World

It was no surprise that, after speaking in private for two hours in Northern Ireland, President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked “tense and uncomfortable,” or, as the pool report put it, “serious and unsmiling.” Not only did the meeting come on the heels of a year and a half of Russia cynically ratcheting up anti-American sentiments—and harassing Obama’s ambassador—in the country, or g

Fifty years after JFK's visit, and five since his own, Obama returns to Berlin—to a different mood.

Patient resilience has long been a characteristic of the Iranian people. In times of adversity—and the increasing authoritarianism of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards allies, combined with the corrupt and inefficient populism of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his band of brothers, has certainly been one such time—the Iranians wait. And usually, instead of challenging the foe head-on, they try to deliver a stinging blow using the limited tools that adverse times allow them.

Engineering elections in Iran, it turns out, is more difficult than what Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his allies in the Revolutionary Guards had imagined. With Friday's elections a day away, every indication is that a candidate's chances of victory is inversely correlated to their professed or perceived closeness to Khamenei. His son's father-in-law, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, pulled out when even the regime's own published polls showed him with no more than low-single-digit support. Khamenei's other favored candidate, Saeed Jalili, hitherto in charge of Iran's nuclear negotiations—and praised by sites close to Khamenei as a "living martyr" for the leg he lost in the Iran-Iraq war—has also failed to garner the kind of support the regime hoped. Even among Khamenei's closest circle of advisors, Jalili has been ridiculed for offering nothing but empty slogans.