Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Jeanne Shaheen, and Mitt Romney listen as Sen. Bill Cassidy speaks during a news conference of bipartisan members of the Senate and House to announce a framework for fresh relief legislation on Capitol Hill, Dec. 1, 2020.

Encouraging noises are coming from Washington about a pandemic relief deal before Christmas – which means that political reality is sinking in. 

Amid a nationwide surge – with a record 4 million new cases in November alone – important measures to help Americans cope have already expired or will be expiring at the end of the year. The economic recovery has stalled, with November reporting the lowest number of new jobs since the spring and the country still 9 million jobs short since March. Meanwhile, states are readying for vaccine distribution, which is underfunded.

Just do something, say the overwhelming majority of Americans, according to polls.

Therefore, a deal now is better than a deal later – even if it is limited in size and duration, says G. William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “Anything is better at this stage, to the extent that it is money that can be gotten out quickly, particularly if the money is for vaccine distribution,” says Mr. Hoagland. Democrats are likely to be disappointed, but they can take “another bite at the apple” next year, he says.

Congress is coming late to a compromise, as it often does until faced with a deadline. At the end of the year, pandemic-related federal unemployment insurance for nearly 12 million Americans and protection from eviction and from student loan payments will expire. The Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses has already lapsed, as has the extra weekly $600 benefit for some 30 million jobless Americans.

“Both from an economic and a health perspective, and those two are intertwined, the stalling with the stimulus is really creating hardship,” says Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

At a minimum, she says, Congress needs to extend unemployment insurance, support paid family leave, and provide funding for schools to cope with the pandemic. Vaccine distribution is also high on her “must do” list. States have only gotten $200 million for that so far, she says, but she’s pleased that both parties agree that billions of dollars more are needed.

Politically, both sides appear to be moving. Like the cubist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” Democrats keep stepping downward in their dollar demands. In May, House Democrats passed the $3 trillion Heroes Act, which went nowhere. In October, they passed a second version, at $2.2 trillion. Now Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are below $1 trillion, embracing a $908 billion deal put forward by a bipartisan, bicameral group of senators and House members this week. 

“Most Democrats think that bigger and later is better. I think it’s a false choice. I think we should take whatever we can get and come back the very next day, reintroduce what we want, and say we’re going to get anything to people that will help them,” says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “To pass nothing hurts Democrats and Republicans. It hurts everyone in Congress. Eighty percent of voters want this.”

Indeed, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Friday that she’s now willing to go for a narrower package because Joe Biden will be taking office, allowing Democrats another chance at relief, and because a vaccine is on the way.

For Republicans, the main sticking point is aid to state and local governments, which they see as a “bailout” to poorly managed states, says David Winston, a Republican pollster and strategist.

“Their attitude is ‘keep it to COVID,’” he says. “It’s not an argument over money,” he adds, though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has backed a GOP package of about $500 billion, with his stipulation that employers get liability protection from pandemic-related lawsuits.

On Thursday, Speaker Pelosi, of California, and Majority Leader McConnell spoke by phone about funding, with Senator McConnell telling reporters that it would likely be added to a must-pass $1.4 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government when it runs out of money on Dec. 11. He was noncommittal about this week’s proposed bipartisan plan, spearheaded by Sens. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.

That plan includes additional unemployment insurance, new funding for the Paycheck Protection Program for small-business loans, direct aid for schools, and $16 billion for vaccine development, distribution, and virus testing and tracing. It also provides $35 billion for health care providers, such as hospitals, and assists with student loan forgiveness, rental housing, and child care. The provisions would run through March, including $160 billion for state and local governments – a significant retreat from the $1 trillion Democrats wanted last spring. Senator McConnell would get the liability protection he seeks, but only for the short term.

Where all this will end up is not clear, but the sides are talking and President Donald Trump says he’ll sign an agreement if Congress can put one together. “We’re seeing this kind of gathering of momentum,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said.

