Vienna

Apparently an acquaintance has dubbed me the “Kremlinologist of the right.” Redolent as it is of the Cold War-era drama surrounding the Kremlin, when the West was desperately trying to suss out what Winston Churchill called a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, I could hardly object to this quip upon learning of it. Indeed, I recently traveled to two hot spots of the Cold War, Vienna and Budapest. I went full immersion in Vienna, where I attended a screening of Orson Welles’s The Third Man, a humdinger of a movie if there ever was one. Graham Greene set it in postwar Vienna, which was divided between the four occupying powers, France, Great Britain, America and the Soviet Union.

Several sources in the negotiating team in Vienna tell Cockburn we can expect a "new Iran deal" between the Biden administration and the mullahs as early as Thursday morning. For the last few months, Iran has been behaving stubbornly in negotiations, refusing to back down from its “red lines,” including lifting sanctions on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Instead, it's kept to the original timeline on the Iran deal, which would allow it to test ballistic missiles next year and remove all restrictions by 2030. Now, Iran’s resolve seems to have paid off. Sanctions: Cockburn's sources say the Biden team is set to waive virtually all sanctions on Iran.