The problem facing Iran’s oil industry is not just sanctions or a shortage of investment. It is a question of governance: who makes decisions, who signs contracts, who receives the money and, ultimately, who is accountable?
Iran is putting two faces of its justice system on display: highly publicized acts of compassion for thousands of prisoners, alongside an execution campaign that has killed hundreds and continues to put protesters on death row.
I stop people from bleeding to death. As a trauma and vascular interventional radiologist in Los Angeles, I find catastrophic bleeding and stop it within minutes. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in victims of Iran’s January protests inside and outside the country.
Iran’s World Cup match against Egypt has become a test not only of FIFA’s approach to inclusion but also of whether LGBTQ+ Iranians can claim visibility on one of the world’s biggest sporting stages.
The Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the United States may strengthen the Revolutionary Guards, weaken Persian Gulf security and deepen China's access to Iranian energy. Above all, however, it leaves Iranians to face the Islamic Republic on their own.
US President Trump’s approach toward Iran may better be explained by the political timing of the World Cup and the culture of New York real estate dealmaking: performance, delay, leverage and spectacle.
As the US-Iran gap widens and President Trump brands the truce “on life support,” three competing visions of international law are struggling for mastery over the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Each captures part of the truth. None fully resolves the tensions.
Washington and the tech industry have the means to help Iranians: expand the tools that bypass censorship and raise the price Tehran pays for shutting the internet down.
I have learned as an Iranian-American scientist that war and politics rarely remain outside the laboratory for scholars from the Middle East, following us into our visas, our collaborations and even our ability to concentrate on our work.
The United States can seize the moment to support regime change and forge a strategic partnership with a democratic Iran that could yield over $1 trillion in revenue for American firms over the next decade.
From the vantage of the region’s coastal states, where these waters have long mirrored both promise and peril, the current chorus of criticism directed at the United States–Israeli campaign against Iran strikes a discordant note.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf may soon be called a pragmatist. That would be a mistake.
Moscow may be benefiting from the war between Iran and the United States and Israel, but the longer it continues, the less it serves Russia’s interests.
The real question is not whether the United States can destroy Iran’s capabilities, but whether it can end the Islamic Republic—and control what follows.
The killings that swept Iran last month revived memories of 1988, when the Islamic Republic erased thousands of political prisoners in silence—my brother, Bijan, among them.
The Islamic Republic was bad news in 1979 and it is bad news in 2026, sending security forces to beat and murder peaceful protesters. Deporting Iranians to a country gripped by violent repression is hardly the ‘help’ the United States promised.
Israelis and Iranians have been cast as enemies for so long, but during Iran’s uprisings their voices tell a different story as Iranians drew a line between themselves and the Islamic Republic.
As Iran’s authorities impose silence through violence and disconnection, what the world is witnessing is not unrest but defiance at its most basic—people refusing to disappear, to be reduced to numbers, or to surrender their names.
Iran’s near-total internet blackout since January 8 did not only shut down social media but collapsed the country’s last channels to the outside world, isolating families and sharply limiting what evidence of the crackdown could escape.
The latest wave of protests in Iran once more demonstrated both the depth of popular opposition to the Islamic Republic and the limits of mass mobilization in the absence of a decisive breakdown in the regime’s coercive capacity.
Tehran’s newly announced fuel price changes have been presented as a long-overdue reform of an unsustainable subsidy system, but they amount to an undeclared form of austerity aimed at rolling back subsidies with minimal political exposure.
Power politics in Tehran has reached a stage where even the most routine public affairs—a film festival, an environmental report or the World Cup draw—spiral into controversy, as if the system cannot tolerate anything resembling normalcy.