Emanuele Ottolenghi

Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este,Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay

On November 30, 2016, Syria watcher Tobias Schneider tweeted out pictures of an Iraqi Shia militiaman boarding an Iranian commercial airliner en route to Damascus. One selfie taken on the plane showed young men in military fatigues in the background. Another photo, likely taken when the militiaman…

Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement say assisting Iran out of its economic isolation could help prop up more moderate elements within the Islamic Republic. By any standard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, fails the moderation test: it is Tehran’s ideological vanguard,…

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, signed this month by the six world powers with Iran lifts a UN arms embargo by 2020, sanctions against Iran’s ballistic missile program by 2023, most nuclear restrictions by 2025, and a cap on low-enriched uranium stockpile by 2030. Most sanctions…

For years, Iran has marketed itself as a frontline state in the war against the drug lords. Recently the New York Times even described the regime in Tehran as the “West’s stalwart ally in the War on Drugs.” The problem is that while the Iranian regime is fighting drug lords on its eastern borders,…

Last month, the Obama administration added seven new Iranian companies, because of proliferation concerns, to the ever-growing list of sanctioned Iranian entities. Yet, as important as this latest move is, one crucial category of Iranian entities is still missing from U.S. policy—companies owned or…

Despite all evidence that sanctions are hurting Iran's economy, four rounds of nuclear talks failed to prove that Iran's regime is now more malleable to a compromise. Diplomacy will continue, but with Iranian proposals falling short of Western minimum requirements, it is time to ask whether…

On March 20, Armenian defense minister Seyran Ohanyan visited Washington, D.C. Talks focused on U.S. defense assistance to the small republic, and regional issues were also discussed, but there is no evidence that Ohanyan’s U.S. counterpart, Leon Panetta, raised the question of Armenia’s excessive…

Every time trouble has erupted in Iran against the regime—1999, 2003, and, most recently, 2009—university students have been at the forefront of protests. This is partly why Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been battling over control of Iran’s biggest institution of higher…

When NATO planes launched their air campaign over Libya’s skies last spring and Western leaders said that Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had to go, the first regime to change was at the London School of Economics. Its director, Sir Howard Davies, resigned following embarrassing dis-closures about…

On Tuesday night, the Obama administration began signaling that it will call for Bashar al-Assad’s departure in Syria. CNN and other outlets reported that the White House would soon increase pressure on the Syrian government’s finances, and isolate a number of officials in the Assad regime.