell to the Iranian public that the militant group has changed its stripes. Officially, Iran has lent its voice to wider international calls for the formation of an “inclusive” Afghan government representative of the nation’s diverse ethnic and cultural makeup to avoid future conflicts. The Taliban’s announced...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s dire economic straits are beginning to dawn on new President Ebrahim Raisi – and it’s not immediately clear ex-judiciary chief has a viable solution in sight. The new leader, who earlier said he would not be beholden to foreigners in deciding his economic policies – reference to the US sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy since 2018 – is now reaching out for help. Raisi has galvanized his foreign envoys to engage in so-called “economic diplomacy”, a new government buzzword he first aired on the campaign trail that is apparently central to his plan for reviving the nation’s fortunes. That’s because domestic-driven economic options are limited. US sanctions have...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: On the surface, a crisis should be emerging on Iran’s eastern border as the Taliban seizes power and establishes a new Sunni-led Islamic emirate. Yet despite a history of hostility rooted in Sunni-Shiite antagonism, Tehran doesn’t appear troubled by the militant group’s return to power. Iran shares a rugged 921-kilometer border with Afghanistan, one that has seen dire spillover effects over the course of its long war. More than three million Afghan refugees and undocumented migrants now live in Iran, a point of tension over the years. But Iran is now seeking to turn a cross-border crisis into an opportunity as an incubator of post-war reconstruction, with multiple trade, security, energy and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: With new Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s official inauguration, all eyes have turned to his likely pick as foreign minister and the candidate’s view of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal that now hangs in the diplomatic balance. The parliament, or Majlis, says the new cabinet line-up will be revealed early this week. It is widely anticipated that religious traditionalists and hardliners will sweep the board in filling the vacancies. The early conjecture was that Ali Bagheri, a Raisi colleague at the judiciary as the Vice-Chief Justice for International Affairs and a former nuclear negotiator under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would get the nod. However,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran and Saudi Arabia are inching towards a rapprochement that, if achieved, would profoundly shift the region’s dynamics, diplomacy and stability. Officials from both sides have recently hailed backchannel talks held first in Iraq and now in Oman as “constructive.” In May, Iraqi President Barham Salih confirmed his country had been hosting quiet talks between the two often bitter rivals. The talks, which started in April, have recently been attended by high-profile delegates, including Saudi chief of General Intelligence Directorate Khalid al-Humaidan and Iranian Deputy Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Saeed Iravani. The first symbolic breakthrough could be seen as early as...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: A convoluted conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen is now in its seventh year, with a staggering death toll of more than 100,000 and dire economic repercussions that have made life in the most impoverished Arab nation additionally painful. International efforts to extinguish the conflict have so far made little success and humanitarian assistance is supplied with great difficulty. Nearly 24 million Yemenis, constituting four fifths of the entire population, require urgent humanitarian aid. A child dies every 10 minutes due to malnutrition or disease, and the country’s health sector, reeling from a massive loss of human capital and demolition of infrastructure,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: An attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility on April 11 has been blamed on Israel by Iranian officials, an accusation that threatens to hamper efforts now underway to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear pact. The apparent cyber-attack, which caused a power blackout at the plant situated eight meters underground, reportedly inflicted substantial damage to a number of centrifuges operating at the installation. Although Iranian officials have ruled out casualties or leakage of hazardous material, anonymous American and Israeli officials quoted in media reports have conjectured that the attack may have set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least nine...

Kourosh Ziabari - Responsible Statecraft: For nearly two decades now, Iran’s nuclear program has represented a global concern debated in the media on a daily basis, and world leaders have made every effort to find a way out of this intractable dilemma. Iran insists on the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, remains adamant that it should be entitled to enrich uranium unrestrictedly, has consistently worked on the development of advanced centrifuges and heavy-water reactors, and at times has been accused of covering-up its past nuclear activities. Lamentably, the sizeable investment Iran has made on its nuclear mission has yielded little concrete outcomes its people can discern other than underpinning an international...

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: Joe Biden’s election has revived certain hopes that the landmark Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), may soon be restored and usher in a new era of stability to the region. Biden vowed on the campaign trail he would rejoin the JCPOA and enter broad negotiations with the Islamic Republic to address a wide array of sticking points that continue to blight bilateral relations. Iran, which resorted to so-called “remedial measures” after the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, has since rolled back several of its commitments under the deal, including recommencing its sensitive uranium enrichment activities. At the same time,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the first anniversary of the fatal downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approaches, the Iranian and Canadian governments are not even close to settling their differences on the tragedy, with Ottawa even suggesting it may pursue justice at the International Court of Justice (ICC) at The Hague. Canada lost 55 citizens and 30 permanent residents when the IRGC, according to Iran’s official account, misidentified a Ukrainian passenger aircraft as a cruise missile flying over Tehran and downed it with two Tor M-1 missiles shortly after takeoff in the morning on January 8, 2020. All 176 passengers on the plane from six nations were...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the world was mesmerized by the spectacle of the presidential race in the United States, attention was diverted from other headline-making issues, at least fleetingly. In particular, it looks as though the dust has settled on the latest civilizational clash between the West and the Islamic world following the reprinting of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and the brutal murder of Samuel Paty, a French middle-school teacher who had shown the cartoons in one of his classes. A debate on the appropriateness of republishing the controversial cartoons, the degree to which they caused offense to Muslims worldwide, the sanctity of freedom of speech in a...