International Security and Law Analyst
Shahram Kholdi has taught Politics and the History of the Middle East, the History of Oil, and International Relations at various universities in Ontario, Canada, over the past twelve years. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Manchester (UK) in 2011. He is currently preparing his doctoral thesis, The Politics of Memory and the Historiography of the 1979 Revolution, for publication as a book.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hastily advanced trip to Washington this week underscores the rising stakes surrounding renewed diplomacy between Iran and the United States.
The reappearance of diplomacy between Washington and Tehran is being shadowed by limited but dangerous military showdowns, revealing how narrow the space for negotiation has become in the absence of trust.
US President Donald Trump’s dramatic naval buildup in the Middle East appears to have generated more strategic uncertainty than clarity both in Tehran and in Washington.
The events of the past two weeks in Iran point toward an openly regime-change movement, with protesters calling for the end of the Islamic Republic itself.
Prolonged economic exhaustion and a broader loss of confidence in the Iranian state after historic military and foreign policy setbacks in 2025 means 2026 may be the Islamic Republic's hardest ever year.
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 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.
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
A British inquiry into a pro-Iran charity reflects a mounting Western struggle to balance freedom of religion with efforts to confront Iranian political influence as Tehran's ties with Western Europe and North America plumb new lows.
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.
