Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Mojtaba Touiserkani
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When rights are sold back as concessions
Wars do not always continue through explosions. Sometimes the more dangerous phase begins when the noise falls, markets steady and governments hurry to turn a ceasefire into proof of victory. Iran is entering that phase. The danger is not only another round of fighting, but the quieter possibility that war…
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The cards they cannot play: Iran, America and the trap of unusable leverage
The strangest feature of the Iran war is not that both sides have leverage. It is that neither side can fully use the leverage it has. That is the defining reality of the conflict as it moves through its uneasy post-ceasefire phase. Washington has the naval power to sustain pressure…
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How the Iran war turned civilian lifelines into bargaining currency
The most revealing thing about the 8 April ceasefire was not that it paused, for the moment, threatened attacks on Iran’s bridges, power stations and other essential infrastructure. It was that such targets had become bargaining language at all. On Truth Social, Donald Trump threatened to destroy bridges and electric…
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Iran Is Not Denying Negotiations. It Is Designing Them
On 26 March, the most revealing development in this war was not another missile barrage. It was the report that Pakistan had urged Washington to restrain Israel from killing Abbas Araqchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf because, as a Pakistani source put it, “there is no one else to talk to”…
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When diplomacy nears the threshold: What two wars in nine months reveal about how the Iran war will end
In February, Ali Larijani shuttled between Muscat and Doha as part of the diplomatic channel between Iran and the United States. On 18 March, Iran confirmed that he had been killed in an Israeli strike alongside his son and several aides. Between those two moments, the channel he had helped…
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Tehran’s calculated wager
When negotiators gather in Geneva on Thursday for the third round of indirect talks between Iran and the United States, the most consequential item in the room will not be a summary of earlier rounds. It will be a written proposal from Tehran — designed to test whether diplomacy still…
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Governance by weather: Iran’s independence, priced in dollars
When US and Iranian officials sit in separate rooms in Muscat, passing messages through Omani mediators, people in Iran do not wait for the communiqué. The quickest dispatch from Oman is never a carefully chosen diplomatic phrase. It is something more elemental — a shift in the atmosphere. And the…
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When survival makes the past impossible to defend: Iran’s reverse sunk-cost trap
Turkey is offering a screen, not a summit. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, arrives in Ankara on Friday, 30 January as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tests an idea that suits Donald Trump’s taste for theatre: a teleconference between Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian. The call may never happen. The point is what…
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Iran’s self-blinding: How governance by narrative manufactures the pretexts it fears
“Death to high prices”—the slogan was unglamorous, but on 28 December 2017 it lit a fuse in Mashhad that quickly outran its economic frame, mutating into leaderless, nationwide defiance that left at least 50 dead, dozens injured and thousands detained. In the background sat a telling figure: the rial had…