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President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
US-Iran talks to be held this weekend
On Monday, President Donald Trump said that the US has been engaged in “direct” talks with Iran over its nuclear program and said that a meeting with “very high-level” officials is set for this Saturday. That would be a sharp break from previous US-Iran talks, which have occurred mostly through intermediaries.
But Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied the “direct” aspect of these talks,confirming that the US and Iranian negotiators will meet in Oman on Saturday, but that they would remain in separate rooms as Omani diplomats carry messages back and forth.
Whatever the format, Trump made it clear that he expects progress. “If the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger,” he warned. “And I hate to say it, great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon. You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.”
While a breakthrough this weekend is unlikely, the talks suggest that both sides see an advantage in finding out whether a deal with the other side is possible.
There are other hopeful signs of a deal. In response to warnings from US officials of looming air attacks by American forces, the leaders of four of the largest Iran-backed militia groups operating in Iraq told Reuters on Monday that they were prepared to surrender their weapons to Iraqi government authorities. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has reportedly met with militia commanders and urged them to disarm, according to Iraqi state officials who requested anonymity.
The militia commanders also said that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, their prime supplier of weapons and money, had agreed to let local group leaders inside Iraq decide how best to respond to Trump’s threats.
Though these militia moves are more likely a tactical retreat than a true surrender, any move to disarm would give the Trump administration a notable foreign-policy victory without an attack. The so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a group of about 10 heavily-armed Shia militias with a total of 50,000 fighters and access to heavy weapons, including long-range missiles, has attacked both Israeli and US military targets in the past.
A child, suffering from malnutrition, is treated at Port Sudan Paediatric Centre, during a visit by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to the country, in Sudan, on Sept. 7, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Cholera spreads in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo turns to an unlikely source to boost tourism, Mass executions held in Iraq, Gunman hijacks bus in LA
430: Over 430 people have died from cholera in Sudan in the past month, according to the country’s health ministry, and the devastating civil war there is making it hard to provide treatment. Doctors Without Borders recently described the health system in Sudan as “decimated” and warned that the humanitarian response amid the cholera outbreak is “regularly obstructed by both warring parties.”
3: AC Milan, one of Italy’s top soccer teams, is reportedly in talks with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for a three-year sponsorship deal that would see the club promote the African country as a tourism destination. But there’s an ongoing war in the DRC. Vacationing in a war zone – what could go wrong? The Italian ambassador to the country was killed there just three years ago when the convoy he was traveling with was ambushed, making it no surprise that Italy currently advises people against visiting the country.
21: Iraq executed 21 people, including a woman, on Wednesday, with most reportedly charged with terrorism. Rights groups like Amnesty International have fiercely criticized Iraq for convicting people on “overly broad and vague terrorism charges,” and they have urged the Iraqi government to halt executions.
7: A bus was hijacked by a gunman in Los Angeles on Wednesday and traveled nearly seven miles before coming to a stop after police used spike strips and punctured one of the tires. One passenger reportedly died from gunshot wounds. The suspect has surrendered, but the motive remains unclear.
Russia’s last independent pollster tells me how Putin does it
How does Vladimir Putin manage to keep this up? For all the destruction he’s visited on Ukraine, his invasion has also inflicted so much damage on Russia.
There are the financial and economic costs. There’s the diplomatic isolation. There’s the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who’d rather bet on a future abroad than support Putin’s war for the past at home.
But above all, there are the dead. The Kremlin doesn’t announce casualty figures, but a running tally by the BBC and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona estimates that at least 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
To put that in perspective, it’s triple the number of Soviets killed in the USSR’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan, often described as the “Kremlin’s Vietnam.”
In fact, it surpasses the number of Soviet and Russian troops killed in the entire period between 1945 and 2022, a period that also includes the Kremlin’s hamfisted and initially disastrous bid to suppress Chechen separatists and jihadists in the 1990s. To put it in American terms, those 45,000 dead would amount to 100,000 flag-draped caskets in the United States.
And yet, there’s hardly been a peep from Russian society.
To find out why, I sent a note to Lev Gudkov in Moscow. Gudkov is the academic director of the Levada Center, Russia’s last remaining independent pollster. I last saw him in person in 2018, at his messy office on Nikolskaya Street – a ritzy pedestrian boulevard – that’s just a five-minute walk from the Kremlin, which has long considered Levada a “foreign agent.”
At 77, Lev has the weary, knowing demeanor of a man who has spent his life asking questions in a society that is increasingly wary of answering them.
