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The U.S. Congress has struck a deal to send President Donald Trump a bill that could limit his power to lift sanctions against Russia.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker said he reached an agreement with leaders in the House of Representatives to act on their version of the legislation, passed Tuesday in a 419-to-3 vote. It includes sanctions onNorth Korea that Corker previously said could hold up the bill. The original Senate bill addressed only Iran and Russia and passed that chamber by 98-2 last month.

The Senate will move to approve the Iran and Russia sanctions it originally passed six weeks ago, as well as the North Korea sanctions developed by the House, Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said in a statement. Going forward, the House has committed to expeditiously consider and pass enhancements to the North Korea language, which multiple members of the Senate hope to make in the very near future.

Passage would force Trump to either sign away part of his authority for unilateral action on sanctions against Russia or veto a bill that appears to have enough support to override an attempt to block it from becoming law.

He may sign the sanctions exactly the way they are or he may veto the sanctions and negotiate an even tougher deal against the Russians, White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci said of the president in an interview with CNN Thursday.

Russian relations are a sensitive topic for the Trump administration, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a special counsel in the Justice Department, and congressional committees are investigating connections between the presidents campaign and the Kremlin. Emails published by Trumps son show that members of his family and inner circle met with Russians in the run-up to last years election.

Read More: Russia Ponders Its Limited Options to Strike Back at Sanctions

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Taking a tough stance on Russia gives Republicans something to talk about as they head back to their districts for August recess after months of squabbling over health-care proposals and failure to produce a draft of their tax plan. The House is scheduled to leave Washington after this week, and the Senate has two more weeks to tackle its backlog of nominations and legislation, including this bill.

Threats of retaliation from Russia were almost immediate, following the Houses approval of this bill on Tuesday.

The sanctions are pretty sad from the viewpoint of Russian-American relations and prospects for developing them, and no less depressing from the perspective of international law and international trade, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday on a conference call. Russian President Vladimir Putin will decide on a response if the bill becomes law, he said.

Trump will likely sign the law because hes a prisoner of Congress and anti-Russian hysteria, Alexei Pushkov, a senator in Russias upper house of parliament, said on Twitter. The sanctions are a new stage of confrontation, he said.

The Senates original bill focused on Iran sanctions that were modeled after executive orders from previous administrations. The Russia part was later added in an amendment.

That bill was sent to the House before Trump met Putin at the Group of 20 summit earlier this month, but Republican leaders said they couldnt hold a vote that week due to procedural concerns. Officials from the Treasury and State departments met with a bipartisan group of House lawmakers to oppose the provision allowing lawmakers to block the presidents decision to lift sanctions.

The delay then gave time for companies to scale up their lobbying against parts of the bill, including a provision that would have restricted participation in international projects with even small Russia participation. That measure was changed last week to apply to only ventures with a 33 percent stake from Russian firms.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy also insisted in including North Korea sanctions as a way to force the Senate to vote on a bill the House passed by a large margin months ago. Corkers statement about an agreement on this measure resolves concerns about further delays.

With assistance by Stepan Kravchenko

Link:
Deal Struck on Russia-Iran Sanctions Bill Curbing Trump's Power - Bloomberg

Earlier this month, North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable (ICBM), capable of reaching Alaska. It is believed that Pyongyang now has enough nuclear material for up to 30 nuclear weapons, missiles that can easily range U.S. bases and allies in Asia, and, in a couple of years, it will possess an ICBM capable of holding at risk the continental United States. This would make North Korea only the third U.S. adversary (after Russia and China) with the ability to threaten nuclear war against the United States and its allies.

If we are not careful, Iran may be next.

The North Korean nuclear crisis began in the 1990s. At the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but international inspectors immediately found discrepancies in North Koreas declarations. Washington suspected Pyongyang of harboring a secret program to reprocess plutonium for the production of nuclear weapons. (Along with uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing is one of two methods to produce nuclear fuel for either nuclear reactors, or for nuclear weapons.)

