With the arrival of Joe Biden at the White House, there have been real prerequisites for the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal. Will it be a return to the previous agreement, or it will be necessary to add new articles, because of which the United States under Donald Trump withdrew from the deal earlier in 2018, considering it insufficiently tough and not covering all vital issues. But do the additional articles for the JCPOA meet Russia's interests, and does it need the Iran deal at all?

The summer in Tehran turned out to be eventful. The sixth round of negotiations in Vienna that began in June did not meet the optimistic and timid expectations of the participants for the return of Iran and the United States to the terms of the JCPOA before the presidential elections in the Islamic Republic. As predicted, the conservative candidate Ibrahim Raisi won the election. The negotiation process was delayed and was put on pause to allow the new, 8th, President of Iran to take office and establish the work of the government. All plans to restore the JCPOA were postponed to August, the period after Raisi's inauguration, however, according to some European politicians, the Vienna talks will resume in September.

PIR Center experts Vladimir Orlov and Sergey Semenov discuss the lessons of Russian-U.S. cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation and whether these lessons may be useful for the Geneva summit.

In recent years, relations between Russia and the US have shifted from competitiveness to confrontation, effectively going back to the Cold War era. The sanctions pressure, threats, conflict behaviour and defence of selfish interests are plunging the world into a state of permanent instability. If relations between the two countries have been in the situation described above for a long time, it is called a crisis. Such crises provide a fertile ground for even more acute periods in the relationship. Under such circumstances, any faux pas, any lack of patience, and any strategic understanding of the “weight” of each word could plunge not just two countries, but the entire world, into an abyss of the gravest challenges, threatening it with a direct military clash.

Vartan Gregorian is no longer with us. He passed away at the age of 88, a Keeper of the Library; the man who once saved the sixth largest collection of books in the world – the New York Public Library, now a vibrant intellectual beehive; Vartan managed to convince the Manhattan's moneybags that philanthropy can be both "honorable and glamorous," in his words. The Internationalist left... no matter how strange this word sounds today: Vartan was a true internationalist, which, I think, was helped by his education as a historian; he did not seek conflicts; he did not seek to "take sides"; but he did not go aside either; he strove to resolve conflicts and bring peace closer.