The Kremlin has pressured Levada over the years but always seemed to allow it to continue its work. Even autocrats, after all, need to know what their people are comfortable saying to strangers.
“The people don’t know how many are dead and wounded,” he told me. More than 60% of Russians get their news primarily from state-controlled TV, which will shout at you about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, perverts who run Europe, or cats thrown from Russian trains – but will not tell you about the bodybags coming home from Ukraine.
People who do speak out about casualties are arrested, harassed or, on occasion, driven to suicide, which is what happened this week to a hawkish military blogger who suggested Russia had lost 16,000 troops in its recent campaign for a single Ukrainian town.
Another problem, to adapt a Vietnam-era protest line, is that the Russians dying in Ukraine “ain’t no Gazprom executive’s son.”
“The funerals are held by individual families,” says Gudkov, “and its overwhelmingly conscripts from marginalized social groups who don’t have the power to mobilize.”
A look at the casualty map bears this out. Young men in remote and relatively poor Russian provinces like Tuva or Buryatia, for example, are up to 45 times as likely to die as their counterparts in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
All of this makes perfect sense. Russians don’t know about the casualties, face huge consequences for trying to find out, and are victim to the propaganda mill that keeps support for Putin above 80% and approval of his war not far behind.
But blaming this sort of collective delusion simply on a Very Bad Autocrat™ is too easy. The reality is that it can happen in democracies too, and it does.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, I looked at a poll that showed 72% of the population approving of their government’s decision to launch a disastrous, unprovoked war.
But it wasn’t from Russia. It was from the US, and it was taken in 2003 to gauge popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
Say what you will about the failure of mainstream media to question the WMD narrative – and there is lots to say – but the US was, and is, a pluralistic paradise compared to today’s Russia.
But even so, it took four whole years of debacle in Iraq for a majority of Americans to finally decide that the invasion was a “bad decision.”
The emergence of social media in the years since has hardly helped. Nearly 20% of Americans today say pop star Taylor Swift was engaged in a Deep State psyop to sway the next election, while a third of Americans still think the last one was “stolen.” And as many as half of Hillary Clinton’s voters once believed Trump’s victory was the result of Russian tampering with vote tallies. None of the above is true.
The point is that you don’t actually have to live under the sway of a late-stage autocrat who controls the airwaves to believe bad, stupid, or crazy things.
A badly contaminated news environment can in some ways be as bad as a tightly controlled one.
President Joe Biden attends the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
US strikes back after deadly drone attack
Nearly a week after a drone attack killed three American service members at a small US base in Jordan, the US responded late Friday by launching strikes against more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon blames the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq for the deadly drone attack.
The strikes hit command and intel centers and storage facilities affiliated with the Quds Force, a unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and local Iran-supported militias.
Tehran condemned the US strikes, calling them a “strategic error.” Baghdad said the attacks killed at least 16 people, including civilians. Syria, meanwhile, criticized the US and said the attacks would “fuel conflict in the Middle East in a very dangerous way.” The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog, said the strikes in Syria had killed 23 pro-Iran fighters, but no civilians.
The strikes came hours after President Joe Biden, first lady Dr. Jill Biden, and US Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin attended the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
Biden had threatened to deliver a “tiered response” over time, so these strikes are expected to be just the first salvo of a broader campaign. We’ll be watching for Washington's next moves — and for any signs of escalation in the form of responses from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
Tensions between the US and Iran have reached historic heights amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Will the US and Iran go to war?
The White House on Wednesday blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of militias backed by Iran, for the Sunday drone strike that killed three US service members in Jordan. It's only a matter of time before the US retaliates, and the White House signaled this would occur in stages.
In anticipation of this, Iran on Wednesday warned Washington there would be a “strong response” to “any attack on the country, its interests, and nationals under any pretexts.”
Will Iran make good on its threat? If the US strikes Iranian assets in the coming days, Tehran will likely feel compelled to respond.
But any retaliatory measures that Tehran ultimately takes will probably be calibrated to avoid a full-blown conflict – such as attacks by proxy groups, its preferred method of making problems for its adversaries. Depending on the scale of the US approach, it’s also possible that Iran could target US assets in the region or potentially even US forces – as it did in the wake of a 2020 US drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani.
