The New Yorker

Iran's Comeback Tour
By Robin Wright
My New Yorker piece on "Iran's Comeback Tour." After four decades as a pariah nation, Tehran is being courted by both East and West. It's one of the fastest turnarounds in history. On his first tour of the Middle East, China's president pledged Saturday to work with Iran to reopen the ancient Silk road trade route, this time with high-speed trains, and generate $600 billion in trade over next decade. On Monday, Iran's president began a European tour that will include buying more than 100 Airbus planes and a visit with Pope Francis. However, the comeback tour may not be a sell-out. Iran still has a revolutionary government with all the uncertainties that entails. Big banks and businesses still nervous.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/iran-is-back-in-business?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Obama's Secret Second Channel to Iran
By Robin Wright

Fourteen months ago, President Obama authorized a top-secret, second diplomatic channel with Tehran to negotiate freedom for Americans who had disappeared or been imprisoned in Iran. It was a high-risk diplomatic gamble. The initiative grew out of nuclear negotiations, launched in the fall of 2013, between Iran and the world’s six major powers. On the margins of every session, Wendy Sherman, the top American negotiator, pressed her Iranian counterparts about the American cases. The Iranians countered with demands for the release of their citizens imprisoned in the United States for sanctions-busting crimes. More than a year of informal discussions between Sherman and her counterpart, Majid Takht Ravanchi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry official in charge of American and European affairs, led to an agreement, in late 2014, that the issue should be handled separately—but officially—through a second channel. After debate within the Administration, Obama approved the initiative. But it was so tightly held that most of the American team engaged in tortuous negotiation on Iran’s nuclear program were not told about it.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/prisoner-swap-obamas-secret-second-channel-to-iran

The New Yorker

Washington's Panda Obsession
By Robin Wright

     When I was little, I wanted a panda for my birthday. Last August 22nd, which happened to be my birthday, the National Zoo, in Washington, sent out an alert on e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook: its female panda, the gentle Mei Xiang, had gone into labor. I signed onto the zoo’s Panda Cam just in time to hear an eek-y squeal from the back stall where Mei had built her nest. It was the birth yelp of a baby boy. A four-ounce butter stick, pink-skinned and blind, slipped from his mom’s womb and slid across the floor.  

      There’s something about pandas, the world’s rarest bear, that captivates the famous, turns the powerful into putty, and wins over skeptics. In 1956, Elvis Presley travelled with a huge stuffed panda on a twenty-seven-hour train ride from New York to Memphis. On the first leg, the bear was photographed in its own seat. At night, the photographer Albert Wertheimer later recounted, the bear was strapped into the upper berth in Elvis’ compartment, its legs protruding through the webbing, as Elvis listened to acetates of his recent recordings in the lower berth. The next day, Elvis, not yet a national icon, perched the bear on his hip and used it to flirt with girls as he strolled through a passenger car.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/washingtons-panda-obsession

The New Yorker

Iran and Saudi Arabia: The Showdown
By Robin Wright

The rule of thumb in the Middle East is that diplomacy often—too often—makes progress only to be overtaken by unforeseen violence on the ground. It’s happening again. Tensions between the Islamic world’s rival powers—the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite theocracy in Iran—that erupted over the New Year’s weekend now jeopardize a string of fragile peace initiatives: Peace talks on Syria (the political complement to the military campaign against the Islamic State) are set to begin January 25th. The Iran nuclear deal was expected to be implemented this month. Iraq is trying to consolidate its first military and political gains against ISIS, which were achieved last month. And a three-week ceasefire in Yemen’s ruthless civil war collapsed on January 2nd, endangering a second round of peace talks scheduled for this month. These initiatives are essential to the international effort to reconstruct the disintegrating map of the Middle East.

       Saudi Arabia and Iran—and their allies—are pivotal players in each flashpoint. Both countries have to make concessions for diplomacy to succeed anywhere. But, on January 3rd, Riyadh abruptly severed diplomatic relations with Tehran.

Read on:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/iran-and-saudi-arabia-the-showdown-between-islams-rival-powers?intcid=mod-latest