President Bill Clintons administration prepared a military strike on North Koreas nuclear reactor, but the operation was called off due to hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough. Republicans in Congress derided the Clinton administrations naivety for its engagement with a nuclear-seeking totalitarian regime, but a deal was eventually struck. Under the 1994 Agreed Framework North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for economic aid and other benefits. Some of the deals proponents argued that the details of the agreement did not really matter, however, because it was only a matter of time before the Kim regime in North Korea fell, solving the problem for us.

We now know that North Korea cheated on the agreement almost from day one, launching a secret uranium-enrichment program with the help of sensitive nuclear assistance from Pakistan.

The Bush administration confronted North Korea with its suspicions in 2002, setting off a decade of bipartisan policy failures. Bush and Obama increased sanctions and engaged in futile negotiations, but it was not enough.

In October 2006, North Korea conducted its first of six nuclear tests. Since that time, it has conducted over 70 missile tests, including 17 this year. Some take comfort that some of these tests are failures, but practice makes perfect. With every test, successful or not, North Korea further ensconces itself in the nuclear club.

There were flickerings of renewed diplomacy and even a couple of agreements. In 2007, the six parties agreed to an action plan for North Korean denuclearization. And in February 2012, there was a Leap Day deal. But both unraveled in a spectacular fashion. The Leap Day deal, for example, prohibited missile tests, but just weeks after the agreement was signed, North Korea conducted a satellite launch, scuttling the accord. (Recall Sputnik: The technology required to launch a satellite into space is exactly the same needed to launch an ICBM.)

Of course, hopes of regime change did not materialize, and Kim Jong Un is the third generation in the Kim family to rule the Hermit Kingdom with an iron fist.

President Donald Trump assumed office amid a bipartisan consensus that North Korea should now be a foremost national-security priority and the administration has conducted a comprehensive review that will leave no options off the table.

It is likely that Trumps strategy will contain two key pillars. First, Washington will seek to increase diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on North Korea with the goal of forcing Pyongyang to the negotiating table and persuading them to limit and then roll back their nuclear and missile program. Recent moves in this direction include secondary sanctions on Chinese firms and banks doing business with the North. Second, realizing that this could be a difficult and lengthy task but that serious threats exist in the here and now, the United States will take steps to defend itself and its allies. This will include the deployment of missile defenses, such as the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea. It will also include the development of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to track North Koreas nuclear assets and offensive strike capabilities to make sure that if North Korea uses a nuclear weapon, it will not be permitted to use a second or a third.

This is not a great set of options, but it is better than the alternatives. I remain hopeful, but others insist that the game is over. They claim we need to learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, despite the fact that several consecutive U.S. presidents have declared that a nuclear North Korea is unacceptable.

***

The Iranian nuclear crisis began in the 1990s when Tehran cheated on its NPT commitments and began a secret uranium-enrichment program with the help of Pakistan. The program was revealed in 2002, leading to over a decade of increased sanctions, unproductive negotiations, and an ever-expanding Iranian uranium-enrichment and missile program. Israel threatened military action to destroy Irans nuclear facilities and President Barack Obama declared all options on the table, but, once again the prospect of a diplomatic resolution proved irresistible. In 2015, a deal was struck and the Obama administration hailed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as one of its crowning achievements.

Unlike the Agreed Framework, however, which prohibited North Korea from making nuclear fuel altogether, the JCPOA gives Irans uranium enrichment program an international stamp of approval. The deal places limits on Iranian enrichment, but those restrictions begin to expire after 10 years (or roughly eight years from last week).

Some of the deals proponents argue that we should not worry about these sunset clauses because Iran will be a fundamentally different country when the deal expires. Years of cooperation with the West and integration in the international economy under the terms of the deal, they argue, will help topple the mullahs and usher to power a more reasonable, and possibly even a pro-Western and democratic, government. Hope springs eternal, but we have been wish-casting for democratic uprisings in Iran and North Korea for many years, and neither appears close to becoming Switzerland any time soon.

