Editor's Note: Meir Javedanfar is an Iranian – Israeli Middle East analyst and the co-author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and The State of Iran. The following post was originally published in The Diplomat, a stellar international current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region.

By Meir Javedanfar, The Diplomat

A new round of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, namely the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, is upon us. Based on the failures of previous talks, the upcoming discussionsscheduled for April 14 have had an air of pessimism hanging over them.

But not all hope is lost.

A recent proposal by the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), as well as a leaked report about U.S and European demands for the upcoming talks, suggest some common ground may be emerging between the two sides.

The report, leaked to the New York Times, find the U.S and European position in the upcoming talks is centered around demands that Iran ceases uranium enrichment of 20 percent at the Fordo nuclear site near the city of Qom. This is in addition to a demand that Iran transfers its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium. FULL POST

Sunday at 10am and 1pm EST on CNN's GPS, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak discusses a range of issues including the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran.

In the excerpt below, Barak addresses the issue of Israel's settlement building.

Fareed Zakaria: The Palestinians are sending you a letter, though, arguing that if negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis must resume, Israel must stop building settlements - creating facts on the ground that will make it more and more difficult to create a two-state solution. Is there any prospect of that happening?

Ehud Barak: Fareed, I hope that it will happen. I think that most of the burden for the inability to move in the last three years happens to be on the Palestinians' shoulders, not on ours. FULL POST

Editor’s Note: David Schenker is the Aufzien fellow and director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  

By David Schenker – Special to CNN

President Bashar al-Assad has agreed to U.N. envoy and former Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s six-point plan to end the bloodshed in Syria.  Al-Assad was wise to do so.  The U.N. initiative, which endorses al-Assad’s oversight of a “political process to address the legitimate aspirations” of the Syrian people - is a boon to the dictator and a setback for the opposition.

Al-Assad had little to lose by signing on to the plan.  The concessions he made in the deal- - the ceasefire, the ensuring of humanitarian assistance, a release of political prisoners, allowing entry to journalists, and permitting demonstrations - can all be reversed relatively quickly.  FULL POST

Editor's Note: Ambassador Stephen Bosworth was United States Special Representative for North Korea Policy from March 2009 to October 2011. He has also served as U.S. ambassador to South Korea, the Philippines and Tunisia. Currently, he serves as Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Amar C. Bakshi: What do you make of Kim Jong-un?

Stephen Bosworth: He is an unknown quality.  We don't know exactly how old he is.  He spent a couple of years in Switzerland, studying at a middle school there where he was portrayed as the son of the embassy chauffeur.

I can’t believe that he’s going to have any real authority within the system in North Korea without the concurrence of all senior military and civilian leaders.  They’re not engaged in some sort of a suicide mission.  They’re not about to turn their fate over to a 28-year-old or 29-year-old untested person, even if he is Kim Jong-il’s son and Kim Il-sung’s grandson. FULL POST

On GPS this week, Fareed had an exclusive interview with the top-ranking military officer in the U.S., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey. Here's an additional, web-only excerpt with Dempsey's thoughts on the Taliban and closing Guantanamo Bay:

Fareed Zakaria: You said in Congressional testimony this week that you had some doubts about the reconciliation process in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Elaborate on that. Why do you have doubts at it? Everyone says we should be trying to get some kind of political deal with the Taliban so that we can stabilize the country and draw down forces.

Martin Dempsey: Well, I concede and am supportive of the effort because I concede that most every conflict that anyone has ever been involved with ends with some kind of political settlement.

I think there's no one Taliban. You know, there's big T and little T.

So to the extent that we can separate...the reconcilable aspects of the Taliban, with those who are irreconcilable, I think it's effort well taken.

If I'm worried about the immediate idea, it's because we might be addressing the ideological side of the Taliban before we get to those that might be a little bit less ideological. It's just not clear to me.

So it's not that I'm reluctant to try this. But it's pretty hard to be optimistic about it. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Daniel Gordis is president of the Shalem Foundation and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His latest book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award.

