The Cipher Brief

Recent deadly attacks by Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthis inside of Saudi Arabia have raised questions about just how far the U. S. should go in helping to protect the Kingdom. We spoke with former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI, Norm Roule , who travels regularly to the region for meetings with senior leaders and asked him to help us better understand the r...

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death led to greater decentralization of the regime and a more collective, securitized decision-making system. In Iran today, authority is distributed across several actors and groups, in which the military-security network has gained disproportionate agenda-setting power.

There has been much speculation about how decisions are made in Iran foll...

Anti-Semitism, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced while repudiating an anti-Israel resolution adopted at the 1967 National Conference for New Politics, is “immoral.” Accordingly, the civil rights leader would surely ha...

“And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again. And so, we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together.” From Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7th speech in Greece, at the Acropolis. Mr. Rubio’s excellent spe...

China is about to run the largest influence operation in history. It will not have to run it. The world will download it.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE -- Our research team at Vanderbilt spent months inside the internal documents of GoLaxy, a Beijing firm - with ties to the Chinese state - that built a machine for shaping opinion abroad. Using AI...