Iran After The Deal

The Islamic Republic has been struggling to reform itself for 25 years and each time the experiment has gone awry. Iran's revolutionary theocracy has evolved, but the most problematic aspects of its ideology and institutions have managed to endure since 1979. Can the Iran Nuclear Deal, an agreement crafted through intense dialogue with an old adversary, alter the essence of the Islamic Republic and its turbulent relationship with the world? In Iran Reconsidered: The Nuclear Deal and the Quest for a New Moderation Suzanne Maloney argues that the nature of the Islamic Republic amplifies the threat posed by its nuclear ambitions and animates the most tenacious opponents of the deal. For that reason, the fierce debate that has erupted in Washington over the deal hinges on the prognosis for Iran's future.

The book offers the first systematic account of Iran’s foreign policy following the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) of July 14, 2015. The author evaluates in what ways the JCPOA, in conjunction with the dramatic changes taking shape in the international order, have affected Iran’s foreign policy. Known as Normalizers, the moderate leadership under President Hassan Rouhani had planned to normalize Iran’s foreign relations by curtailing terrorism and reintegrate Iran into the community of nations. Their hardline opponents, the Principalists, rejected the JCPOA as a tool of subjection to the West and insisted on exporting the Islamist revolution, a source of much destabilization and terror in the region and beyond. The project also analyzes the struggle between Normalizers and their hardline opponents with regards to global and regional issues and Iran’s foreign policy towards global powers including the U.S., Russia, EU, and regional countries including Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Distinguished diplomat Ambassador Wendy Sherman brings readers inside the negotiating room to show how to put diplomatic values like courage, power, and persistence to work in their own lives. Few people have sat across from the Iranians and the North Koreans at the negotiating table. Wendy Sherman has done both. During her time as the lead US negotiator of the historic Iran nuclear deal and throughout her distinguished career, Wendy Sherman has amassed tremendous expertise in the most pressing foreign policy issues of our time. Throughout her life -- from growing up in civil-rights-era Baltimore, to stints as a social worker, campaign manager, and business owner, to advising multiple presidents -- she has relied on values that have shaped her approach to work and leadership: authenticity, effective use of power and persistence, acceptance of change, and commitment to the team. Not for the Faint of Heart takes readers inside the world of international diplomacy and into the mind of one of our most effective negotiators -- often the only woman in the room. She shows why good work in her field is so hard to do, and how we can learn to apply core skills of diplomacy to the challenges in our own lives.

This book investigates the American media coverage of the historic nuclear accord between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the world powers, commonly known as the Iran Deal. The analysis examines the sources of news and opinion expressed about the Iran Deal in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the national newscast of broadcast networks. The empirical component uses media sociology and indexing theory to determine the extent to which the media covered the topic within a framework of institutional debates among congressional leaders, the executive branch and other governmental sources. The coverage is placed within a larger historical and interpretative framework that examines the construction of Iran in both the pre-revolution news narratives and in the post-revolution American media and popular culture. The book endeavors to reveal the place Iran occupies in the American political and cultural imagination.

The modern history of U.S.-Iran relations is a collection of iconic images: the Shah in regal glory on his throne; the Shah fleeing his country; the rapturous welcome of Ayatollah Khomeini; the parading of blindfolded American hostages; the burning wreckage of American rescue helicopters; Oliver North testifying on the Iran-Contra scandal; the volatile defiance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the hope of the Green Movement; and the persistent gloom of Ali Khameini. Yet behind these images are decades worth of diplomatic efforts, policy statements, official speeches, and passionate opinion pieces written by politicians, policymakers, human rights activists, and engaged citizens. Readers who examine these disparate viewpoints will gain a deep understanding of the vital, urgent, strategic importance of this long fraught relationship.

The agreement reached in Vienna on 14 July, 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, Germany) has been greeted as an historical achievement. While offering a long-lasting negotiated solution to one of the biggest crises of the last decade, the deal represents an opportunity for a deep recalibration of the balance of power in the Middle East. It also paves the way to some sort of rapprochement between Iran and the United States. But the deal is also likely to have an impact on Iranian domestic politics, not least on its economy, which, after repeated rounds of sanctions, languishes in deep crisis.

Despite a U.S. focus on securing an international deal to curb Iran’s nuclear development for the last several years, the United States lacks a strategy to combat the full range of Iranian activities that threaten the interests of the United States and its allies but fall short of conventional warfare. In this report, CSIS’s International Security Program sets forth analysis of Iran’s strategy, motivations, military, and paramilitary capabilities and evaluates the effects of Iranian behavior on key U.S. partners. The study leverages the expertise of contributing authors at CSIS, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Naval Analyses, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Harvard University and the University of Hawaii to inform its analysis. The study proposes a framework for deterring Iran, including practical recommendations for the U.S. administration and Congress that would enhance the security of the United States and its allies and partners.

The deeply reported story of two supremely ambitious figures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—archrivals who became partners for a time, trailblazers who share a common sense of their historic destiny but hold very different beliefs about how to project American power In Alter Egos, veteran New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler takes us inside the fraught and fascinating relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—a relationship that has framed the nation’s great debates over war and peace for the past eight years. In the annals of American statecraft, theirs was a most unlikely alliance. Clinton, daughter of an anticommunist father, was raised in the Republican suburbs of Chicago in the aftermath of World War II, nourishing an unshakable belief in the United States as a force for good in distant lands. Obama, an itinerant child of the 1970s, was raised by a single mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, suspended between worlds and a witness to the less savory side of Uncle Sam’s influence abroad. Clinton and Obama would later come to embody competing visions of America’s role in the world: his, restrained, inward-looking, painfully aware of limits; hers, hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old-fashioned. Spanning the arc of Obama’s two terms, Alter Egos goes beyond the speeches and press conferences to the Oval Office huddles and South Lawn strolls, where Obama and Clinton pressed their views. It follows their evolution from bitter rivals to wary partners, and then to something resembling rivals again, as Clinton defined herself anew and distanced herself from her old boss. In the process, it counters the narrative that, during her years as secretary of state, there was no daylight between them, that the wounds of the 2008 campaign had been entirely healed. The president and his chief diplomat parted company over some of the biggest issues of the day: how quickly to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; whether to arm the rebels in Syria; how to respond to the upheaval in Egypt; and whether to trust the Russians. In Landler’s gripping account, we venture inside the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, watch Obama and Clinton work in tandem to salvage a conference on climate change in Copenhagen, and uncover the secret history of their nuclear diplomacy with Iran—a story with a host of fresh disclosures. With the grand sweep of history and the pointillist detail of an account based on insider access—the book draws on exclusive interviews with more than one hundred senior administration officials, foreign diplomats, and friends of Obama and Clinton—Mark Landler offers the definitive account of a complex, profoundly important relationship. As Barack Obama prepares to relinquish the presidency, and Hillary Clinton makes perhaps her last bid for it, how both regard American power is a central question of our time. Advance praise for Alter Egos “A superb journalist has brought us a vivid, page-turning, and revelatory account of the relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as of their statecraft. Alter Egos will make a signal contribution to the national debate over who should be the next American president.”—Michael Beschloss, bestselling author of Presidential Courage “Mark Landler, one of the best reporters working in Washington today, delivers an inside account of Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Barack Obama that brims with insight and high-level intrigue. It’s both fun to read and eye-opening.”—Jane Mayer, bestselling author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right