Robin Wright's Blog
Tehran’s Promise
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker)Iran’s revolutionaries are aging. Most are in their late fifties, sixties, or seventies. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, turned seventy-six this month. More than sixty per cent of Iran’s eighty million people are under the age of thirty-five. A baby-boom…
Javad Zarif on Iran’s Post-Deal Future
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker)The long slog of diplomacy with Iran—a pariah nation since its 1979 revolution—was always about more than the bomb. It was about the return of the world’s eighteenth-largest country—and its vast military, population, and consumer base—at a time when the Middle East…
An Iran Deal, At Last
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker)After nineteen days of marathon negotiations and four missed deadlines, Iran and the world’s six major powers announced a nuclear deal in Vienna this morning. The exhaustive and elusive diplomacy—sustained by an unsettling combination of Twizzlers, gelato, string…
The Nuclear Deal’s Adversaries Back Home
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker) Campaigns against a deal are already in full swing in both Washington and Tehran. If an agreement eventually emerges, both parties will have to sell it to constituencies that remain skeptical because of the even more tortured history between the two countries—…
The War that Haunts Iran’s Negotiators
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker) The historic nuclear diplomacy taking place in Vienna’s elegant Coburg Palace has roots in a gritty war between Iran and Iraq that ended more than a quarter of a century ago. Iran suffered more than a hundred and fifty thousand dead between 1980 and 1988. In…
“Madam Secretary” and the Real Iran Deal
An American flag was flown in Tehran last weekend--and, in a first, wasn't set on fire. My piece in @NewYorker. http://t.co/zfDMZeJHQD— Robin Wright (@wrightr) May 6, 2015 In a new article for The New Yorker, Robin Wright reports that officials involved in nuclear talks say that diplomacy is…
The Test in Tikrit
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker) “Victory [in Tikrit] will not be decided on the battlefield. More important to the ultimate success of the campaign will be how Baghdad proceeds politically in Saddam’s home town—both in creating a climate where the Sunnis will not feel defeated and in using…
Iran's Dinner Diplomacy
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker) Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, did not shake hands with Barack Obama at the United Nations this week, a year after their celebrated cell-phone chat. The two men didn’t even pass each other in the hallway. But Rouhani did give a quiet dinner at his…
Iran's Dissidents, Released But Not Freed
Robin Wright(Excerpt from The New Yorker) Rouhani’s victory, an upset, spawned great expectations of change. A pragmatic centrist, he campaigned on the promise of “hope and prudence.” After the election, in a series of speeches and tweets, he pledged new freedoms and challenged past…
Singing Amy Winehouse in Tehran
Robin Wright (for The New Yorker) For decades, both before and after his 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini railed against “Westoxication”—the poisoning of Iran’s Islamic society by Western culture. The new theocracy banned everything from music and dancing to modern art. Tehran’s National…