RealClearWorld Articles

President Trump recently urged the Iranian people to take over [their] government" once the U.S.-Israel-led campaign on Iran has ended. If only it were that easy.  The Islamic Republic has spent decades ensuring that Iran’s citizens cannot unite against it. It has intentionally divided the people and deliberately created leadership vacuums. Any movement building has been defeated through the most brutal violence.  Regime change in Iran cannot happen with a wave of a magic wand, or even with force alone. The selection of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son,...

To the people of Iran,The killing of your Supreme Leader by American and Israeli forces has shattered the illusion of permanence surrounding the Islamic Republic. Whatever one thinks of the strike, its geopolitical consequences are immediate. But the deeper question is internal. With the apex of the theocratic system suddenly removed by foreign firepower, the structure beneath it stands exposed.This is not a military moment. It is a constitutional one.I write to you as an American who has spent two decades in international development, as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from the area, and as...

 A recurring paradox in modern politics is the alliance between two ideologies that, at first glance, appear fundamentally incompatible: radical leftist movements and Islamist political movements. One emerges from secular revolutionary theories associated with figures such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin; the other from religious-political doctrines developed by thinkers like Ruhollah Khomeini. Yet history shows that these movements have repeatedly converged around shared political narratives. This “marriage” first became visible during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In...

With Russia’s alliance with Iran being well-established, it was no surprise that Russian President Vladimir Putin put out a statement after the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, expressing his condolences; calling Khamenei an “outstanding statesman” and lauding him for his contribution to the “development of friendly ties between Russia and Iran,” in Putin’s own words. In addition to these kind words to the late Supreme Leader, the Washington Post reports that Russia is also providing Iran with intelligence revealing U.S. targets,...

President Kast takes power in Chile. Rafael Lopez Aliaga leads the polling for the upcoming election in Peru. Recent wins pile up, including Costa Rica and Honduras. The political scene of Latin America moves markedly to the right, toward the United States — and away from meddling China. For years, Latin America had tilted toward China’s orbit. Beijing focused on Latin America with a massive appetite for commodities, aggressive infrastructure financing, and consistent diplomatic outreach. But that trend reverses now. Thankfully. Across the region, a new generation of conservative...

The war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran is beginning to reshape the strategic environment well beyond the Middle East. What began as a campaign aimed at Iran’s leadership and military infrastructure has already begun to affect NATO members and their installations across the wider region. Iranian retaliation has reached locations connected to Western forces and forced European governments to reassess the security of their personnel, bases, and maritime routes in the eastern Mediterranean. One of the clearest examples occurred when Iranian drones struck the British air base at...

The escalating conflict in Iran has immediate consequences for the Middle East. But its strategic ripple effects extend well beyond the Gulf. For Russia, already locked in a grinding war in Ukraine, instability in Tehran presents a complex mix of opportunity, vulnerability, and strategic distraction. At first glance, Moscow and Tehran appear closely aligned. In 2025, Russia and Iran formalized a 20-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty covering defense, energy, trade and technology. Both states face Western sanctions. Both frame their foreign policies around resistance to...

On March 8, the world will celebrate International Women’s Day under this year’s theme, “Give to Gain.” The phrase is aspirational; a call to invest in women and girls so that societies, economies, and nations grow stronger in return. But if we are serious about giving in order to gain, then we must confront an uncomfortable truth: female genital mutilation (FGM) is happening in the U.S. and it’s not being given the attention it deserves, and we are losing ground because of this failure.  International Women’s Day commemorates the social, economic,...

The United States and Israel have chosen war with Iran for the second time in just eight months, launching sweeping strikes aimed at toppling the regime. The assault once again comes amid negotiations between Washington and Tehran, raising serious questions of both U.S. sincerity in its diplomatic efforts abroad and the supposed “peace” mandate President Donald Trump has falsely claimed to support. Trump’s stated reasoning for attacking Iran continues to fluctuate between Iran’s nuclear program, missile program, support for proxies abroad, and...

