The United States, Iran and the Middle East's New “Cold War”
The relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran both shapes and is shaped by a new Middle Eastern “Cold War”. The United States and the Islamic Republic should transcend the prospects for hegemonial conflict or strategic standoff and seek a fundamental realignment of their relations, along the lines of the realignment in relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China that took place during President Richard Nixon's tenure in the White House. The article examines the imperatives for a comprehensive and strategic realignment of US–Iranian relations from the standpoint of Iranian interests and foreign policy concepts as well as from an American perspective. It also evaluates the actual prospects for US–Iranian rapprochement.
Learning From a Troubled Experience – Transatlantic Lessons from the Nuclear Standoff with Iran
With the US eventually embracing the European-devised ‘dual track’ approach comprising both sanctions and incentives, the transatlantic partners have currently reached a remarkable level of convergence on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear conundrum. Although EU--US unity might not be enough to solve the dispute, the experience of transatlantic cooperation on Iran offers some important lessons. It shows that strategic convergence between the transatlantic partners, or lack thereof, has a considerable impact on the way a crisis unfolds in an area in which both parties have a stake. It highlights the added value represented by European/EU political and economic assets in a situation in which US military options are both unlikely to have the desired effect and at grave risk of backlash. Finally, it sets an important precedent for a specific option for intra-EU and EU--US cooperation – the contact or lead group – that seems to suit the emerging multipolar world better than other, more institutionalised methods.
Struggles for Visibility
This article addresses the ways in which terrorists are rendered visible in the news media. By studying images used in coverage of terrorists, the article focuses on the visual construction of this figure, which symbolizes the public’s notion of the “enemy”, in terms of specific attacks and the general threat thereof as well as terrorist actors, networks, and ideologies. The article takes its point of departure in the assumption that two visual forms are prevalent for representing terrorists in the news media, “surveillance representations” and “self-representations”. Based on this assumption, the article is guided by a principal research question, namely: How are terrorists made visible in the news media through surveillance representations and self-representations and what are the prevalent genres for visually representing terrorist actors? The article draws on a theoretical framework concerning the news media’s propensity to personalize the terrorist and the mediated visibility of terrorists. Empirically, the article is based on a quantitative content analysis of coverage of terrorism by Danish public service broadcasters DR and TV2 in 2016 to provide an overview of the proportions between surveillance representations and self-representations and develop a typology of the most widespread genres: ID photography, surveillance footage, selfies and similar, and private snapshots.