Eli Lake

Why Iran’s Presidential Election Is a Sham

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…

How China Can Quash the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory

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…

Why Iran Negotiations Will Go Nowhere

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…

China’s Claims of Exoneration on Covid Ring Hollow

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…

Biden and Instability in the Middle East

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…

Biden’s First Foreign Policy Blunder Could Be on Iran

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…

The Dark Side of Going Solar

In an energy sector dominated for more than a century by polluters, the relatively small solar-power industry has been the good guy. Now it has a darker side. To be clear, using silicone cells to trap the sun’s rays and turn them into fuel is still better for the climate than burning fossil…

Iran Between Clash and Response

Ever since a US missile killed Iran’s most important general almost a year ago, the regime has been vowing revenge, with the latest threat coming just last week. Yet aside from a barrage of missile strikes on an Iraqi base last January, causing traumatic brain injuries for US soldiers stationed…

On the Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel Gets a Vote

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…

Pardoning Snowden Would Backfire on Trump

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…