This past Monday, President Biden ordered U.S. Forces to carry out airstrikes against targets along the Iraq-Syria border. The Pentagon stated that these targets had been housing munitions for Iranian-backed militia groups. At least four Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada milita members were killed in the attack. A day later, militia units retaliated against U.S. forces in...
With a little less than six weeks before hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi is inaugurated as the new President of Iran, President Biden’s top aides are engaged in a high stakes game of ‘telephone’ in Vienna. As Iranian negotiators refuse to meet their American counterparts in person, European intermediaries have shuttled between hotel rooms with messages...
A key chord in Donald Trump’s 2016 rise was a promise to terminate ‘bad deals’ made by previous administrations on the international stage – of these, public enemy number one was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement aimed to avert Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and subject its facilities to international...
Just as the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq defined the War on Terror under President Bush, drone strikes became ubiquitous with counterterrorism under Bush’s successors. Presidents Obama and Trump ordered drone strikes within and outside of war zones to disrupt terrorist networks like IS, Al Shabab, and AQAP, and to conduct controversial assassinations, including radical...