Few experts expect this deal to resolve the Iranian nuclear threat. In a recent workshop in Washington, D.C., several other specialists and I (including those who had favored and opposed the deal) forecasted the future of the accord. We all assessed that Irans ultimate goal is to have its cake and eat it too: sanctions relief and a robust nuclear and missile program. All but one of us believed that Iran would cheat on the deal before it expires. The only one who believed the deal would endure reasoned that the mullahs had every incentive to abide by the accord because it was such a sweetheart deal. They can revitalize their economy with a decade of sanctions relief and then recommence their march to the bomb once the limits expire. In short, none of us were optimistic.

Moreover, the deal does not cover Irans ballistic-missile program. Iran has the most sophisticated ballistic-missile program in the Middle East. The Obama administration made a strategic decision to exclude ballistic missiles from negotiations because they thought including them would have been too hard. Iran has conducted several ballistic-missile tests since the nuclear deal went into effect. It now possesses medium-range ballistic missiles capable of ranging the Middle East (including Israel) and Southeastern Europe. And earlier this year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency estimated that Iran could have the ability to deploy an operational ICBM by 2020.

We are in a tough spot, but, unlike in North Korea, we do have the ability to stop Iran from going nuclear. As an adviser to then-presidential candidate Marco Rubio, I recommended tearing up the Iran deal on day one. That moment has passed. At present, I believe the best we can do is to do to Iran what Iran is doing to us: Abide by the strict terms of the deal, but compete in every other area not covered by the deal. The Trump administration should ratchet up economic pressure on the still-economically-vulnerable clerical regime: new ballistic-missile tests, new sanctions; new human-rights abuses, new sanctions. We should also seek to push back on Irans malign influence in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon.

What is the ultimate purpose of this increased pressure? The Trump administration is still completing its Iran-policy review. Some argue that we should use the increased pressure to force Iran back to the table and seek to increase the limits on the sunset clause to 25 or 50 years.

This might be worthwhile. Or, like the previous deals with North Korea and Iran, renegotiations might prove counterproductive. I am a political scientist by training. Political science is not physics. We dont have many valid covering laws. But one thing we are pretty sure we know is that autocracies are less likely than democracies to sign international agreements, and when they do, they are more likely to cheat. But we never seem to learn our lesson. North Korea cheated on the agreed framework and several follow-up accords, Russia is currently violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and I would not bet my life that the JCPOA will die a natural death.

Yet, still some will argue for continued diplomacy with the Islamic Republic. Indeed, many critics initially scoffed at Trumps calls for renegotiating of the Iran deal, but today even E.U. officials and Democrats in Washington are calling for additional negotiations, which is a distinction without a difference.

Other experts in Washington have made a renewed press for an explicit policy of regime change in Iran, not through military force, but through increased pressure on the mullahs and increased support to opposition groups.

Regardless of the path we choose, we must be absolutely clear that we are willing to do whatever it takes to stop Iran from acquiring enough nuclear material for even a single nuclear weapon. If and when Tehran cheats on the accord or the limits expire, we will snap back sanctions per the terms of the JCPOA (although this admittedly is a thin reed). And, if necessary, we are willing to use force if necessary to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.

The JCPOA put us in a bad spot and we are left with few good options. But, fortunately, we still have alternatives to living with another North Korea, but this time in the volatile Middle East.

***

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Matthew Kroenig is an Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government at Georgetown and a Senior Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council. He formerly worked as a special adviser on defense policy and strategy for Iran in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is the author of A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat.

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Matthew Kroenig - Tablet Magazine

Since his brother and father were arrested and imprisoned while visiting Iran nearly two years ago, Babak Namazi has been trying to persuade the U.S. government to step up its fight for their freedom.

Both inmates 45-year-old Siamak Namazi and 81-year-old Baquer Namazi are Iranian American dual nationals who were convicted of espionage in a secret trial last year and are now serving 10-year sentences in Tehrans Evin Prison, notorious for its harsh conditions.

