ANALYSIS

Mohammad Javad Zarif’s latest Foreign Affairs article follows a familiar pattern in his narrative: recasting Tehran’s militarization and domestic repression as reactive responses to external pressure rather than deliberate internal choices.

Tehran’s recent gestures of apparent flexibility—from looser enforcement of the hijab to an embrace of nationalist symbolism—recall moments in Communist history when a brief opening exposed risks the system ultimately moved to contain.

As the Middle East enters the final weeks of 2025, the aftershocks of two years of regional war since October 7, 2023 are yielding to a quieter, consequential realignment of regional power.

As Azerbaijan and other Caspian Sea states deepen partnerships with Western energy companies to extract more oil and gas from aging offshore fields, Iran stands apart as the only Caspian littoral country that produces no hydrocarbons from the sea at all.

Faced with economic crisis, social defiance and regional strain, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei continues to invoke earlier moments of “glory,” treating defeat and mismanagement as moral triumphs rather than political failures.

Most authoritative energy forecasts, including Iran’s own official estimates, agree that global oil demand will peak in the next decade and then enter irreversible decline, a frightening outlook for Tehran.

The seizure by US forces last week of an oil tanker in the Caribbean for allegedly transporting sanctioned oil from Iran and Venezuela may signal a policy shift that could endanger the funding of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran faces a stark choice to address a cost of living crisis: preserve subsidized exchange rates that have failed to protect purchasing power and fueled corruption or remove it and risk triggering another wave of uncontrolled inflation.

As diplomatic horizons narrow and domestic hardships mount, Iran appears to endure less through strategic vision than an ad hoc survival economy backed up by China, Russia and its armed allies abroad.

Half a century of rule built on clerical authority has secularized Iran, available data suggests, with most still believing in God but not in the theocracy.

The political storm over a marathon on Iran’s Kish Island may have started as a dispute over unveiled participants, but it now reflects a deeper struggle between a society pushing for change and institutions intent on reasserting control.

Simultaneous visits by senior Turkish and Saudi officials to Tehran last weekend were widely seen as a move by the two US allies to explore new channels to manage rising regional tensions through dialogue with Iran.

A lopsided war with Israel and the United States in June rattled Iran’s political order, but it survives through smarter coercion and the disarray of forces that might otherwise bring it down.

Tehran warily watches events in the Caribbean as its ally Venezuela faces the largest US military deployment in the region in decades, which US officials describe as a bid to confront narco-terrorism

Under unprecedented strain at home and abroad after the June war, Tehran is adopting new tones and messaging to steady its own base.

The UN nuclear watchdog’s latest rebuke shows that Iran’s turn to nuclear ambiguity is deepening concerns and may accelerate an escalation that all sides insist they want to avoid.

President Masoud Pezeshkian has drawn fire over his decision to hand leadership over a crucial new energy body tasked with confronting an acute power crisis to a bureaucrat with no background in the sector.

Iran is facing one of its most severe droughts in 60 years, with more than half its plains suffering drastic groundwater depletion and the term “water bankruptcy” becoming more palpable by the day.