Group items tagged

"This is a unique arrangement," one U.S. official said. "This is a humanitarian gesture."

The Obama administration has been criticized by several Republican presidential candidates, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump, for reaching the nuclear deal with Iran while the Americans remained imprisoned.

When news first broke of the incident involving the sailors, tensions were high, the official said. But the way it was quickly resolved allowed the parties to return to wrapping up negotiations on the prisoners.

Iran had initially insisted Jason Rezaian's fate could only be decided by Tehran's judicial system rather than through political accommodation with the U.S. But the nuclear deal, reached last year, held out hope for increased dialogue about Rezaian and the other Americans.

"There are a number of Iranians in the United States who are imprisoned, who went to prison as a result of activities related to the nuclear industry in Iran," he said through an interpreter.

"I have raised them in all of our sessions. We've had a lot of conversations. We are continuing those conversations now. And I am hopeful that the day will come soon, obviously sooner rather than later, but soon, when all of our citizens can come home," Kerry said.

new sanctions on those involved with Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests conducted in violation of United Nations restrictions, but he did not elaborate or dwell on that dispute.

“We have a rare chance to pursue a new path, a different, better future that delivers progress for both our peoples and the wider world,” said Mr. Obama,

But Mr. Obama vowed to continue monitoring Iran’s nuclear program to ensure it does not cheat and said he would work to restrain any aggressive behavior by Iran, including terrorist activity and human rights abuses.

The release of the Americans came a day after Iran and the United States concluded delicate negotiations on a prisoner exchange tied indirectly to the completion of a nuclear agreement.

optics of the back-to-back sanctions announcements might seem to suggest that Washington was imposing new measures to make up for those that were lifted Saturday, they are actually nowhere near comparable.

The action taken Saturday allowed Iran to re-enter the world’s oil markets;

The new sanctions are mostly aimed at individuals and some small companies accused of shipping crucial technologies to Iran,

in addition to the completion of the nuclear deal and the prisoner swap, the United States and Iran had resolved a three-decade-old financial dispute.

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, did not address the prisoner swap on Sunday. At a news conference, he said that since the sanctions were lifted, the door had opened for foreign investments in the country, even by American companies.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's declaration unlocked some $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets overseas, and potentially even greater economic benefits through suspended oil, trade and financial sanctions by the U.S. and European Union.

One of the last hiccups that delayed the Americans' departure was an Iranian military official's misunderstanding about Rezaian's wife and mother joining him on the flight. After Kerry spoke to Zarif, permission was granted.

Israel remains steadfastly opposed to the Iran deal and any rapprochement with Tehran. Sunni Saudi Arabia has had tension with Iran since executing a Shiite cleric on Jan. 2, which led to a severing of diplomatic ties between the two.

We can confirm that our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left

The nuclear agreement "accelerated" the prisoner swap

were released, along with four other Iranians held in other parts of the U.S., Mechanich's attorney

concluded Tehran was in compliance with the deal governing its nuclear program.

U.S. federal officials said they will not comment on the names of anyone who is part of the agreement until after the four Americans are in U.S. custody

seven Iranian men walked free from detention in the United States after being pardoned and released

he freed prisoners are expected to be transported to a U.S. military hospital in Germany for medical evaluation

Iranian officials to "continue cooperating with the United States to determine the whereabouts of Robert Levinson,

FBI agent and CIA contractor, went missing in Iran in 2007.

men had been involved in exporting products and services to Iran in violation of trade sanctions against the country.

agreed to drop charges against 14 other Iranians whose extradition to the United States seemed unlikely

Three Americans freed in a prisoner swap with Iran arrived in Germany on Sunday evening after a brief stop in Switzerland, two White House officials said.

The fourth prisoner released in the swap, identified by U.S. officials as Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, decided not to leave Iran, senior White House officials said. "It's his free determination" whether he wants to stay in Iran, one official said. "We don't make that judgment."

“What is clear is that Iran will now have more resources to dedicate to their terrorism and aggression in the region and in the world, and Israel is prepared to deal with any threat,” he said.

Mr. Netanyahu believes, as he said in a statement issued late Saturday, when it became clear that the United Nations would accept Iran’s partial dismantling of its nuclear infrastructure in what has been called “implementation day,” that “Iran has not relinquished its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons.”

