Eli Lake

When Iran is scheduled to hold its presidential election, Narges Mohammadi will be staying home. One of her country’s most courageous human-rights activists, she views the upcoming vote as a sham. “The principle of absolute jurisprudence has invalidated all the principles of the Iranian…

What a difference a year makes. In 2020, discussing the hypothesis that Covid-19 originated in a Chinese lab could get your video yanked from YouTube. Many journalists dismissed such talk as a conspiracy theory, and many scientists insisted it was fake science. Now these assurances are falling…

Senator Marsha Blackburn has not devoted much of her time in office to Iran policy. But this week the Tennessee Republican offered some clarity on the issue when she introduced a bill aimed at preventing President Joe Biden from returning the US to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “It’s time for…

The World Health Organization’s report on the origins of Covid is a whitewash. Don’t take my word for it: Listen to what the WHO’s director-general had to say. In his briefing to member states on Tuesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the report’s study of the hypothesis that the Covid-19…

Since President Joe Biden took office, Iran’s regional proxies have been busy. This month alone, Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed credit for a drone attack against Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport; one of the most prominent critics of Hezbollah, the journalist Lokman Slim, was found murdered in his car in…

President Joe Biden has done a good job so far of calming the anxieties of allies that the US will rush into negotiations to re-enter the flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Appointing Robert Malley as special envoy to Iran could change that. On Iran, other Biden advisers have been reassuring…

When asked when the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan might end, retired General David Petraeus would deploy a useful quip. “The enemy gets a vote,” he would say, meaning that both sides need to agree to stop fighting. There is a corollary to Petraeus’s adage that is relevant not to war but to peace…

Before Donald Trump was president, he often referred to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who divulged massive secrets to the press about the American surveillance state, as a spy and a traitor. Now Trump is thinking about issuing him a pardon. It is a reckless idea…