You always think the worst and it paralyzes me, said Babak Namazi.

Now it appears that the familys quest for their release is gaining traction.

The U.S. House passed a bill Wednesday calling for Iran to release all U.S. citizens and legal residents being held for political purposes.

The White House had already started to elevate the issue. Last week, it threatened new and serious consequences if Iran did not release all imprisoned U.S. citizens. That prompted Iran to call for the U.S. to release Iranians it is holding, suggesting to some experts that Iran is willing to negotiate a trade.

For Iran, a prisoner swap would resolve a problem of their making, said Reza Marashi, research director for the National Iranian American Council. Iran doesnt have the upper hand when it unjustly detains Americans. Iran needs to resolve this so that a bad situation doesnt get worse.

It is unclear where the Trump administration stands on the idea of an exchange. The last prisoner swap occurred in January 2016 under the Obama administration when four Iranian American dual nationals were freed in exchange for the release of seven Iranians. The exchange was seen as a sign of good faith in the wake of a deal to monitor Irans nuclear program.

Siamak Namazi was rumored to be among the Americans who would be freed, but his release never materialized.

His brother said that engagement with the Trump administration was slow at first, but that it has improved in recent months.

Last month I left a meeting very confident that the case of my family has become a top priority for the Trump administration, said Babak Namazi, who testified alongside relatives of other prisoners on Tuesday before a congressional foreign affairs subcommittee.

At least four Americans are imprisoned or missing in Iran.

This month, Iran sentenced Xiyue Wang, a 37-year-old Chinese American student at Princeton, for spying. Robert Levinson, a 69-year-old former FBI agent, went missing in Iran in 2007, and his whereabouts are unknown.

There are also two U.S. permanent residents detained in Iran. Karan Vafadari, who owns an art gallery in Tehran, was arrested last July. Nizar Zakka, an information technology expert originally from Lebanon, is also believed to have been detained in Iran since 2015.

In addition, Gholamrez Reza Shahini, an Iranian American dual citizen, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in October for national security crimes but was released on bail and is under house arrest in Iran, according to family members.

The issue of jailed Americans in Iran has been a sensitive subject in U.S.-Iranian relations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In recent years, Iranian hard-liners have used the arrests of Americans to undermine the efforts of President Hassan Rouhanis government to improve relations with the West, experts said.

The Trump administrations threats on the issue of imprisoned Americans follow the imposition of U.S. sanctions last week on 18 entities and individuals connected to Irans ballistic missile program, military procurement and Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the powerful hard-line security and military organization whose members are believed to have jailed the Namazis and other Americans.

The Iranian regime continues to detain U.S. citizens and other foreigners on fabricated national-security-related charges, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the day the sanctions were announced.

President Trump had made it clear to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that "bringing Americans home" from overseas detention was an issue of huge concern and an administration priority, a senior State Department official told reporters Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official would not say how any negotiations would take place.

Iranian officials have intensified their rhetoric on the issue and this week started releasing names of its nationals who it says the United States has unlawfully detained, or requested its allies to detain.

Recently a number of Iranians in various countries, at the request of the U.S., were arrested on the baseless claims of circumventing sanctions, said Abbas Araghchi, Irans deputy foreign minister, according to an article published Monday by Raja News, an affiliate of Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The article also lists the names of 12 Iranians who were apparently detained in the U.S. and elsewhere, including some who were released during the prisoner swap with the U.S. in January 2016.

On a visit to the U.S. last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made similar claims during an event at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. He said that an Iranian woman who is two months pregnant was arrested a few weeks ago in Australia, along with an Iranian national living in Spain and another in Germany.

Im not saying that its tit for tat, but Im saying that we need to address this humanitarian problem from a humanitarian perspective and not from a political perspective, Zarif said. And Im certainly ready to do all it takes on my side to help reside this humanitarian problem.