Republicans “realize that things are getting worse. And that if the economy goes into a recession, it really gets worse,” said Senator Cassidy, who backs the bipartisan proposal. “And for the individuals and their families, I mean, they can’t borrow their way out of this. And they’re really going to get stuck.” 

John Locher/AP

A supporter of President Donald Trump holds her hand over her heart during a protest of the election outside the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas on Nov. 8, 2020.

President Donald Trump has yet to concede the 2020 election, but a long list of potential Republican hopefuls for 2024 is already forming – including President Trump himself.

Not since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 has a former president actively run for another term after leaving the White House. But Mr. Trump, never a slave to convention, may well run again. He suggested as much Tuesday at a White House Christmas party.

“It’s been an amazing four years,” the president told his guests, according to a livestream viewed by reporters. “We are trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”

Mr. Trump’s legal effort to overturn Joe Biden’s Nov. 3 election continues, despite winning only one victory so far among dozens of lawsuits. But after the court cases run their course, and assuming Mr. Biden wins in the Electoral College on Dec. 14, Trump allies predict he’ll announce for 2024.

“If he does not win this election, he’ll run again,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

In fact, the massive fundraising haul the Trump campaign announced Thursday – $207.5 million since Election Day, to be shared with the Republican National Committee – could be a harbinger of things to come.

“It helps to set the groundwork for 2024 if he so chooses,” Mr. O’Connell says.

Either way, comeback bid or not, Mr. Trump is likely to loom large over U.S. politics for the foreseeable future.

Still popular within the GOP, he can influence races up and down the ballot – including the two crucial Senate runoffs in Georgia next month – as well as legislation in Congress and, longer term, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

On Saturday evening, the president will appear in Valdosta, Georgia, alongside the state’s Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom face runoff elections on Jan. 5. Both races are ranked as toss-ups, especially after Mr. Trump unexpectedly lost Georgia to Mr. Biden last month, and will determine control of the Senate.

The president’s remarks will be watched closely for any clues to his future plans.

Keeping the media spotlight

But for now, Mr. Trump remains a force in Republican politics, especially as he teases another run at the presidency. And that has the effect of freezing the 2024 field. This is intentional, say people who know the president. Even just suggesting he’ll run again keeps the media spotlight on him, starving other potential candidates of the attention he craves. Reports indicate Mr. Trump might hold his own event on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, and potentially even announce a 2024 campaign then.

“Right now, no Republican will stand up to challenge him,” says Steven Schier, professor emeritus of political science at Carleton College in Minnesota. “But will he look as formidable in a few years?”

More clues could emerge next month at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held in Amelia Island, Florida. Party chair Ronna McDaniel has invited more than a dozen likely 2020 aspirants to speak, effectively the “first cattle call” of the 2024 cycle.

Mr. Trump is invited, but hasn’t said if he’s going. Vice President Mike Pence, who has long eyed the top job, is reportedly planning to attend.

Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the runner-up to Mr. Trump in 2016, told the Monitor, “I hope to run again.” He’s among those invited to Amelia Island.

Other invitees reportedly include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, and Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott.

Already, several of those listed – including Vice President Pence – have traveled to Georgia to campaign for the two GOP Senate candidates and build capital within the party.

Post-Trump era starting

In Washington – and Wilmington, Delaware, Mr. Biden’s hometown base of operations, for now – the post-Trump era is already taking shape. As the president-elect announces his cabinet and other top aides, the challenge of effecting a presidential transition during a pandemic and economic crisis moves closer to reality.

Soon the political world won’t hang on Mr. Trump’s every utterance and tweet. That suggests, some analysts say, a world that in fact moves on from the former reality TV actor and real estate developer, who improbably won the presidency four years ago as an outsider who sought to shake up Washington.

“He’s very good at controlling the news cycle,” says Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “But come January, there will be other stories, and it may be a point at which the news media largely move on.”

The spectacle of an ex-president “may not have the novelty of a Trump in 2015 or the news justification of a Trump as president,” she adds.

