Foreign Policy Program

On January 17, 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty in Moscow. The agreement is aimed at strengthening bilateral relations over the next 20 years. Reportedly delayed by the death of Pezeshkian’s predecessor Ebrahim Raisi in May 2024 and disagreements over details, the treaty came at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions for both countries and was hailed by officials in Tehran and Moscow as a sign of deepening strategic alignment.

In February 2024, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Egypt for the first time since 2012, effectively ending more than a decade of political and diplomatic rupture between Egypt and Türkiye.

In 2024, Iran’s efforts to gain strategic depth in the Middle East suffered a series of crippling blows. For decades, the Islamic Republic extended patronage to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and came to Bashar al-Assad’s aid from 2011 onwards to protect his regime in Syria against armed rebel groups. This strategy, initially aimed at expanding Iran’s regional influence, morphed into a network of deterrence to ward off U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iranian soil.

Iranian foreign policy is an important topic that has been extensively studied, given the Islamic Republic’s strategic location in the Middle East and the Asian continent. This issue brief draws its importance from a tense regional and international climate, which has bred growing uncertainty about the behavior of states and the orientations of governments. The need to track Iranian foreign policy also mounts with every political transformation following elections, particularly Iranian presidential elections.

This policy note argues that a Greek-Turkish thaw needs to be couched within a broader Türkiye-EU reset.

Iraq’s Development Road Project constitutes a bold and much-needed initiative for a country that has been plagued by decades of civil war, ethnic and religious conflict, and geopolitical tensions. The $17 billion Development Road Project (hereafter referred to as Development Road or the Project) aims to transform Iraq into a transport hub by connecting its southern hinterlands to the Turkish border in the north,1 and act as a major driver of economic prosperity in both Iraq and the wider region.

This issue brief examines the underlying challenges facing peacebuilding processes in the Middle East and the limitations of excluding non-state actors in these processes. This issue brief examines the underlying challenges facing peacebuilding processes in the Middle East and the limitations of excluding non-state actors in these processes.