JINSA Gemunder Center Iran Task Force Chair Amb. Eric Edelman Senate Banking Committee
Subcommittee on National Security and International Trade and Finance on September 21, 2016. The hearing was held to examine the terrorism financing risks of America's $1.7 billion cash payments to Iran.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is stepping up its harassment of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf. In the past few weeks, U.S. ships had to swerve and fire warning shots on separate occasions to avoid colliding with oncoming Iranian ships. The U.S. Navy recorded 31 such instances of "unsafe and/or unprofessional interactions" by Iran in the first half of this year, compared to 23 in all of 2015. The increase corresponds to the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program in January, but this is not just a game of chicken to test U.S. resolve in the wake of the deal.
JINSA's Gemunder Center Iran Task Force released it's latest report - The Iran Nuclear Deal After One Year: Assessment and Options for the Next President - in an event co-hosted by United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) on July 12 featuring Chairman Ed Royce, Representative Juan Vargas, and a panel with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Aaron David Miller, and Ray Takeyh.
Gemunder Center Iran Task Force Chair Eric Edelman, JINSA President and CEO Michael Makovsky, and Gemunder Center Associate Director Jonathan Ruhe write in USA Today that the year since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program was announced has been a strategic windfall for Iran and a disaster for the United States. Many of the deal’s shortcomings were glaring from the beginning, yet they have been magnified by serial and gratuitous U.S. concessions to unilateral Iranian demands.