War, huh, yeah. What is it good for? Neither Washington nor Tehran wants a full-blown war. For one, the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas already has the region on edge. Iran also can't match up with the US in a conventional war. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is running for reelection this year and can’t afford to get the US entangled in a war that would undoubtedly drive up oil prices.
Along these lines, there is still hope for de-escalation, but the situation remains tense.
Iran thrives on Arab "misery," says expert Karim Sadjadpour
Whether it's Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, how much control does Iran have over its proxy forces? According to Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Karim Sadjadpour, Iran tends not to micromanage these groups. Iran may not typically give direct, day-to-day instructions but instead defer to these leaders to make their own decisions. However, Sadjadpour adds, on a broader level, Iran wields significant influence as they are often the primary source of funding and military support for these groups.
More importantly, when it comes to the people under the control of these proxy forces, whether they be Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Lebanese, Iran doesn't care about their wellbeing. Sadjadpour emphasizes that we must distinguish between Iran being anti-Israel and genuinely pro-Palestinian, for instance. He recalls a conversation with an Iranian official who suggested that Iran benefits from the instability and conflict in the region, as it furthers their interests.
"Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous" Sadjadpour tells Ian Bremmer in the latest episode of GZERO World. " And so in some ways, the more these populations experience conflict, whether it's, you know, conflict amongst themselves or direct conflict with Israel, Iran has tended to benefit from the despair of these Arab populations."
Watch the full interview: What’s Iran’s next move?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war ›
- US braces for Iran-backed blowback ›
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- Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable? ›
- What’s Iran’s next move? ›
- US-Iran tensions complicate Biden's Middle East strategy - GZERO Media ›
What’s Iran’s next move?
Remember that famous line from Bill Clinton’s campaign staffer James Carville back in 1992?: “It’s the economy, stupid!” As Israel’s war with Hamas escalates, it brings to mind—in a nasally Louisiana accent—the phrase “It’s Iran, stupid.”
Because, whether it’s the dizzying arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in southern Lebanon pointed at Israel, or the Houthi drones targeting Israel from Yemen, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities in Eastern Syria-, one thing is clear: all roads lead back to the Ayatollah. And yet, there’s a big difference between skirmishes with proxy forces and an all-out US/Israel war with Iran.
"Iran feels particularly emboldened at the moment," says Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, who joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. "Whether it's going after Israel via proxies or going after the US via their proxies. And they may be difficult to deter because they may either correctly read the situation that the US is not interested in a conflict, or they may misread it. And that could lead us to more direct conflict with Iran."
So how close is Iran to waging war on Israel, and its Western allies? Iran is, after all, a rogue nation well on its way to developing a nuclear weapon. And that’s an escalation that no one, including Iranian leadership, wants to see happen.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- Israel at war: How will regional actors respond? ›
- Ian Explains: How Israel & Iran went from friends to enemies ›
- US braces for Iran-backed blowback ›
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war ›
- The proxy war (still) raging in Yemen ›
- Israel's war in Gaza has emboldened Iran, says Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Iran thrives on Arab "misery", says expert Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: How Hezbollah became so powerful in Lebanon - GZERO Media ›
- GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: 2024's top 10 most quotable moments - GZERO Media ›
A Houthi militant attends a parade held by newly recruited Houthi fighters in Sanaa, Yemen, January 1, 2017.
US braces for Iran-backed blowback
As Israel prepares to launch its widely expected invasion of the Gaza Strip, Washington is bracing for blowback against American troops from proxy groups supported by Iran. The US says it is now reinforcing its air defenses, naval presence, aircraft, and troop numbers in the region.
Iran has spent years constructing a powerful network of proxy groups, which include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, an array of militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In recent weeks, at least two dozen US troops stationed in Iraq and Syria have been wounded in a fresh wave of rocket and drone attacks attributed to Iran-backed groups, and last week US forces intercepted Houthi-launched missiles headed toward Israel. There are currently more than 30,000 US troops in the region. Most are based in the Persian Gulf monarchies and Iraq.
So far, both Iran and Israel have shown little appetite for a direct conflict, but proxy groups are a way for Tehran to indirectly harry the US and Israel.
The trouble is: Proxies are sometimes hard to control. If one of these groups goes further than Iran intends, a wider war could flare up fast.
- Ian Explains: How Israel & Iran went from friends to enemies - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable? - GZERO Media ›
- What’s Iran’s next move? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel's war in Gaza has emboldened Iran, says Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Iran thrives on Arab "misery", says expert Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- US-Iran tensions complicate Biden's Middle East strategy - GZERO Media ›