The Namazi family is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Siamak Namazi, who was visiting relatives in Iran, was arrested there in October 2015. In February 2016, his father traveled there to seek his release and was arrested.

According to Babak Namazi, his brother, a businessman, has been held for most of the time in solitary confinement. Their father, a retired official with the United Nations Childrens Fund, has lost 30 pounds and twice been hospitalized.

Babak Namazi said he fears his father will die.

I continue to urge the Trump administration to do everything possible to bring them home. We are literally running out of time, he said.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report. melissa.etehad@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @melissaetehad

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Trump administration intensifies demands for Iran to release US prisoners - Los Angeles Times

Two enemies of America are poised for upcoming rocket launches, two senior U.S. officials told Fox News, with another North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile launch expected as soon as Wednesday night and Iran on the verge of sending its own vehicle into space.

Iran's Simorgh space-launch vehicle is believed to be carrying a satellite, marking the second time in more than a year that Tehran has attempted to put an operational satellite into orbit -- something the Islamic Republic has never done successfully, according to one of the officials who has not authorized to discuss a confidential assessment.

Iran's last space launch in April 2016 failed to place a satellite into orbit, the official said.

The intelligence community is currently monitoring Iran's Semnan launch center, located about 140 miles east of Tehran, where officials say the "first and second stage airframes" have been assembled on a launch pad and a space launch is expected "at any time," according to the official.

Just days after President Trump took office, Iran conducted its first ballistic missile test under the new administration, prompting the White House to put Tehran "on notice." Since then there have been other ballistic missile and cruise missile tests, including one from a midget submarine in early May -- a type of submarine used by both Iran and North Korea.

North Korea and Iran have long been accused of sharing missile technology.

"The very first missiles we saw in Iran were simply copies of North Korean missiles," said Jeffrey Lewis, a missile proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. "Over the years, we've seen photographs of North Korean and Iranian officials in each other's countries, and we've seen all kinds of common hardware."

U.S. officials are skeptical, however, that North Korea and Iran are coordinating their rocket and missile launches.

While Iran insists its space program is for peaceful purposes, officials have long said any components used to put a satellite into orbit can also be used for building an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.

U.N. resolution 2231 says Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology, according to the text of the agreement which went into effect days after the landmark Iran nuclear agreement that was engineered by the Obama administration.

Critics have said that language was purposefully watered down to called upon instead of a more restrictive phrase because Russia intervened.

In a sign Congress is losing patience with both Iran and North Korea, the House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed (419-3) new sanctions targeting Iran, North Korea and Russia, due in part to Iran and North Korea's missile programs.

News of Iran's pending rocket launch coincides with more evidence North Korea is also preparing to test another ICBM, perhaps as early as Wednesday night -- a date that would coincide with the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the fighting in the Korean War, but technically not the war itself.

U.S. officials say North Korea has recently moved fueling equipment and trucks to a launch pad near the town of Kusong, near North Korea's border with China and about 100 miles north of the capital city of Pyongyang.

North Korea has a history of conducting missile tests on historic dates.

North Korea's first successful launch of a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska -- a rocket the Pentagon now calls the KN-20 -- occurred on July 4, while the U.S. celebrated Independence Day.

That North Korean ICBM traveled some 1,700 miles into space, seven times higher than the orbit of NASA's International Space Station. It is not clear, however, if the rocket's "re-entry" vehicle successfully returned to Earth in one piece after it splashed down in the Sea of Japan hundreds of miles off the Korean peninsula.

Officials believe a new test of North Korea's KN-20 is for the purpose of testing the re-entry vehicle.

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

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Iran poised to launch rocket into space, as North Korea readies another missile test, US officials say - Fox News

Theres trouble in the Gulf, where a hijacked news website has helped kick off a blockade of Qatar. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their allies have cut off a fellow member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), citing as justification fake news stories that the Emiratis themselves allegedly planted.

