“Time to End the Long Iran-Nicaragua Relationship” with Todd Bensman
Time to End the Long Iran-Nicaragua Relationship
Washington has pressed every Latin American government with ties to Tehran to cut them, with one exception: Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. Todd Bensman, author of a new Heritage Foundation report on the nearly two-decade partnership between the two regimes, will discuss why Nicaragua has become one of Iran’s most permissive footholds in the hemisphere since the U.S.-Iran war began, what Iran and its proxies may be doing there, and the leverage the United States has to make Ortega end the relationship.
Todd Bensman is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center. He previously served as senior adviser to the ICE Office of the Director at the Department of Homeland Security and as a National Counterterrorism Center detailee. Before that, he was senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies from 2018 to 2025 and led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety for nearly a decade. A reporter for more than two decades and a two-time National Press Club award winner, he is the author of Overrun (2023) and America’s Covert Border War (2021).
