Arash Azizi

Boston, New York

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Articles

Iran Couldn’t Avoid Talking With Trump Any Longer

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly rejected the U.S. president’s offer of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, just as he had during Trump’s first term. Tehran would not talk to this U.S. administration, Khamenei insisted. And even if it did talk, it would only do so indirectly. Talking to Washington was “not honorable,” the supreme leader claimed.
Will Iran Cut a Deal With Trump?

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei.
A Battle for the Soul of the West

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

For President Donald Trump, last month’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was “great television.” To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945. Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own.
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.
Even Iraq Wants to Leave Iran’s Axis

1 month ago | msn.com | Arash Azizi

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Even Iraq Wants to Leave Iran’s Axis

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

The Iranian regime spent decades building the Axis of Resistance, a coalition of anti-Western militias that extended Tehran’s influence deep into the Arab world. But what takes years to build can collapse seemingly overnight. Iraq is the latest country in which many leaders are attempting to move out of Iran’s orbit. Last year, the Axis rapidly slid from the seeming height of its power into terminal decline.
Why Reading Lolita in Tehran Holds Up

2 months ago | msn.com | Arash Azizi

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An Israeli Take on a Modern Iranian Classic

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir).
Iran’s Return to Pragmatism

Jan 14, 2025 | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

The Iranian presidency seems to be a cursed position. Of the eight men who have held it before the current president, five eventually found themselves politically marginalized after their term finished. Two others fell to violent deaths in office (a bomb attack in 1981, a helicopter crash in 2024). The only exception is Ali Khamenei, who went on to become the supreme leader.
RIP to the Axis of Resistance

Dec 17, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Iran’s Axis of Resistance, an informal coalition of anti-Western and anti-Israeli militias, was already having a terrible year. But the loss of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad may have dealt the knockout blow. Syria was both the organizing ground and the proof of concept for the Axis. Assad owed his throne to its armies, which helped him kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the civil war that began in 2011. Unlike other members of the Axis, Assad wasn’t an Islamist.