The conflict started when several statements attributed to Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani appeared on the Qatar News Agencys website and the governments official Twitter feed. The comments, which the Qataris quickly dismissed as the result of a hack, strayed from the Arab Gulf consensus on hot-button issues such as relations with Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Israel. The Saudi-led bloc rejected that explanation and on June 5 severed diplomatic relations with Doha and also halted air, sea, and land transportation to the gas-rich state. Despite the mounting evidence that the offending news stories were contrived, the blockade has remained in place through extensive diplomatic intervention from abroad.

The confrontation, which threatens stability in a region critical to U.S. interests, is bad enough. But far more ominously, it shows how future crises can be sparked by cyberoperations to manipulate information. Operations of the kind used against France in 2015 and the United States during the 2016 presidential election take advantage of preexisting tensions to drive political change. In the case of the Gulf, these fake news stories exploited regional hostility and the Iranian boogeyman to push the region into conflict.

The recent hack didnt occur in a vacuum; tensions among the Gulf Arab monarchies have been simmering for years. The Saudis, with support from Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, have struggled for nearly half a decade to prop up the central government in Yemen against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels. In Syria, many of the GCC states support Syrian rebel groups against the Islamic State, while Iran provides Bashar al-Assads government and groups like the Syrian Electronic Army with training and technical assistance. In the eyes of their neighbors, the Qataris also maintain an uncomfortably close relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which they see as a movement that threatens established rulers across the region.

While internal GCC differences over Iran are a key driver of the current crisis, the next conflagration might be sparked by Tehran itself. The country has demonstrated growing maturity in offensive cybersecurity, conducts extensive espionage against its neighbors, and is actively engaged in harassing Israeli government websites with regular distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In a 2013 speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also claimed that Iran, together with Hezbollah, was carrying out nonstop attacks on Israeli industrial sites like water treatment facilities and power stations.

Irans capabilities have been strongly influenced by its own experience as the target of cyberoperations. In the years after Stuxnet, the U.S.-Israeli effort to stymie Iranian nuclear enrichment efforts, Tehran began making repeated efforts to gather information on industrial control systems in both countries. After a 2012 attack on an Iranian oil facility by malware designed to wipe computer systems of data, Iran responded by conducting precisely the same sort of attack against the back-office computer systems of oil giant Saudi Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas, which forced the replacement of tens of thousands of computers.

Iran is capable of causing a lot of havoc through cyberspace. Moving from web defacements and crude censorship in the early 2000s, through sophisticated internal information controls and sustained espionage campaigns, to complex multistage attacks today, Irans evolution in cybersecurity has been rapid. More recent Iranian operations have leveraged extensive reconnaissance of social media to successfully compromise American government organizations and critical infrastructure facilities.In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment against seven Iranian nationals accused of engaging in the costly digital harassment of American banks, one of whom was also charged with trying to hack into upstate New Yorks Bowman Avenue Dam.

All this means that the next hack in the Gulf might not simply exploit Irans reputation as a regional boogeyman it might be launched by Iran itself. There are limits to our ability to assign attribution for incidents in cybersecurity, which suggests that future information operations may be able to operate under the cloak of relative anonymity or at least plausible deniability.

This isnt the last time information operations are going to roil the region. The Gulf states need to be better equipped to defend themselves against these sort of attacks, and the first step is investing in their domestic cybersecurity capabilities. Their best bet is to leave aside surveillance and censorship to develop the technical capacity to identify and mitigate weaknesses in their own networks.

The episode demonstrates how the Gulf is ripe for exploitation via information operations. Through a fairly low-risk compromise of the Qatar News Agency, an actor managed to fracture one of the primary political blocs arrayed against Iranian action in the region. The Gulf has more than its share of political rivalries and long-standing antipathies, and Irans status as a growing power in cyberspace means that these vulnerabilities only appear poised to worsen. The damage done so far was likely the result of internal political fragmentation in the Arab bloc the potential fallout that could result from external interference is daunting.

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The Iranian Cyberthreat Is Real - Foreign Policy (blog)