Middle East & North Africa

As conventional wisdom goes, experts tend to rank the U.S ahead of China, U.K., Iran, North Korea, Russia, in terms of how strong it is when it comes to cyberspace. But a new study from Harvard University’s Belfer Center shows that China has closed the gap on the U.S. in three key categories: surveillance, cyber defense, and its efforts to build up its commercial cyber sector.

“A lot of people, Americans in particular, will think that the U.S., the U.K., France, Israel are more advanced than China when it comes to cyber power,” Eric Rosenbach, the Co-Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center, told CyberScoop. “Our study shows it’s just not the case and that China is very sophisticated and almost at a peer level with the U.S.”

"...Iran has not suspended its uranium enrichment program, but it has not ignored the UN Security Council resolutions on Iran either, as can be discerned in the latest report by the International Atomic Energy Agency citing "significant progress" in Iran-IAEA cooperation. With the United States and Iran talking in Iraq and Iran-IAEA cooperation yielding concrete results in terms of Iran's nuclear transparency, the stage is potentially set for de-escalating the US-Iran tensions, particularly if both sides adopt a long-term view and sort out the security dimension."

"...the stage is set for a thaw in U.S.-Iran relations. With sufficient political will on both sides, Washington and Tehran can achieve this by adopting concrete confidence-building measures and by imposing a mutually agreed-upon moratorium on demonizing each other."