Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation

John Kerry. (AP Photo/Scott Applewhite.)

Traveling in Europe on his first trip as secretary of state, John Kerry has had his first close encounter with the Syrian opposition. It doesn’t bode well.

A tree nursery near Morogoro, Tanzania. (Courtesy of Trees for the Future, CC 2.0.)

This is the fourth of several blog posts written from Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, Tanzania. I’m visiting Tanzania thanks to CARE USA, which has paid for my trip with the help of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its purpose, for me at least, is to explore one country’s need for humanitarian aid and development assistance and to examine America’s political will and commitment to deliver on its promises.

Soldiers present the colors during an Independence Day celebration at the US embassy in Tanzania. (Courtesy of Wikimedia.)

This is the second of several blog posts written from Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, Tanzania. I’m visiting Tanzania thanks to CARE USA, which has paid for my trip with the help of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its purpose, for me at least, is to explore one country’s need for humanitarian aid and development assistance and to examine America’s political will and commitment to deliver on its promises.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a sermon in 2009. (AP Photo/Hayat News Agency, Meisam Hosseini.)

Things are looking up a little on the Iran front, even though talks in Tehran between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ended without a deal. Before the talks, Iran had suggested it might be ready to meet the IAEA’s demand to visit an off-limits site called Parchin, though that didn’t happen. On February 26, talks between Iran and the world powers, including the United States, are scheduled in Kazakhstan. There, too, a breakthrough isn’t likely, for two reasons. First, the United States does not seem prepared, yet, to take the two steps that it must in talks, namely, to acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its own soil and to offer to relax economic sanctions on Iran as part of a deal. And Iran, caught up in the early days of what promises to be a lively if not tumultuous presidential campaign leading to elections in June, may not be ready to make any sort of deal with the Great Satan.