ایران

The Cipher Brief sat down with Matt Levitt, former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department, to discuss Hezbollah's roles in Lebanon and Syria and as a proxy for Iran. According to Levitt, despite losses in Syria, Hezbollah remains a threat to Israeli security and U.S

The United States should not let Iran define effective sanctions relief at the expense of continued implementation of nonnuclear sanctions.

The nuclear deal and the negotiations leading up to it have been a significant source of factional confrontation inside Iran over the past few years, and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

Thus far, the Obama administration has not fulfilled its pledge to deter and confront external threats to Gulf partners following the nuclear deal.

Moscow only agreed to the nuclear deal out of self-interest, and the JCPOA has allowed Russia to expand ties with Iran while positioning itself as a regional counterweight to the West.

Not enough is being done to convince Tehran that seeking nuclear weapons down the road will lead to forceful consequences, so the next administration will need to put forth a tougher declaratory policy on the issue while bolstering the deal's near-term benefits.

Left to their own devices and faced with an Iran on the march in multiple theaters, regional states have responded to the deal in an incoherent and dangerous fashion.

After years of foreign policy setbacks, Ankara is trying to mend fences with Israel, Egypt, Iran, and Russia, and the potential implications for the United States are mostly beneficial -- assuming the Turks can actually pull it off.

While the severity of the Sunni extremist threat inside Iran is debatable, the regime's recent operations against suspected terrorists highlight its pattern of exploiting sectarian sentiment to bolster its regional adventurism.