I mentioned the other day how Turkey might come out on the losing end of the Obama administration’s willingness to engage Syria and Iran. I also mentioned that France fit into the category of Middle Powers that had benefited from the late-Bush 43 period. France is a bit more complicated, because it filled not only the communication vacuum created by the Bush administration’s isolation policies, but also the more generalized leadership vacuum created by the extended lame duck period. One area where the two vacuums overlapped, though, was with regards to Iran’s nuclear program. To begin with, France as part [...]
Will Russia supply Iran with the advanced S-300 surface-to-air missile system? That is the most important — and persistent — question regarding Russia’s ongoing arms sales to Iran. The repeated rumors and confusion regarding a possible sale indicate that Russian policymakers are divided over the issue. It also illustrates the degree of mistrust between the Russian and Iranian national security communities over the subject of bilateral arms transfers in general, and disagreement over the extent to which Moscow should support Iranian defense aspirations over American and Israeli objections in particular. The “S-300” family encompasses a range of specific models that [...]
In a recent WPR Briefing on the Iranian nuclear program, the Arms Control Association’s Peter Crail explained why the most credible risk of Iranian weaponization came from the areas of “Known Unknowns” that lie outside of IAEA inspection oversight. Today at Arms Control Wonk, Andreas Persbo fills in the outlines with a detailed description of the most worrying suspects in the “Known Unknowns” lineup: Iran’s domestic uranium mining sector, and as Crail discussed, an alternate, clandestine conversion and enrichment facility. The former is for now entirely outside the IAEA’s oversight activities and, in combination with the latter, could feed raw [...]
