Posts tagged : "Iran-U.S. relations"

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The nuclear deal with Iran has been a resoundingly important theme in the primary debates of U.S. presidential contenders. The most peculiar, unconventional ideas have been broached by the Republican hopefuls such as Senator Ted Cruz who said the JCPOA will hasten Iran’s path to developing nuclear weapons and that he will rip the deal “to shreds” if elected president. Similarly, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who is one of the major GOP competitors and equals Ben Carson as the third most popular Republican nominee in the polls analyzed by Real Clear Politics, has opined that the nuclear deal with Iran is not binding for the next U.S. administration and he will undo it, since he considers it to be a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: As the final preparatory step for the implementation of the comprehensive nuclear deal agreed by Iran and the group of six world powers has been taken after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Yukiya Amano submitted his report on the past and present outstanding issues regarding the country’s nuclear program to the nuclear watchdog’s Board of Governors, political scientists and foreign policy experts are now passionately debating the prospective, much-anticipated thaw in the Iran-U.S. relations. A noted academician and political scientist, who is known in Iran for his research about the 1953 coup d’etat against the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Following the successful conclusion of the talks over Iran’s nuclear program, and as the negotiating parties gear up for the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), there are still concerns and uncertainties on the commitment of the interlocutors to the terms of the deal. The U.S. presidential election 2016 is approaching, and some candidates have openly vowed that they will scrap the nuclear deal with Iran if elected to the White House, including GOP hopeful and Florida Senator Marco Rubio who has said he will tear the agreement apart on his first day as the U.S. President. Now, having invested a great deal of political capital on obtaining this agreement, it’s inarguably...

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 - Huffington Post: While nearing the end of his first term, the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boldly termed the tough, cruel economic sanctions against Iran as "scraps of paper", naively advising the world powers to "issue resolutions and rejoice"; however, perhaps few of his advisors had told him that Iran's economy would move to the verge of an all-out collapse because of those "scraps of paper" and that an incredible international isolation would be what befalls the country in a matter of 3, 4 years. On various occasions, Mr. President ridiculed the sanctions imposed against Iran over its nuclear program, and irritated the Iranians suffering under the brunt of the most rigorous economically...

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 - Iran Review: On the final day of the Global Media Forum 2015 and while I had only a couple of hours to pack my luggage and depart from Bonn to Frankfurt and catch my return flight to Tehran, I got the chance to talk to a leading British peace-worker and women rights activist for a 15-minute interview for Iran Review. Scilla Elworthy is the founder of the Oxford Research Group, an advisor of The Elders and a member of several international peace organizations. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times in recognition of her work on nuclear non-proliferation and the facilitation of dialog between weapons policy-makers and their critics. A member and councilor of the World Future Council, Ms....

Kourosh Ziabari - Your Middle East: Let me jump to an early conclusion about the historic nuclear deal achieved by Iran and the six world powers (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) on July 14: the Iranian, American and Israeli critics of the deal, I bet, haven’t even bothered to read the text of the 159-page Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. To be honest, they’re either practically incapable of grasping and comprehending the highly technical, well-crafted, exhaustive deal or don’t have the time to review its content and simply crave for shouting something against it in general, like that it was a “historic mistake”. For the United States and its allies, who said they were seeking...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: A European Youth Press fellowship took me to the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2015 held in the German city of Bonn from June 22 to 24 to cover the world’s largest media gathering for Iran Review. The 3-day event was held in the World Conference Center Bonn, the former home to the German Bundestag (lower house of the Federal Parliament) and several workshops and plenary sessions were arranged with different subject matters revolving around the forum’s main theme “Foreign Policy in the Age of Digital Media.” About 160 speakers and panelists delivered presentations in the workshops and plenary sessions. On the second day of the event, Iran Review conducted an interview with Mr. Gavin Rees,...

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...