guarantee that would exempt Russia from sanctions limiting or preventing its economic and military-technical cooperation with Iran on accounts of its invasion of Ukraine, signaling the continuation of the nuclear talks.
or decades, the geopolitical and geo-sectarian rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has played out across the Middle East in various destabilizing ways.
hile there always seem to be efforts to rehabilitate Iran’s image at both a regional and international level, usually attempting to make Tehran appear to be the victim rather than the victimizer, few would be naïve enough to deny the fact that Iranian ambitions can actively be classified as being imperial in nature.
Iran had played a vital role in overthrowing the Taliban in 2001 by sharing key intelligence input with the United States and showing its full support for the Northern Alliance, the main group opposing the Taliban.
espite being a fundamentalist Shia Islamist power, some may have been surprised to see Iran hosting the Sunni Islamist Taliban in Tehran and congratulating them over their victory in their 20-year war against the United States that finally saw Kabul back in the hands of the insurgents and the Joe Biden administration withdrawing all forces not long after.
In reality, however, Iraq has become the playground for Iran-sponsored Shia jihadist groups and militias who control every kind of industry imaginable, from a Shia clergy-backed illicit sex trade that sells girls as young as 9-years-old, to a drug trafficking cartel that controls Iraq’s porous borders with Iran and smuggles copious amounts of narcotics.
hina and Iran have been building an increasingly close economic, political and security partnership since the mid-1990s, when China emerged as Iran’s partner of choice for its energy projects in both the nuclear field and hydrocarbons.
Interestingly, Blinken called for the foreign ministers and envoys from Iran plus a number of other countries (China, India, Pakistan, and Russia) to join the US in discussing a “unified approach to supporting peace in Afghanistan”.