Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Mahdi Niksefat Motlagh
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Ending the war requires accepting Iran in the Middle East
The hardest question about ending the war with Iran belongs in Washington. What place can Iran occupy after the fighting stops? A country left economically excluded, unable to rebuild and exposed to renewed attack has little reason to regard a ceasefire as a durable ending. The war cannot be politically…
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The war that failed to define Iran
Iran did not win the war. But it denied Washington and Tel Aviv the victory they needed most: the power to decide what the war had made of Iran. The recent US-Iran memorandum of understanding is important for that reason. It is designed to end the near four-month war, reopen…
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When a ceasefire becomes an offensive system
Ceasefires are usually treated as the negative space of war: the moment when fire stops, diplomats return and the strategic temperature begins to fall. That reading is dangerously incomplete. In the present Iran-US-Israel confrontation, the ceasefire is not merely an interruption of violence. It is becoming a coercive architecture in…
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Talks without balance: Why Tehran and Trump remain locked in escalation
Negotiation is being spoken of constantly, yet a meaningful settlement has rarely been farther away. In an existential war, talks are not a neutral return to reason. They become another theatre of the conflict itself. That is the central reality of the current war involving Iran, Israel and the US.…
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The myth of a fractured Iran: Why pressure consolidates the civilisational state
This essay responds to a Washington Post argument that treats the fragmentation of Iran as a plausible, or even tolerable, endpoint of regional strategy. The premise is familiar. Iran is not a coherent nation state in the classical Westphalian sense. Its borders are historically contingent. External pressure may accelerate internal…
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The chaos that calculates: Unveiling Tehran’s strategy of “managed ambiguity” against Israel
In the post-war strategic landscape of the Middle East, silence constitutes the most deceptive variable. While the balance of power appears to have shifted, security circles in Tel Aviv grapple with a reality far more complex than headlines suggest. Israeli strategists seemingly agree on one unwritten consensus: the “Iran issue”…