Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has updated this unique bargaining technique by contriving to aim one pistol at the West even as it presses another to its own temple. Over the past two years, Erdogan has willfully antagonized Turkey’s partners in the North Atlantic Treaty…

Given President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s penchant for political gamesmanship, it is hard to know how seriously to take Turkey’s request for US Patriot missile-defense batteries to be deployed on its southern border with Syria. The request was relayed last week to James Jeffrey, the American envoy for…

A familiar charade is playing out in Tehran. Ahead of the elections to the Iranian parliament next month, those political factions likely to perform poorly are preemptively blaming the US. Expectation-management is the recourse of last resort for failing politicians everywhere, and blaming the…

The Islamic Republic’s volte face on the fate of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 has tempted Iran-watchers to speculate that the tragedy could be a “Chernobyl moment” for the regime in Tehran. Implicit in this analogy is the hope that the shooting down of the jetliner foreshadows the…

It was meant to be a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the mood at a gathering of the alliance’s leaders this week in London was anything but celebratory. There was no disguising the fact that NATO is in deep — even existential — trouble. Nothing…

The full extent of the protests that erupted across Iran over the weekend is hard to gauge, not least because the regime in Tehran has shut down internet access for most of the country. That decision suggests that the regime feels more threatened by the latest demonstrations of public anger than it…

To judge by the propaganda of the Iranian regime, "the brave warriors of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had captured a Royal Navy guided-missile destroyer." Video footage shows the IRGC men rappelling down to a ship while other fearless comrades, looking on from speedboats racing…