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Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***Iran The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors this week took Tehran to task over its past. For years, the U.N. nuclear watchdog has been pressing Iran to explain activities — dating back to the early 2000s — at facilities it had failed to disclose. The agency’s investigators — as meticulously documented in a May 31 report — found uranium traces and evidence of subsequent sanitization efforts. While Tehran insists that it has cooperated in good faith with the probe and dismisses its conclusions as political, a majority of the Board of Governors on June 12 passed a resolution crafted by the United States and European allies finding Tehran in non-compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The resolution stopped short of a possible next step: referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council. But if the U.S.-Iranian talks sputter — and as Tehran ups the ante by rolling out more advanced centrifuges and announcing a new enrichment facility — that too may be on the horizon.A sixth round of U.S.-Iranian talks is expected later this week in Oman, although the U.N. report, Iran’s response, and several other factors threaten to derail this. Some of the earlier optimism appears to be waning. In a June 11 Pod Force One podcast episode, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is “less confident now than I would have been a couple months ago” about reaching a deal. Also, the risk of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites has increased, leading the United States to take precautionary steps to protect U.S. citizens in the Middle East.The International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors congregates in Vienna. Image: IAEA Imagebank