ExxonMobil’s return to southern Iraq this month underscores how far Baghdad has surged ahead of Tehran in exploiting their shared border oilfields—and how the two neighbors’ fortunes are diverging.
Tehran may be preparing for confrontation rather than calm, if the recent remarks of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are any indication, preferring the uncertainties of further conflict over meeting US peace demands seen as humiliating.
The return of UN sanctions has deepened Tehran’s isolation and tested Beijing’s pragmatic balancing act in a region shaken by Donald Trump’s new peace plan and the 12-day war between Iran and Israel.
Tehran’s behavior after the June war with Israel reflects a state of suspended decision-making—a fragile equilibrium that may nevertheless endure, sustained by continuing control and the absence of any obvious alternatives.
Despite years of official rhetoric about a “strategic partnership,” new data show that Russia has slipped from Iran’s list of main trading partners.
As the world races to meet the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, Iran faces a bleak environmental outlook given the scale of its problems and authorities' record of short-term policymaking.
For the first time in more than seven years, Iranian-flagged oil tankers are broadcasting their location accurately and without spoofing—raising eyebrows among longtime watchers of Tehran’s sanctions-busting efforts.
US President Donald Trump appeared to suggest in a passing remark during a speech before Israel's Knesset on Monday that his son-in-law Jared Kushner could lead US diplomacy with Tehran.
Invitation to the Islamic Republic to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit can be seen as one of the most significant signs of a shift in the strategy of the United States and its Arab allies toward Tehran.
Tehran is shifting its sanctions-busting strategy away from crude oil toward more lucrative and less scrutinized petroleum products to boost revenues even as restrictions tighten.
The reported detention of two Iranian green card holders marks “a profound erosion of due process,” international human rights lawyer Gissou Nia told Iran International, saying it represents a growing threat to lawful residents.
Two years after the October 7 attack, the Middle East drifts between competing promises and stubborn realities: Khamenei’s dream of regional “de-Americanization” lies in ruins while Netanyahu’s “new order” remains elusive.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blocked any potential signal of compromise before President Masoud Pezeshkian even landed in New York—a move some saw as a reckless gamble but in fact a calculated strategy rooted in decades of survival.
On the eve of the return of UN sanctions against Iran, all sides insist the doors of diplomacy remain open, but the table beyond those doors looks less like one for negotiation than for autopsy—an exercise in assigning blame for a failure long deemed inevitable.
Iran’s economy has slipped into its first contraction in more than four years and now faces mounting debt and record capital flight, official data show, days before UN sanctions are due to return.
Seven years after Donald Trump quit the nuclear deal, his duel with Ali Khamenei looks lopsided: the US president spoke from New York with renewed leverage, while Iran’s leader replied in taped defiance that evinced more strain than authority.
Iran's push to modernize its oil industry through artificial intelligence and advanced drilling techniques faces daunting old obstacles from restricted access to technology to mounting financial constraints which have dogged exports for years.
In Tehran today, debate over Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hardline stance on nuclear negotiations carries an unmistakable echo of the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in 1988.
Iran’s gas deficit will double in the next 15 years, reaching “terrifying” heights, a senior advisor to the president has warned.
Three years after the killing of Mahsa "Jina" Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police, and in the shadow of the Islamic Republic’s recent 12-day war with Israel, the outlines of a durable social transformation are clear.
The United Nations fact-finding mission on Iran, created after mass protests were crushed in 2022, has emerged as a rare instrument of accountability whose survival now rests on the political and financial will of the international community.
More than any other act in the post-October 7, 2023 world, the Israeli airstrike on a busy residential neighborhood of Doha on Tuesday has the potential to upend prevailing assumptions on Persian Gulf security.