While Gulf states cautiously welcomed last year's nuclear deal, they are deeply suspicious of Iran's activities, particularly on the Arabian Peninsula.

The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has taken to Twitter in recent days to criticize Iran and poke fun at his Iranian counterpart. "Don't torch, take over or ransack embassies and consulates. Don't take diplomats hostage. #DiploMaturity101," read one post.

A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, was also released by Iran, though his release was not part of the negotiated prisoner swap.

The International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had fulfilled its obligations under the nuclear deal that six world powers struck with Tehran. The United States responded by announcing it would end its sanctions on Iran, freeing up $150 billion in frozen assets.

Israelis see the Kurds—a moderate, pro-Western, Muslim community that eschews anti-Israel sentiment, and with whom Israel has worked quietly—as exactly the kind of element that the Middle East needs more of. They constantly press for more American support for the Kurds. Israel, against American wishes, encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq in their ill-advised independence referendum of 2017. For Israel, the U.S. abandonment of the Kurds represents both a strategic and an emotional blow.

Obama, too, was criticized by Israelis for withdrawing troops from Iraq, for failing to strike Syria in response to chemical-weapons use, and for his perceived reluctance to use force against Iran’s nuclear program. But Trump, the gever-gever, Israelis hoped, would reverse the trend. Instead, Trump is doubling down on reducing U.S. involvement in the Middle East in an even more brutal fashion: bashing regional allies as freeloaders, demanding payment for U.S. protection, and loudly declaiming against any plausible logic for a U.S. military presence in the region. America’s friends, including Israel, feel a chill wind at such talk.

A more dominant Russia in Syria means a reinforced Assad regime. That process was happening anyway, much to the chagrin of Israeli strategists and anyone with a moral conscience. But the folding of the U.S. tent cements the outcome. Where Turkey does not wipe out the Kurds, Russian-backed Syrian forces will mop them up. The Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah weapons highway will be disrupted only by Israeli action

Other Arab states, long funders of anti-Assad opposition groups, have given up and are welcoming Syria back to the fold. Syria’s prospective invitation to the Arab League summit, the visit of Assad’s security chief to Cairo, and the reopening of the UAE embassy in Damascus mark Syria’s best week diplomatically since the war began in 2011.

Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, women have been forced to cover their hair according to Islamic law on modesty.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also defended the pact, saying that an imperfect deal is better than no deal and that her country will "watch very closely" to ensure it is being fulfilled.

The United States already has immense nuclear and conventional capabilities, and experts say there is no evidence these so-called more usable low-yield nuclear weapons will force adversaries to behave better. Enlarging the United States arsenal will certainly lead other countries to seek equivalent arsenals of their own, while also raising the odds that weapons fall into terrorists’ hands and heightening the risk of accidental war. Investing huge sums this way is also unlikely to protect us from tomorrow’s threats.

he proposed nuclear policy says a more aggressive nuclear posture is warranted because the world is more dangerous, with China, North Korea and Iran cited as concerns. Yet blowing up the Iran deal would free Tehran to resume its nuclear activities and make the world less safe. In other words, Mr. Trump’s approach makes no sense.

Until Mr. Trump, no one could imagine the United States ever using a nuclear weapon again. America’s conventional military is more than strong enough to defend against most threats. But Mr. Trump has so shaken this orthodoxy that Congress has begun debating limits on his unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons. Expanding the instances when America might use nuclear weapons could also make it easier for other nuclear-armed countries to justify using their own arsenals against adversaries.

"I thought at first that it was a huge bomb. But then I heard everyone around me screaming: 'Earthquake!'"

Most importantly, Carlson is saying something pundits, especially conservative ones, rarely say on television: that America must prioritize.

Since the George W. Bush years, conservative politicians and pundits have demanded that the United States become more aggressive everywhere. They’ve insisted that America confront China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda, all at the same time. Strategically, that’s absurd.

“How many wars can we fight at once?” he asked Peters. “How many people can we be in opposition to at once?” He told Boot that, “In a world full of threats, you create a hierarchy of them. You decide which is the worst and you go down the list.”

Carlson is offering a glimpse into what Fox News would look like as an intellectually interesting network

For over a century, conservative interventionists and conservative anti-interventionists have taken turns at the helm of the American right.

