Tag: International Security

Questions about whether the June 12 agreement signed by US President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un will, unlike previous broken promises, successfully lead to North Korean denuclearisation also have implications for Iran...

This Update deals with the possible ramifications for the Middle East of the summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un in Singapore on Tuesday - with a special focus on how it might affect the efforts to contain Iran's nuclear program. 

On May 8, US President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the West... There are many ways to assess the significance of this decision.

Ever since US President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in early May, the commentariat has been aghast at the lack of a new plan. Critics said that the Administration was all instinct and no insight, and that coercion without purpose was its only strategy.

On Monday, May 21, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a key speech in Washington outlining a new comprehensive US strategy for confronting problematic Iranian behaviour across a variety of areas - not only nuclear, but also missiles, support for terrorism, destablising neighbours, involvement in the Syria and Yemen conflict

Now the hope must be that Trump's announcement signals the beginning of a new era of negotiations and sustained diplomatic efforts to put into place new and better arrangements to thwart Iran's dangerous nuclear ambitions and regional aggression.

ON April 30, Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu revealed one of Israel's greatest intelligence coups - that it had obtained an entire archive of around 100,000 secret files on Iran's nuclear program.

According to media accounts, in January Israeli spies broke into a secret Tehran warehouse, stole the documents and brought them back to Israel the same night.

The cold war between Israel and Iran is heating up. At the same time, the countdown to either "fix or nix" the Iranian nuclear deal is ticking down, with an urgent deadline looming on May 12. These two aspects of the Iranian problem are linked.

Several recent articles have called on President Donald Trump to change the Iran policy of the United States based on ‘past lessons' and Persian history. If we follow these writers to a logical conclusion, then they appear to accept that Iran must be appeased and accommodated, not confronted or contained, in its drive for regional hegemony, support for terrorism and pursuit of non-conventional weapons.

According to numerous reports, the Syrian government is still using chemical weapons against its civilians and has even increased the frequency of such attacks. In the past month alone, it has been accused of using chemical weapons at least six times. These latest assaults are believed to have been chlorine attacks. While chlorine itself is not a prohibited substance as it can be used for water purification and other civilian purposes, the use of any chemical weapon including chlorine is a war crime banned under the Geneva Convention.