The new Congress, addressing the agenda of a new, Democratic president, could also make Mr. Trump less relevant.

But for now, the president still commands center stage in the Republican Party – especially given the possibility he may run again, and the fundraising clout that brings.

Of the $207.5 million the Republican National Committee has raised since the election, some will go toward the president’s legal efforts but most won’t. Initially, half of the postelection fundraising went to retire Mr. Trump’s campaign debt, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Then, CRP reports, the fundraising shifted gears, and 60% of donations to Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” now go to his new “leadership political action committee.” The leadership PAC, known as Save America, is not an official campaign committee “but could begin to lay the groundwork for a potential 2024 bid.”

Leadership PAC funds may also be used to pay personal expenses, which the president has done, according to CRP.

After the ban on women in combat was lifted in 2013 (initially subject to exceptions), debate raged about whether the death of female troops in battle, particularly in large numbers, would cause Americans to turn against their country’s wars in a way that men’s deaths don’t – and, in the process, imperil U.S. national security.

Opening combat jobs – without exception – to women in 2015 did little to quell the debate.

Two years later, the impact of women dying in combat was still a point of discussion, including in classrooms at Harvard University, where former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter had just returned to teach. “There were people wildly speculating about the consequences of this [women in combat] change,” says Connor Huff, a teaching assistant there at the time, “and doing this with no evidence.” 

He mentioned this to Dara Kay Cohen, associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. “Connor said, ‘Instead of just talking about it, let’s collect some data,’” she recalls.

Last month they published the study, and the results were clear: Women dying in combat did not diminish support for America’s wars. 

Early on in the project, their findings were so unequivocal that they decided to ask more questions. What would happen, for example, if women were dying in greater numbers? But whether the hypothetical combat fatality was a man (Todd Ryan) or a woman (Molly Ryan) – and whether one woman died or a dozen – support for the war remained the same. 

The study should “put to bed the argument that women serving and sacrificing in these roles will be harmful to leaders’ ability to wage war,” Dr. Cohen says.

It seems like a point that should have been shelved long ago, particularly given that 173 American servicewomen have died for their country since 2001 without the wars grinding to a halt, notes retired Col. Ellen Haring, a 1984 West Point graduate who, in 2012, sued the Department of Defense for its combat exclusion policy. Still, she adds, “I wish this study would have come out five or 10 years ago.” 

Combat sacrifice but not “first-class citizenship”

In addition to the argument that women should be protected from fighting wars due to their inherent weakness, in the early days of women in combat, the study notes, there was concern among advocates that detractors could interpret the death of female soldiers as confirmation of their unfitness for the front lines, their dying as evidence of poor performance in battle.

That argument never gained much traction, but American women in combat remained a touchy subject. In 2018, for example, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis told an audience at Virginia Military Institute that infantry troops are “necessarily macho” since war is “the most primitive – I would say even evil – environment.” In that context, he added that the “jury is out” on whether women can make the U.S. military more combat-effective.

This was three years after the Pentagon opened all combat jobs to women – including the infantry and special operations forces – and three years after the first women graduated from the Army’s grueling Ranger School. Today, some 50 women have earned their Ranger tabs, and there are nearly 1,000 women serving as infantry soldiers, tankers, and cavalry scouts, front-line jobs previously closed to them.

As women have moved into these jobs, the hope among advocates has been that respect for them might grow in the eyes of their fellow countrymen, creating a path to, as the study puts it, “first-class citizenship.” Dr. Cohen and Dr. Huff, now an assistant professor of political science at Rice University in Texas, along with their co-author Robert Schub of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, looked into this, too, collecting data on whether, according to the study, women “fighting on the frontlines and making heroic sacrifices in combat” might have “broad implications for women’s equality.”

It doesn’t appear to, at least among men. “We don’t find evidence of a massive shift in thinking about what women are capable of doing, even after serving and sacrificing in these heroic ways,” Dr. Cohen says. “On a personal level, that was a depressing finding for us.”

As the study puts it, “Combat service – and indeed, combat sacrifice – alone appears to be insufficient to yield women ‘first-class citizenship’ among the U.S. public that the most ardent supporters hope to achieve.”

Military women serving in these roles often take pains to emphasize that they are not doing it to garner special kudos, or even to make a statement – other than that they want to fight in the same way their male counterparts do. Still, the finding is “very disappointing,” Colonel Haring says. 

Tae-Gyun Kim/AP/File

Maj. Shanelle Porter, commanding officer at Recruiting Station Chicago, stands outside her office in Des Plaines, Illinois, on Aug. 5, 2016. U.S. Marine Corps recruiters are turning to girls' high school sports teams to find candidates who may be able to meet the Corps’ rigorous physical standards for front-line combat jobs.

Women soldiers as role models for women

Among women, however, the study’s findings were different. Hearing about women serving and dying in combat did seem to boost support for women’s equality among other women. This included, for example, creating more positive views of women’s fitness for leadership.

There appears to be a “kind [of] aspirational effect on women,” Dr. Cohen says, noting that a number of studies have shown that if there’s a female instructor for an introductory economics class, for example, more women tend to declare an economics major, “but it doesn’t have that effect on men,” she adds. “Seeing someone like you do something inspiring or heroic has an effect on similar people.” 

This may have had something to do with the fact that women who served in the military ran for elective office in larger numbers than ever before in both the 2018 and 2020 elections, the study argues: “Having status as a veteran increased public perceptions of the legitimacy and authority of female candidates.”

And though women in combat may not have an immediate impact on how men view women’s equality, it may over time, Colonel Haring says. “Look, 100 years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a woman to command a Navy ship. Now it’s not even blinked at,” she adds. “I also know we have a lot more male champions today than when we came into the Army – it can just take time.” 

In 1739, everything changed for Broteer Furro. The son of a wealthy chieftain in West Africa had just returned home from an apprenticeship when a raiding army attacked their village. According to historians’ estimates, Broteer was only 9 or 10 years old when he watched the raiders kill his father. Like more than a million others during the transatlantic slave trade, he was soon marched to the coast of present-day Ghana and sold to American slavers. Standing aboard the Charming Susanna, Broteer received a new name: Venture. As in, purchased as another man’s personal business venture.

That September, Venture set foot in the New World, and although it would be years before he was able to reclaim his freedom, he never forgot his roots. When he was in his 20s, a particularly violent master threatened to banish Venture if he and his wife, Meg, resisted the family’s abuse.

“I crossed the waters to come here,” Venture replied, “and I am willing to cross them to return.”

In “A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture,” a 30-page memoir considered one of the greatest slave narratives in American history, Venture explains how he overcame bondage and became a widely respected businessman, freeing his entire family and acquiring more than 130 acres in Haddam Neck, Connecticut, by the end of his life. (After purchasing his freedom, Venture adopted his final slave master’s surname, Smith, because of the man’s fairness.)  

Venture Smith never returned to Africa, but now his story will.

Bob Child/AP/File

Frank Warmsley Sr. (center) watches as archaeologists dig at the gravesite of Venture Smith and his family in East Haddam, Connecticut, July 26, 2006. The dig was blessed by Mr. Warmsley and more than a dozen other descendants of Smith who believe science can lend credence to tales of his prodigious strength as a lumberjack, which helped him win his freedom.

The Documenting Venture Smith Project, based in Torrington, Connecticut, in collaboration with scholars from England and Ghana, has translated Smith’s 1798 narrative into Fante, one of the Akan languages spoken by roughly 2.7 million people in Ghana’s coastal regions.  

Along with expanded access to Smith’s story comes a reckoning. Of the more than 900 slave voyages sponsored by Rhode Island merchants in the 17th and early 18th centuries, many of those ships, including the Charming Susanna, traded with forts along the Gold Coast. Smith’s narrative reveals not only how the institution of slavery shaped places such as Ghana and New England – pushing back on local beliefs that slavery was not important to these regions’ histories – but also how Middle Passage survivors demonstrated strength and resilience in the worst possible circumstances.

