General Assembly and how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shaped the meetings and how it will affect the U.N. going forward: James Jeffrey and Bilal Saab analyzed the five recent talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran and how their contrasting goals have produced little progress between the two nations. [read post]

As James Jeffrey of the Wilson Center and Bilal Saab of the Middle East Institute argue, part of the reason is that the two powers have fundamentally different objectives for the negotiations and that the power imbalance in Iran’s favor is profound. [read post]