The Iranians want a seat at the table," a senior source with direct knowledge of Tehran’s thinking told Reuters, explaining its actions were meant to give Iran a voice and not allow the U.S. and Israel to dictate the outcome.(…)

Be it in Davos or elsewhere, the difficulty of establishing dialogue with Iran is its involvement in conflicts via proxies. This strategy was designed by Qaseem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s foreign operations force Quds who was killed by a 2020 U.S. military strike on Baghdad airport. Iran promised to retaliate. “His legacy lives on: a network of deniable but deployable arms-length proxies across the region,” a Western executive working in the Middle East, who asked not to be named due to security concerns, told Reuters.