Whois & Analysis for nationalinterest.org

Iran (also; '), also known as Persia, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran ('), is a sovereign state in Western Asia.

It is bordered to the northwest by Armenia, the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and Azerbaijan; to the north by the Caspian Sea; to the northeast by Turkmenistan; to the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan; to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; and to the west by Turkey and Iraq.

Comprising a land area of, it is the second-largest country in the Middle East and the 18th-largest in the world.

With 82.8 million inhabitants, Iran is the world's 17th-most-populous country.

It is the only country with both a Caspian Sea and an Indian Ocean coastline.

The country's central location in Eurasia and Western Asia, and its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, make it of great geostrategic importance.

Tehran is the country's capital and largest city, as well as its leading economic and cultural center.

Russian.

Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia.

At, Russia is the largest country in the world by surface area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with over 144 million people at the end of March 2016.

The European western part of the country is much more populated and urbanised than the eastern; about 77% of the population live in European Russia.

Russia's capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other major urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan.

China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion.

The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing.

It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing) and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau), also claiming sovereignty over Taiwan.

The country's major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong.

China is a great power and a major regional power within Asia, and has been characterized as a potential superpower.

International relations (IR) or international affairs, depending on academic institution, is either a field of political science, an interdisciplinary academic field similar to global studies, or an entirely independent academic discipline in which students take a variety of internationally focused courses in social science and humanities disciplines.

In both cases, the field studies relationships between political entities (polities) such as states, sovereign states, empires, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international non-governmental organizations (INs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multinational corporations (MNCs), and the wider world-systems produced by this interaction.

International relations is an academic and a public policy field, and so can be positive and normative, because it analyzes and formulates the foreign policy of a given State.

Realism is the predominant school of thought in international relations theory, theoretically formalising the realpolitik statesmanship of early modern Europe.

Although a highly diverse body of thought, it can be thought of as unified by the belief that world politics ultimately is always and necessarily a field of conflict among actors pursuing power.

Crudely, realists are of three kinds in what they take the source of ineliminable conflict to be.

Classical realists believe that it follows from human nature, neorealists focus upon the structure of the anarchic state system, and neoclassical realists believe that it is a result of a combination of the two and certain domestic variables.

Realists also disagree about what kind of action states ought to take to navigate world politics, dividing between (although most realists fall outside the two groups) defensive realism and offensive realism.

Realists have also claimed that a realist tradition of thought is evident within the history of political thought all the way back to antiquity, including Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli.