Shay Khatiri

Shay Khatiri is vice president of development and senior fellow at Yorktown Institute. He writes for his Substack, the Russia-Iran File.

Thursday

Shay Khatiri

Who deserves credit for the Gaza ceasefire?

Since the Gaza ceasefire was announced last week, two distinct narratives have emerged. The first gives President Donald Trump the lion’s share of credit. The second, mostly pushed by former Biden officials, is trying to share the glory. Both are wrong and for the same reason: they give the United States unrealistic credit and ignore the obvious fact that it is the belligerents who decide the fate of a war. More than any world leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves credit.

Thursday

Shay Khatiri

What do Iranians want?

I was born in Gorgan, Iran, ten years after the Islamic Revolution, and for the first 21 years of my life, I never experienced life outside of it. But my parents and grandparents told me about the prosperous lives they had before Islamism captured the country during a revolution they had initially supported. Their generation had detested the feeble and feckless Shah, and they’d been inspired by Ruhollah Khomeini’s charisma. That was the story of my generation: parents recounted to their children how the revolution they had supported ruined their lives, but they always blamed someone else for it. Instead, my generation has experienced theocracy, poverty and international embarrassment. As we grew up, our parents told us of bars, cabarets and nightclubs back in the Shah’s days.