Posts tagged : "Hassan Rouhani"

Kourosh Ziabari - Huffington Post: Javad Zarif is a name you may encounter in the media reports and news stories these days frequently. Aside from being Iran's Foreign Minister, a U.S.-educated diplomat and a social media connoisseur, he is now viewed by thousands of young Iranians as a savior and a national hero. The 55 year old is credited with concluding one of the most far-fetched, elusive diplomatic negotiations of the contemporary history and clinching a non-proliferation deal that seemed an outright impossibility some three years ago and is now described as a blueprint: The comprehensive agreement over Iran's nuclear standoff, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Of course his U.S. counterpart John Kerry played an...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The nuclear agreement between Iran and the six world powers survived a vote of disapproval in the US Senate on Thursday, September 10 after no more than 58 Republicans and Democrats voted to block the enforcement of the deal by the Obama administration – while the adoption of disapproval deal needed a minimum of 60 votes to pass the floor. Secretary of State John Kerry has appointed the former U.S. ambassador to Poland Stephen Mull as the lead coordinator for the implementation of the deal now that the Congress failed to kill off the deal during its 60-day review time. At the moment, President Rouhani administration in Tehran is waiting for the debate on the JCPOA to come to an end in the Majlis so...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: As the high-ranking economic and political delegations from the European and Asian countries flock to Tehran one after the other to negotiate the resumption of their trade ties with Iran following the landmark conclusion of the nuclear talks between Iran and the six world powers earlier on July 14, the United States is the only nation that hasn’t yet taken a final decision on the adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and implementing it. The UN Security Council issued the resolution 2231 on July 20, endorsing the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, indicating that after a period of 10 years, Iran’s nuclear program would be treated as a normal and regular case within the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Since 2002 when the United States first accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons, there was barely a day when one couldn’t find a headline on the press about Iran’s nuclear program. Literally thousands of news stories, reports, articles and commentaries as well as video footage were released about Iran’s “dangerous ambitions” for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and violating the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. During these years, the climate of Iran’s relations with the international community was more or less gloomy, and tensions marred Iran’s ties with the European Union and aggravated it’s already contentious relations with the United States. Sanctions were...

Kourosh Ziabari - Your Middle East: Anti-American sentiments have been a pivotal part of the ideology that gave rise to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, toppled the U.S.-allied monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and introduced the world’s first Islamic Republic. Of course at that time, there was some good reason for feeling unhappy about the role the United States had played in Iran’s political developments; a role which the former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw once famously said had a “malign” influence over the country. In 1953, in what came to be known as the Operation Ajax, the Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 staged a coup d’état against Iran’s nationalist, democratically...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Will Iran and the group of six world powers be able to reach a final solution on Iran’s nuclear standoff? It will have to wait until June 30, which is the self-imposed deadline for Iran and the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States) to conclude the marathon talks. The negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program get closer to the critical phases, and now the two sides are wrestling over the most miniature details: when and how the sanctions against Iran will be terminated, whether or not the UN Security Council will endorse the removal of the sanctions, and what parts of Iran’s nuclear activities will be stopped or limited. The former U.S. Ambassador to NATO believes...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Iran and the six world powers are moving closer to singing a historic deal that will bring a happy and peaceful end to more than one decade of dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Almost all the details regarding the foundation of a comprehensive nuclear accord were agreed upon in the Swiss city of Lausanne on April 2, and the Iranian negotiating team is talking to interlocutors from the United States, three European countries (Britain, France and Germany), Russia and China to work out the text of the comprehensive agreement that is due to be signed on June 30. Although the Congressional hawks in Washington, Israel and some Arab states in the Persian Gulf seem to be nervous about the possibility of a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: It’s possible to bridge the gaps that keep Iran and the West apart and actualize the normalization of relations between them. This is the substance and gist of statements made by Richard Bacon MP who talked to Iran Review in an extensive and in-depth interview conducted in December last year. Richard Bacon, a British Conservative Party politician and the Member of Parliament for the South Norfolk constituency, believes that Iran has engaged in constructive negotiations with the six world powers over its nuclear program, and it’s really imminent that it will strike a deal with them to put an end to the decade-long nuclear crisis. On the rise of the terrorist group ISIS in the Middle East, Mr....

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: With the rise of the terrorist group ISIS in the Middle East and its intensified campaign against the peoples of Iraq and Syria, which is resulting in increased insecurity and instability in the already-turbulent Middle East, more attention is being paid to the role of Iran in leading a regional front for fighting violence and extremism. Although Iran was not officially included in the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, there are many American politicians and academicians who lay emphasis on the importance of Iran’s contribution to the global battle against terrorism and believe that the U.S. government’s decision to exclude Iran was wrong. The role of Iran in addressing the concern of violence and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The First International Conference on World Against Violence and Extremism (WAVE) held in Tehran on December 9-10 last year following the endorsement of President Hassan Rouhani’s proposal for the establishment of a global front against terrorism and extremism was a landmark event in the final days of 2014 in Tehran and brought together hundreds of government officials, diplomats, peace activists intellectuals, scholars and academicians from some 40 countries to the Iranian capital. The big international gathering underlined the leading role Iran has been playing in confronting terrorism and violence in the Middle East, especially following the rise of the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The First International Conference on World Against Violence and Extremism (held on December 9-10, 2014) was an opportunity for hundreds of public figures, including politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, academicians, religious leaders and thinkers of more than 40 world countries to come to Tehran and discuss one of the most pressing and sensitive issue of the 21st century with each other: terrorism and extremism. The debate on violence and extremism has become more heated and controversial with the rise of the terrorist cult ISIS, which has established a self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, and harbors inauspicious plans for dominating larger parts of the Middle East and even...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The International Conference on World Against Violence and Extremism was held in Tehran from December 9-10 to honor the proposal put forward by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in his speech at the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly regarding the exigency of forming a global coalition to fight the growth of extremism and radicalism across the globe. In his address to the 68th session of the UN General Assembly, President Rouhani underlined the fact that the Middle East has been burning in the fire of extremism and violence for a long time as a result of the presence of forces that are not genuinely concerned about the wellbeing and tranquility of the people living in the region; forces...