By Daniel Gordis, Foreign Affairs

No one in Israel is calling the agreement signed for Gilad Shalit’s freedom a good deal. On many levels it is terrible. Israel is releasing more than 1000 prisoners, several hundred of them hardened terrorists, for one soldier. For the first time, the Jewish state essentially acquiesced as a terrorist organization dictated the list of prisoners to be released, including several responsible for mass deaths of Israeli citizens, a notion that would once have been unthinkable. Israel may well have given its enemies incentive to kidnap more soldiers. And the terrorists now being released are likely to attack and kill Israelis in the future.

Despite these facts, the deal for Shalit passed a cabinet vote by an overwhelming margin (26 in favor and only three opposed), and the vast majority of Israeli citizens support it. In agreeing to this prisoner swap, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli public chose to return to their roots, to revive a central tenet of old-time Israeli ideology: we do not leave our sons in the field. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Alon Pinkas is an Israeli diplomat, who most recently served as Consul General of Israel in the United States.

By Alon Pinkas, Foreign Affairs

The prisoner exchange deal that Israel struck with Hamas last week does not make sense in terms of the country's foreign and defense policy goals. A country that has been a victim of terrorism for decades - and that maintains that nations should never negotiate with terrorist organizations - has done exactly that, exchanging 1,027 convicted terrorists (550 of whom were directly involved in multiple murders) for one soldier, Gilad Shalit.

Although the government initially considered military action to recover Shalit, who was abducted on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip in 2006, it was never a feasible option. Gaza's dense and hostile population would have made any rescue mission messy and dangerous. Moreover, Israeli intelligence had never determined his precise whereabouts. Over time - and under immense public pressure - the Israeli government began to entertain the notion of a political deal, the basic contours of which were drawn as early as 2007. (Israel would free roughly 550 Hamas prisoners, Hamas would free Shalit, and then Israel would free another 450.) At the time - and when it resurfaced in 2009 - the administration of then-Prime Minster Ehud Olmert rejected the deal because the price was too high. Yet two and a half years later, both parties agreed to strikingly similar terms. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Andrew C. Kuchins is Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

By Andrew Kuchins, Foreign Affairs

With last Saturday's announcement, we now know with virtual certainty that Vladimir Putin will be returning to the Kremlin in May as the next president of Russia. His groomed and subordinate sidekick, Dmitri Medvedev, will trade his position and become the next prime minister. The "tandem," as the arrangement was originally dubbed in 2008, will endure for the foreseeable future, perhaps even for more than a decade to come.

While this leadership change portends little for Russia - indeed, once again de jure power will be reunited with de facto power - one key area remains a question mark: relations with Washington. Remember back to Putin's second presidential term, from 2004 to 2008. His criticisms of the United States sharpened. He obstructed a number of U.S. foreign policy initiatives such as NATO enlargement and missile defense in Europe. And then things hit rock bottom in the fall of 2008 after the Russian invasion of Georgia, just after Medvedev became president. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Daniel C. Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Visiting Professor in Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has served as U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and Israel.

By Daniel C. Kurtzer, Foreign Affairs

Two weeks ago, a mob of angry Egyptians invaded the Israeli embassy in Cairo, forcing Israeli diplomats to flee and causing one of the few Israeli diplomatic establishments in an Arab country at peace with Israel to close down. (The other, the Israeli embassy in Jordan, also closed after the threat of similar violence prompted Israel to preemptively evacuate its embassy in Amman.) This escalation of anti-Israel rhetoric and action in Egypt threatens not only Egyptian-Israeli relations but also places in jeopardy the credibility and ultimate success of Egypt's transition to democracy. The mobs clamoring for Egypt to abrogate the country's peace treaty with Israel and the vacillation of Egypt's military and civilian rulers could give rise to extremist populist politics. This momentum could, in turn, engulf the institutions through which people in Egypt want to see their country ruled democratically. FULL POST