On Friday, the world woke up to news that Iran's leading nuclear scientist had been killed outside Tehran. Earlier that day, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a high-ranking officer in Iran's feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was assassinated in an ambush in a secluded village east of the Iranian capital. Contrary to much of the media coverage surrounding the incident, Fakhrizadeh was far more than just a preeminent nuclear specialist. He was also the architect of Iran's nuclear weapons program, and a pioneer of the Islamic Republic's effort to clandestinely acquire an offensive-oriented atomic arsenal. And while its policymakers have remained understandably mum on the subject, intelligence officials strongly believe that Israel was behind the killing as part of a new push by Jerusalem to derail Iran's nuclear program.

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These days, Iran is actively contemplating its future in Syria. Since 2013, the Islamic Republic has become deeply involved in that country's civil war—in the process emerging as a key player in one of the Middle East's most brutal and enduring conflicts. It has used the Qods Force, the paramilitary arm of its feared clerical army, the Pasdaran, to bolster the ranks of the Syrian military. It has trained and deployed a "Shia Liberation Army" made up of thousands of Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi and Yemeni irregulars to fight in support of the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. It has tasked its principal terrorist proxy, Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah militia, with doing the same. And it has erected scores of military installations throughout the country in an attempt to institutionalize its presence there. All of this has been done based upon the longstanding Iranian view that Syria's security is "its own security"—and that support for the Assad regime is critical to Tehran's long-term strategic interests. But now, circumstances are changing. Over the past year-and-a-half, the Syrian civil war has wound down, with the country's balance of power shifting back decisively toward Assad, thanks in large part to Iranian (and Russian) support. As it has, Tehran's footprint on the territory of its premier regional partner has undergone a profound transformation.

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Will they or won't they? Since the start of the "normalization" wave this summer, speculation has abounded as to whether other regional nations would follow the lead of the UAE and Bahrain (and now Sudan) and establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. President Trump has expressed confidence that quite a few countries will do so in coming weeks.   The Kingdom of Morocco ranks prominently on the list of prospective peace partners. At first blush, the North African nation seems like a natural candidate for "normalization" with Israel. The two countries share major civilizational links – some 10 percent of Israel's population of 9.1 million is estimated to be of Moroccan descent, and many travel back to the Kingdom regularly. Moreover, the Moroccan government has established a vibrant political dialogue with the Jewish state in recent decades, albeit unofficially. As part of that alignment, Morocco has taken a leading role in promoting education about the Holocaust in the Arab World, and trade between the two countries has flourished.   Yet the Kingdom's calculus is complicated by a number of considerations.

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How will a Biden administration handle the Middle East? Now that the results of the hotly contested U.S. election are (mostly) known, foreign policy experts and officials alike are turning their attention to that question. Over the coming weeks and months more particulars will emerge, as will the personalities who will be tasked with managing one of the world's most volatile regions. Even before then, however, it is clear that one issue will be of overriding importance in shaping the complexion of the Middle East in the years ahead—as well as America's standing in it. It is the one issue where Biden's approach differs most greatly from the one adopted to date by the Trump administration. That issue is Iran.

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With the U.S. election around the corner, the contours of a second term Trump Iran policy – or a first term Biden approach – are already coming into view. Since 2016, the Trump administration has made reversing its predecessor's line toward the Islamic Republic a centerpiece of its Mideast agenda. Over the past two-and-a-half years, the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign has jettisoned the 2015 nuclear deal known as the JCPOA (under which the Iranian regime received a massive financial windfall in exchange for temporary constraints on its nuclear development), and leveled a broad campaign of economic pressure at the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. The results have been profound. Today, Iran's radical regime is in dire financial straits – and its hold on power is increasingly fragile. The numbers indicate just how much. Iran's oil revenues, which totaled $100 billion in 2018, plummeted to just $8 billion last year, as skittish clients fearful of U.S. sanctions increasingly disengaged from the Islamic Republic. That trend, moreover, is accelerating. Earlier this month, Majid Reza Hariri, the chairman of the Iran-China Chamber of Commerce, outlined in an interview that the regime's oil revenue (which represents a significant part of the national economy) will be "at best $5 billion" this year. Such a decline could very well end up being nothing short of catastrophic for Iran's already unpopular rulers. That increasingly desperate position is a big reason why the Iranian regime acquiesced this summer to a sweeping new strategic accord with the People's Republic of China. If fully realized, the quarter-century, $400 billion deal will make the PRC a major stakeholder in the Islamic Republic – and do so at the expense of Iranian sovereignty. The arrangement is a telling reflection of the increasingly desperate domestic situation now confronting the regime in Tehran. Whichever candidate perseveres in next month's presidential election will inherit this dynamic. The operative question is: what will they do with it?

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