“Slavery is not black history,” says Keith W. Stokes, vice president of the 1696 Heritage Group in Newport, Rhode Island. “Black history is how our ancestors survived and thrived despite slavery. And that’s exactly what the Venture Smith story provides – a first-person narrative of how an African boy was able to survive the Middle Passage, survive enslavement, and raise a family.” 

Lingua franca

Chandler Saint, president and co-director of the Documenting Venture Smith Project, led the translation effort. “We don’t know what language was spoken where Venture was born,” he says. “But what we do know is the last language Venture would have heard as he was being taken out by a canoe to the Charming Susanna would have been the Ghana canoe men speaking Fante.”

Rebecca Shumway, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of “The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” says the slave trade brought hundreds of years of violence to the region – warfare between states, banditry, kidnapping – as well as commerce and, for some, new power. During this time, Fante spread from a relatively small area to being the main language spoken from Accra to the Ivory Coast. 

“The Fante became sort of the ruling elite during the period of the slave trade. ... And so their language became the lingua franca of trade for the African population,” she says.

When Dr. Shumway lived in Ghana in the 1990s, she noticed there was very little interest in the slave forts scattered along the coast or other relics of the trade. People were more interested in the legacy of British colonialism, which had only ended in 1957 and felt like slavery to many who remembered it. But since then, there’s been a growing reverence for these sites, due in part to the rise of heritage tourism and unprecedented access to historical data that reveals how different countries, states, and colonies participated in the transatlantic slave trade. 

“It became possible to actually count the number of voyages and, in most cases, the number of captives aboard those voyages,” says Dr. Shumway. “Before that, everybody was just guessing.”

Smith’s narrative brings those numbers to life.

“In Africa, we like telling stories a lot,” says Gertrude Afiba Torto, an education lecturer at University of Cape Coast. “The children, especially those at the lower primary level, will appreciate the lesson in their local language better because they can identify with it.”

Dr. Torto hopes that Smith’s narrative will be translated into all 11 of Ghana's official languages.

Tim Martin/The Day/AP/File

Nancy Byrne (front right) of Chester, Connecticut, points out initials inscribed in the rock of a stone wall during a walking tour of 26 acres of land owned by Venture Smith in Stonington, Connecticut, now part of the Barn Island Wildlife Management Area, Dec. 13, 2009.

An expanded history for New Englanders

Back across the Atlantic, experts agree that reconstructing the lives and stories of individuals who experienced slavery is crucial.

“We developed more information on Venture than exists probably on any other survivor of the Middle Passage,” says Robert Pierce Forbes, principal historian of the Documenting Venture Smith Project. “And that’s in large part Venture’s doing.” 

Firmly planted in the Northeast, Smith never traveled below Long Island. So his narrative reinforces what Dr. Forbes describes as a growing recognition of the role slavery played in America’s northern colonies. Whether it’s Brown University joining other colleges in acknowledging its ties to 18th-century slavers or white families confronting their own history, new research is helping to chip away at the notion that slavery was only a Southern phenomenon.

In the United States, as in Ghana, Smith’s narrative could serve as an invaluable educational tool, expanding the traditional view of early American history – slavery, revolution, and all. 

“A useful comparative written in the same time period as ‘Venture’ is [Benjamin] Franklin’s autobiography,” says Joanne Pope Melish, author of “Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860” and a visiting scholar in American studies at Brown University. “Franklin also starts out ‘unfree’ and runs away. But as a white man, he is able to end up a famous patriot and Founding Father.” Smith begins his life in the New World with no autonomy, and by his self-initiated heroic struggles ends up a successful property owner, fulfilling his American dream. 

Yet despite efforts by the Documenting Venture Smith Project, more people know the names Brown and Franklin than Venture Smith, says Mr. Stokes. 

