The Senate passed, by a 90-1 count, an “Iran containment” resolution that creates that “red line” Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for recently. And, it puts the red line for Iran’s nuclear program at a nuclear capability rather than a nuclear weapon, a shift from current Presidential policy.

If you want to understand how things get done in Washington, perhaps the best lesson of the year comes from the State Department’s decision late Friday to remove the Iranian exile group Mujahideen-e-Khalq from the official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The MEK never really lessened the activities that got it listed as a Foreign [...]

When Mother Jones released the secret fundraiser video of Mitt Romney doing his best Thurston Howell III impression (yes that links to a David Brooks op-ed) they promised more to come. Today’s video concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and while Romney will sadly not suffer politically for denigrating the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, [...]

When you talk about tail risk for the US economy, sweeping away the European crisis and the fiscal cliff, perhaps the biggest potential comes from an oil price shock. Combined with any fiscal tightening, that could easily snap the US into recession. And the biggest threat of this stems not from the protests outside US [...]

Several weeks back, Standard Chartered Bank, caught engaging in multiple acts of money laundering, settled with the New York Department of Financial Services for $340 million. At the time I wrote that if the Treasury Department and the other federal regulators cannot get as much from Standard Chartered as the DFS, “it will be completely [...]

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lightly before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do know that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to [...]

In addition to the tragic situation in Libya, another international incident simmered last night, on the subject of Israel and Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech claiming that the US had “no moral right” to intervene in a potential Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, unless they too set a “red line” [...]

A startling report in Israeli paper Haaretz claims that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has now flipped and opposes a strike on Iranian nuclear sites, after supporting the project as recently as a couple months ago. There are suggestions in the piece that pressure from American generals has moved him in that direction: Word is that [...]

The Democratic platform on Iran has a mix of pleas for a diplomatic solution combined with the ever-present threats and vows of military force if required. It acknowledges straight-out that “Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon” but adds that the country has “failed to meet its obligations under the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). [...]

Looks like we’re scheduled to endure another round of hype about Iran’s nuclear program. David Sanger writes in today’s New York Times about an imminent IAEA report. International nuclear inspectors will soon report that Iran has installed hundreds of new centrifuges in recent months and may also be speeding up production of nuclear fuel while [...]

I think what we’ve learned by now is that every international bank in the world may have violated US anti-money laundering guidelines, specifically when it came to doing business with countries barred by sanctions. Royal Bank of Scotland is only the latest, and you can add it to the growing list of firms we know [...]