What’s Next After Iran’s Very Bad Year?

Iran’s regional ambitions were dealt a severe setback in 2024. With Hezbollah and Hamas significantly degraded, Houthi militants in Yemen increasingly targeted by the United States, and most recently—and perhaps most significantly—the fall of the Assad regime, Iran’s influence and ability to project power appears limited.

Do these setbacks make Iran more dangerous or more open to diplomacy? And what can we expect from U.S. policy towards Iran as the Trump administration takes over?

Join the World Affairs Council for a conversation with Iran experts Ray Takeyh, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Holly Dagres, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on what we might see from Tehran and the trajectory of U.S. policy in 2025.

About Our Speaker

Ray Takeyh is Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His areas of specialization are Iran, U.S. foreign policy, and the modern Middle East.

Takeyh is, most recently, the author of The Last Shah: America, Iran and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty. He is the coauthor of The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East and Revolution & Aftermath: Forging a New Strategy Toward Iran. He is author of three previous books, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic, and The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine: The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1952-1957. He has written more than three hundred articles and opinion pieces in many news outlets including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. Takeyh has testified more than twenty times before various Congressional committees.

Prior to joining CFR, he has served as a senior advisor on Iran at the State Department and was a fellow at the Yale University, The Washington Institute of Near East Policy, and the Middle East Center at University of California, Berkeley. Takeyh holds a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University.

Holly Dagres is senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy focusing on Iran. Previously she was a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council specializing in Iranian affairs, the editor of the Middle East Programs’ IranSource and MENASource publications, and the curator for the weekly newsletter, The Iranist. In a separate capacity, she is an Iran analyst (contract) for the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO).

Before the Atlantic Council, Dagres worked as a freelance Iran analyst, regularly following traditional and social media in English and Persian. She also worked as the assistant editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, associated with the American University in Cairo’s Global Affairs and Public Policy School. She regularly conducts radio, television, and print interviews, including CNN, BBC News, Bloomberg, NBC News, and NPR. Her work on Iran has appeared in numerous publications, including Foreign Policy, Guardian, The New York Times, TIME, and the Washington Post. She is the author of the groundbreaking report, Iranians on #SocialMedia.

Dagres received a master’s degree in political science at the American University in Cairo, and a bachelor’s degree in political science and French from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has fifteen years of experience in the Middle East (living in Tehran, Cairo, and Jerusalem) and spent her formative years in Iran. She is fluent in Persian.