While conservatives in the 1930s had generally attacked Franklin Roosevelt as too interventionist, conservatives from the 1950s through the 1980s generally attacked Democrats as not interventionist enough.

When the Cold War ended, the pendulum swung again. Pat Buchanan led a revival of conservative anti-interventionism. The biggest foreign policy complaint of Republican politicians during the 1990s was that Bill Clinton’s humanitarian interventions were threatening American sovereignty by too deeply entangling the United States with the UN.

Then came September 11, which like Pearl Harbor and the onset of the Cold War, led the right to embrace foreign wars. Now Donald Trump, exploiting grassroots conservative disillusionment with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has revived the anti-interventionist tradition of Coolidge, Harding, and Buchanan. And Carlson is championing it on television

re would have been no monarchy and no empire, no usurpation of the lives and property of the people, no oppression and plunder, no encroachment on the public treasury, no vice and abomination. Most forms of corruption originate with the ruling class, the tyrannical ruling family and the libertines that associate with them. It is these rulers who establish centers of vice and corruption, who build centers of vice and wine-drinking, and spend the income of the religious endowments constructing cinemas.5            

In addition, superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced in them, all of which are totally alien to Islam, impose further expenditures on our national budget not less in quantity than the illicit expenditures of the first category.

dicating disputes, and executing judgments is at once simple, practical, and swift. When the juridical methods of Islam were applied, the sharī‘ah judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people and send them about their business.

“This is a full-fledged cold war that risks turning hot with a single mistake,” said Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization. “We’re still in an escalatory spiral that risks getting out of control.”

Since 2019, Israeli commandos have attacked at least 10 ships carrying Iranian cargo, according to an American official and a former senior Israeli official. The real number of targeted ships may be higher than 20, according to an Iranian Oil Ministry official, an adviser to the ministry and an oil trader.

The extent of Iran’s retaliation is unclear. Most of the attacks are carried out clandestinely and with no public claims of responsibility.

The Israeli ship attacked last month was a car freighter, the Helios Ray, carrying several thousand German-made cars to China.

Several tankers were similarly attacked in the Red Sea last fall and winter, actions some officials attributed to the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel movement in Yemen.

Iran has denied involvement in all of these attacks which, like the Israeli ones, appeared intended not to sink the ships but to send a message.

Israel has tried to counter Iran’s power play by launching regular airstrikes on Iranian shipments by land and air of arms and other cargo to Syria and Lebanon. Those attacks have made those routes riskier and shifted at least some of the weapons transit, and the conflict, to the sea, analysts said.

“Neither Israel nor Iran want to publicly take responsibility for the attacks because doing so would be an act of war with military consequences,” Hossein Dalirian, a military analyst affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, told The New York Times in a Clubhouse discussion on Thursday.

Analysts say that Iran wants to continue to needle Israel and to arm and support its Middle Eastern allies, both to surround Israel with well-armed proxies and to give Iran a stronger hand in any future nuclear negotiations.

The Israeli offensive against Iranian shipping has two goals, analysts and officials said. The first is to prevent Tehran from sending equipment to Lebanon to help Hezbollah build a precision missile program, which Israel considers a strategic threat.

The tankers targeted by Israel were carrying Iranian oil to Syria, contravening American sanctions and most likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, also under sanctions, is in dire need of oil. Iran, its economy decimated by American sanctions, needs cash. Hezbollah has also been hit hard by the severe economic and political crisis in Lebanon and a cyberattack on its financial system.

The effectiveness of the Israeli campaign is unclear. Some of the targeted ships were forced to return to Iran without delivering their cargo, the American official said.

While the Israeli Navy can make its presence felt in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, it is less effective in waters closer to Iran. And that could make Israeli-owned ships more vulnerable to Iranian attacks as they pass Iran’s western shores on their way to ports in the Gulf, said Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli admiral who now heads the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center at the University of Haifa.

Death now comes daily to Europe’s beaches. How is this tolerable?

President Bashar al-Assad and cronies stand accused of a wide range of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Civilians, rescuers, health workers and hospitals are routinely (and illegally) targeted. The International Criminal Court is stymied by Russian and Chinese vetoes

Repeated regime use of banned chemical weapons in defiance of global treaties has grave international ramifications.

