The next president must revise Washington's approach to Iran if the United States hopes to halt Iran's enrichment activities and address Iran's role in other issues of critical importance to the United States.
In a discussion held at the Carnegie Endowment, George Perkovich and Karim Sadjadpour suggested steps the next U.S. administration should take to strategically engage Iran- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Bio
Jessica Mathews
Jessica Tuchman Mathews was appointed president of the Endowment in 1997. Her career includes posts in the executive and legislative branches of government, in management and research in the nonprofit arena, and in journalism.
She was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1993 to 1997 and served as director of the Council's Washington program. While there, she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, "Power Shift," chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal's seventy-five years.
From 1982 to 1993, she was founding vice president and director of research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural-resource management issues.
She served on the editorial board of the Washington Post from 1980 to 1982, covering energy, environment, science, technology, arms control, health, and other issues. Later, she became a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, writing a column that appeared nationwide and in the International Herald Tribune.
From 1977 to 1979, she was director of the Office of Global Issues of the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales policy, chemical and biological warfare, and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs.
Mathews is a director of Somalogic Inc. and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Century Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, and the Trilateral Commission.
She has previously served on the boards of the Brookings Institution, Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Surface Transportation Policy Project, and the Joyce Foundation, among others.
George Perkovich
George Perkovich is vice president for studies and director of the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research focuses on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation, with a focus on South Asia and Iran, and on the problem of justice in the international political economy.
He is the author of the award-winning book India's Nuclear Bomb, which Foreign Affairs called "an extraordinary and perhaps definitive account of 50 years of Indian nuclear policymaking," and the Washington Times has called an "important… encyclopedic…antidote to many of the illusions of our age." The book received the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association, for outstanding work by an independent scholar, and the A.K. Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, as an outstanding book on South Asia.
Perkovich is coauthor of the pathbreaking Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, published in September 2008 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and also of a major Carnegie report, Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, a blueprint for rethinking the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. The report offers a fresh approach to deal with states and terrorists, nuclear weapons, and missile materials to ensure global safety and security.
Perkovich is also developing a project on fairness in the international system, drawing on his interests in trade and globalization. His article, “Giving Justice Its Due,” published in the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, establishes the central theme of this project.
Perkovich served as a speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to Senator Joe Biden from 1989 to 1990.
Karim Sadjadpour
Karim Sadjadpour is the International Crisis Group's Iran analyst, based in Tehran and Washington DC. Over the past three years he has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian, American, and European officials, as well as hundreds of interviews with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.
He is a regular contributor to BBC World, CNN, National Public Radio, and PBS NewsHour, and has also written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic. Sadjadpour has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, and spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations and Asia Society in New York.
He has degrees from the University of Michigan and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was a visiting fellow at the American University of Beirut, and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and speaks Persian, Spanish, Italian, and conversant Arabic.
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