Israel’s stunning and sophisticated June 13 attack on Iran set off a worrying 12-day escalatory spiral. Iran responded in short order with ballistic missile and drone strikes, which led to a series of tit-for-tat exchanges between the two sides. On June 21, the United States struck three key Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan, in what U.S. President Donald J.
Despite Chinese leader Xi Jinping's plans to supplant the U.S.-led international order, Beijing has been a bit player in the major conflicts consuming the globe in recent years. China's peace plan for Ukraine and Middle East diplomacy in the wake of Hamas' October 7 attack have had no impact on resolving either of those conflicts. Following the U.S.
On March 8, the United States allowed a waiver to expire that had permitted Iraq to buy Iranian electricity.
Among the central factors that led to the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad was Iran’s and Russia’s decisions to not intervene yet again to prop him up. Tehran had long used Syria as vector to project influence in the region and marshalled significant resources and manpower to keep Assad in power when the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.
Iran launched at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in a massive two-wave assault on Oct. 1, 2024. Millions of civilians sought protection in bomb shelters. The risk of a regional war mounted as Jerusalem pledged retaliation. Iran “made a big mistake – and it will pay for it,” warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of senior Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon—as well as more than 400 fighters—during the first year of the Gaza war, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians increasingly spilled across the border. The Israeli campaign against the Lebanese militia was initially conducted on fighters deployed south of the Litani River. It stopped short of attacking Beirut or the upper echelons of Hezbollah’s military, apparently calibrated to avoid sparking a full-scale war.
Since the early 21st century, the centerpiece of relations between Tehran and Beijing has been economic, largely based on trade in oil and consumer goods. China bought Iran’s oil to fuel industrialization, while it sold machinery, electronics, and appliances to Iran to expand its global marketplace. The relationship, however, has been lopsided.
Iran reported its first deaths from the new COVID-19 virus on February 19, 2020. It soon became one of the world’s early epicenters. The Health Ministry claimed that the disease had been spread by travelers between Iran’s holy city of Qom and China’s industrial center at Wuhan, where the coronavirus first broke out. The government initially rejected quarantines, which the Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi said "belong to pre-WWI — to the plague, cholera, stuff like that."
On November 27, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent nuclear scientist, was assassinated in a roadside attack about 40 miles east of Tehran. Western and Israeli intelligence had long suspected that Fakhrizadeh was the father of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program. He was often compared to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb. He kept a low profile for most of his career.
Tensions between Iran and the outside world have escalated since an attack on four tankers on May 12 near the Strait of Hormuz, which was followed by an attack on two more tankers on June 13. Both attacks occurred in the Gulf of Oman. The Persian Gulf flows through the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman. On July 4, the British Royal Navy seized an Iranian tanker carrying oil to Syria. In what seemed like a response, Iranian vessels harassed a British tanker while entering the Strait of Hormuz on July 11.