Russia has repeatedly hindered investigations, while the US has ignored its own “red lines”. As a result, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is seriously weakened.

A lasting beneficiary of the war is Islamic State (Isis), which overran territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014. While an international coalition eventually crushed the caliphate, Isis was behind many terrorist attacks in Europe in 2014-17.

The war has marked a clear shift in the Middle East balance of power from the US to Russia. After Barack Obama declined to intervene militarily, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, filled the ensuing power vacuum in 2015 – and probably saved Assad’s regime. Joe Biden’s main concern is deterring pro-Iranian militia and jihadists – witness last month’s limited air strikes. The UN-led peace process collapsed in January – and Biden seems to think it’s too late to save Syria. It would be great to be proved wrong.

Western states initially expressed sympathy for attempts to overthrow dictators and authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria in 2010-12. But as events turned unpredictable and Islamists got involved, the west backed away. The window that briefly opened on peaceful reform in the Arab world slammed shut. The cause of global democracy was a big loser. Syria symbolises its defeat.

Israel worries about the build-up of Iranian Revolutionary Guard and pro-Tehran armed forces in Syria and Lebanon. It has launched hundreds of air strikes on Iran-linked targets there, and has urged the US to do likewise

The failure to end the war has done enormous damage to international institutions. The UN security council in particular has been severely discredited. So, too, have UN peacemaking efforts. Yet if the UNSC’s “big five” had really wanted to stop the conflict, there is little doubt that, acting together, they could have done so. That they did not even try is the Syrian war’s most shameful legacy.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi was able to negotiate a last-minute deal in February, however, under which promised the IAEA it would hold onto footage shot by its surveillance cameras and would hand them over if diplomats reached a deal in Vienna to lift the sanctions it faces. Otherwise, Tehran said it would delete the images.

The ultimate goal of the deal is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, something it insists it doesn’t want to do. Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb, but nowhere near the amount it had before the nuclear deal was signed.

But if it emerges that we were mistaken, and the Americans succeed in securing a discussion of a different, better deal, we will certainly be part of that discussion. We made that clear and the (Biden) administration welcomes this, of course."

Mixed signals, she said, make any effort to shape an adversary’s behavior “incredibly ineffective.”

This imposes a layer of confusion on the conflict, just as it enters a dangerous and volatile new chapter, inviting mixed messages and misread intentions.

It’s not that experts or foreign officials suspect a secret agenda, but that the administration’s action fit no clear pattern or long-term strategy, she said. “It just doesn’t add up.”

He took the United States out of the nuclear agreement and imposed sanctions against Iran — which some see as setting off a crisis that continues today

He has cycled between ambitions of withdrawing from the Middle East, positioning himself as a once-in-a-generation peacemaker and, more recently, promising to oppose Iran more forcefully than any recent president has.

Without a clear understanding of what actions will lead the United States to ramp up or ramp down hostilities, she said, Iranian leaders are operating in the dark — and waiting to stumble past some unseen red line.“That’s what makes this a dangerous situation,” she said.

Without a clear explanation for Mr. Trump’s behavior, anyone whose job requires forecasting the next American action — from foreign head of state to think tank analyst — was left guessing.

United States diplomacy has emphasized calls for peace but has conspicuously declined to offer what diplomats call “offramps” — easy, low-stakes opportunities for both sides to begin de-escalating, which are considered essential first steps.

has Trump considered next 15 moves on chessboard? How to protect our people? Line up allies to support us? Contain Iran but avoid wider war? My guess is he hasn’t.”

Ms. Geranmayeh stressed that the conflict between the United States and Iran also threatens to draw in a host of Middle Eastern and European countries.To navigate tensions and avoid worsening them, allies and adversaries alike must astutely judge American intentions and anticipate American actions.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had already been ramping down tensions with Iran, Ms. Geranmayeh said, “because they have no idea how Trump will behave from one week to the next” and fear getting caught in the middle.

“If Trump is not managing a consistent and clear message to the Iranians about what he wants,” she said, “then this opens up a lot of space for a lot of miscalculation.”

Ms. Kaye said Iran might conclude that it should tread with extreme caution. Or it might reason that the United States poses a threat that is both existential and unyielding, compelling Tehran to gamble on taking extreme measures.