Iran
Reports
The exile: The stunning inside story of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in flight
Elections in Iran: Prospects for Rouhani, reform, and the nuclear deal
What does success in the Middle East look like for the next president?
Richard Nephew
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative
Suzanne Maloney
Deputy Director - Foreign Policy
Senior Fellow - Center for Middle East Policy, Energy Security and Climate Initiative
The administration is sort of spinning to find a pathway to satisfy the president’s desire to assert Iran’s noncompliance, but without necessarily erupting a second nuclear crisis.
[The economy is] an issue where [Rouhani] has a greater chance of avoiding real gridlock within the system itself. It’s not nearly as dangerous as taking on issues of political prisoners or trying to open up the political space to those who feel marginalized.
[Targeting Rouhani’s brother] is a very convenient way to cause pain to the family without necessarily provoking a crisis of office. The general message that the rest of the system is trying to send to Rouhani is not to get too far ahead of himself, to not allow his decisive election victory to give him illusions of greater autonomy and authority than his position actually has.
There's often a temptation to look for some kind of logic [in the arrests of students and dual nationals in Iran]... I think that this particular case [of Xiyue Wang] highlights the fact that the logic is simply the paranoia of the Islamic Republic—its judiciary and its security services in particular.
This is just a system [in Iran] that views individual foreigners who come to the country, particularly people with some language capabilities, as inherently suspect.