Neither the Trump nor the Netanyahu administrations have articulated clear plans for how to facilitate the rapid establishment of an internally-representational, externally-nonaggressive, new government in Tehran. When the reign of the ayatollahs ends, a national governance system will be needed posthaste to lead Iran as the country attempts to simultaneously reintegrate into the global community and rebuild its domestic socioeconomics. Establishing stable authority within Iran need not be the challenge it was in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran already has underlying constitutional and...

Regimes rarely collapse in a single decisive moment. They fracture under pressure until a political opening emerges. When that moment arrives, the decisive question is not simply whether an authoritarian system has weakened, but whether an organized alternative exists capable of converting rupture into a structured democratic transition. Iran may now be entering such a moment. The ongoing U.S. and Israeli military offensive against the Islamic Republic has dramatically intensified pressure on a regime whose domestic legitimacy had already been eroding for years. Major strikes have targeted...

Within hours of the United States and Israel launching their attack on the Iranian government, allegations that the operations were illegal filled airwaves and social media feeds around the world. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed the strikes “mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” International law specialist Oona Hathaway insisted the attacks “are blatantly illegal,” while referring to an opinion article in which she reaches the same conclusion for the previous attack against Iran’s nuclear...

Morocco is emerging as a regional powerhouse central to the world’s trade network, and it’s easy to see why: its critical minerals and manufacturing have made it indispensable to China, the EU, and the U.S.   In early February, Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington. The conversation centered on building trust, responsible development, and stabilizing investment in Morocco’s critical minerals. The nation controls 70% of the world’s...

When the Taiwan legislature recently refused a large defense spending increase of $40 billion in favor of a much smaller allocation of $12 billion, many in Washington were surprised and dismayed. They should not be. Political gridlock in Taipei over defense shows there are very real fissures on the island. It illustrates an evident understanding among some in Taiwan that political accommodation with China is preferable to armed confrontation. The United States has consistently pressured the Taiwanese government to spend more on its own defense. Elbridge Colby, now the Pentagon’s...

For weeks, some external media and advocacy narratives regarding northeastern Syria were dominated by warnings of imminent massacres of ethnic groups and large-scale population displacement. These warnings appeared across Western and regional policy commentary, advocacy reports, and online analysis, framing any change in control as likely to trigger immediate communal violence and large-scale civilian flight. The current reality, in which the national government in Damascus increasingly exercises operational control, stands in sharp contrast to those predictions. Instead of the anticipated...

Now that the U.S. and Israel have crossed the threshold of war with Iran, and the apparent death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule” will inevitably be resurrected.  Caution argues, as would Powell, that if our invasion “breaks” the Iranian economy, we had best be prepared to “own” it.  We will have to engineer a recovery that provides a standard of living that at least approximates pre-war conditions, otherwise we will have set in place the conditions of another endless conflict. While we would like to believe...

Western governments have correctly identified rare earth supply chains as strategically vulnerable. Yet their policy responses have disproportionately weighted toward finance, including sovereign funds, loan guarantees, and critical minerals grants. Instead, the real deficit plaguing the West lies in processing expertise, intellectual property depth and institutional capability in rare-earth separation and downstream refinement. China’s dominance rests on decades of extraction optimization, state-supported accumulation of separation patents, embedded university–industry programs,...

In his well-received speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the reform of global institutions like the United Nations. “We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don’t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built.  But these must be reformed.  These must be rebuilt,” he stated. Indeed, the Trump administration has an opportunity to reform the United Nations, to shift UN policy away from gender ideology, diversity, equity,...

America is currently experiencing a period of heightened skepticism toward multilateral institutions. As President Trump has withdrawn the United States from 31 UN bodies that he believes operate contrary to American interests, debates about the United States’ role in the United Nations have resurfaced and become prominent in American political discourse. Some people interpret proposals to withdraw from UN bodies as efforts to preserve national sovereignty or reduce financial and political obligations. However, a critical analysis of U.S. strategic, diplomatic, and normative interests...