“Today, the greatest challenge we face is not simply racism; it’s invisibility,” he says. “We’re still telling the story from an owner-class or white perspective. And before we have reconciliation with white organizations, you start with recognition. ... We have to start with the people, which is Venture Smith and all the African men and women who survived like him.”

Editor’s note: Dr. Torto’s hope that Smith’s narrative will be translated broadly has been clarified, along with references to the Fante language.

Reuters

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif meets the European Union's top envoy, Josep Borrell, in Tehran, Feb. 23.

In their everyday jabs at each other, Iran and the United States speak of containing or restraining the other in the present-day Middle East. The U.S. keeps forces in Arab states and backs Israel. Iran shoots or provides missiles around the region, harasses U.S. vessels, and maintains a nuclear program. Yet in the background for both is an emotion that often drives much of their actions: historic resentment. With a new U.S. president taking office next month and coming elections in Iran, it may be time to finally deal with the bitterness that each holds over perceptions of past wrongs.

Many Iranians resent both the U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow of an elected prime minister and its support of an oppressive regime under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the U.S., some leaders resent the taking of 52 American hostages after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and attacks on U.S. forces in the region. Together, these not only create a trust gap in resolving current issues, they sometimes serve as convenient excuses for politicians to whip up domestic support to stay in power.

Across the globe, feelings of national humiliation often cast a long shadow over statecraft. They cannot be ignored. Russia’s recent aggressions are sometimes rooted in resentment over the fall of the Soviet empire. Turkey seems bent on restoring the influence it had before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. China celebrates a National Humiliation Day each September to remember the encroachment of Western powers and Imperial Japan on its territory. Beijing exploits a narrative of past victimhood to justify its regional and global ambitions as restitution of historic injustices.

Such tactics often leave a country unable to seek a better future. “The problem with the Chinese Communist Party’s rendering of the past is that it encourages the Chinese people to remain frozen in a time of humiliation,” writes British historian Christopher Coker.

For President-elect Joe Biden, Iran’s sense of aggrievement – as well as resentment in the U.S. toward Iran – will be an obstacle to creating a peaceful Middle East. He intends to rejoin the international deal negotiated during the Obama administration to contain Tehran’s nuclear capabilities. The Trump administration withdrew from that pact two years ago to impose a raft of new sanctions against Tehran and its trading partners.

Mr. Biden will have a short window to coax receptive leaders in Tehran into a new relationship with the U.S. In June, Iran is due to hold a presidential election. Any diplomacy before then will be complicated by the recent assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, widely suspected to be the work of Israel. On Tuesday, hard-liners in Iran’s parliament voted to accelerate enrichment of fissile material and suspend United Nations inspections of its nuclear facilities unless sanctions are eased. President Hassan Rouhani, hoping for a rapprochement with Mr. Biden, condemned the bill.

U.S. critics of restoring a diplomatic track with Iran equate lifting sanctions with financing Iran’s proxy conflicts, sponsorship of terrorism, and enmity toward Israel. Those are real and persistent dangers. But Iranians say those arguments reflect a perspective that has misguided U.S. policy toward Iran since the Islamic Revolution. “The Americans ... don’t want to think that we have legitimate political concerns that are about a region free from imperial domination and a quest to control our resources,” a former commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told Foreign Policy last year.

What may help are small gestures that build up trust and open an opportunity to deal with the past. This is the approach widely supported in Europe. Germany’s relationship with Iran underscores the diplomatic capital of consistency. It tries to maintain cultural exchanges and economic relations with Iran that allow Berlin to retain some diplomatic influence – even during turbulent times. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. relied heavily on European partners to start a dialogue with Iran.

Some form of COVID-19 assistance is an obvious possibility. Iran was one of the first countries outside China to be overwhelmed by the pandemic. Measures to help it could send a message that while the U.S. opposes the regime, it has no quarrel with the people of Iran.

As the Biden administration recalibrates U.S. policy toward Iran both sides need a pathway out of the past.