U.S.-Iran Relations after the U.S. Election: Will Anything Change?
Barbara Slavin
Atlantic Council
Early in his administration, President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA (the 6-country agreement with Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear program) and ramped up U.S. economic sanctions on the Tehran regime. Trump signaled that in a second term he would be willing to explore negotiating with Iran to impose a wider array of prohibited actions in return for sanctions relief. On the other hand, former Vice President Biden appeared ready to commit a Biden administration to rejoin the JCPOA. Although the U.S. election may still be unresolved, our November speaker—returning to TCFR for the third time–will examine the available policy options.
Barbara Slavin is the director of the Future of Iran Initiative and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington University and a columnist for Al-Monitor.com, a website devoted to news from and about the Middle East. The author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation (2007), she is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS, and C-SPAN.
A career journalist, Slavin previously served as assistant managing editor for world and national security of the Washington Times, senior diplomatic reporter for USA TODAY, Cairo correspondent for the Economist, and as an editor at the New York Times Week in Review. She has covered such key foreign policy issues as the US-led war on terrorism, policy toward “rogue” states, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has traveled to Iran nine times.
Slavin also served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she wrote Bitter Friends, and as a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace, where she researched and wrote the report Mullahs, Money and Militias: How Iran Exerts Its Influence in the Middle East. She has a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in Russian Language and Literature.
For background attendees may wish to read: