Suzanne Maloney - Mentions and Appearances

I still don't believe this administration wants to provide a lot of leeway to the Iranian authorities but that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be looking for every opportunity to.

I don’t believe the administration is in any way likely to significantly alter its approach towards Iran, including and especially the ‘maximum pressure’ economic strategy.

It’s symptomatic of the revolutionary state’s highly ideological and often inept approach to governance...What’s maddening is that Iran has enormous scientific capabilities and a well regarded public health system. So this is entirely a leadership failure.

It’s wildly inappropriate and dangerous for an American diplomat to openly threaten individual assassinations of Iranian military commanders...There is a rhetorical and substantive difference between promising tough, decisive US responses to any attacks on Americans vice specific threats to kill individual commanders — especially from a State Department official.

The Iranians really do have alternative industries to fall back on and a significant domestic capacity, as well as the ability to leverage their relationships with several of their neighboring states to try to muddle through economic adversity. Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the Central Asian republics and, of course, Syria, elsewhere across the region — it does have a reach that goes beyond that of the U.S. Treasury Department.

In neither case was the ultimate, explicit goal ‘regime change,’...But there was a kind of theory of the case under Obama that engagement could lead to the sort of fundamental changes in Iranian policy, almost irrespective of the character of the regime, that the U.S. had been seeking since 1979.

[The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai] suggests a mission with a longer planning horizon and a larger objective, and it really does call into question why there was an attempt to explain this publicly on the basis of an imminent threat.

It’s been largely quiet until late December...In the interim, Pompeo and other U.S. officials seemed to articulate a red line for what would elicit a U.S. response — the death of U.S. personnel.

This may initiate a nuclear crisis...They can’t march to a bomb tomorrow, but this will dramatically change the dynamic and they can reduce the timeline.