There have been five central crises in America's post?World War II encounter with the Middle East, and the Obama administration now faces a sixth. Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapons capability, and the prospect of Israel launching air strikes to stop it, are ingredients for a conflict that could ruin any residual hopes for fostering peace in the region.
The Sixth Crisis
explores the fraught linkages between the Iranian nuclear challenge, the increasing likelihood of an Israeli preventive strike, the continuing Israel-Palestine tragedy, and President Barack Obama's efforts to recast America's relations with the world's Muslims. It is the first full account of the situation since Obama took office. The authors, a former senior official on President Clinton's National Security Council staff and a leading authority on international politics, lay out in clear and accessible detail the technical and political dimensions of Iran's nuclear program, and the ongoing diplomacy to stop it. They show how Israel's panic about Iran's nuclear threat?combined with its policy toward the Palestinians?is undermining Jerusalem's alliance with America. Tehran, meanwhile, is exploiting tensions between Arab regimes fearful of a nuclear Iran and an Arab public that is both angry about the plight of the Palestinians and resentful of Israel's nuclear monopoly in the region.
The Sixth Crisis
brilliantly illuminates this fateful juncture. The status quo is on an incline to disaster, and the hopes that President Obama has inspired are threatened by the toxic mixture of Israeli-Palestinian stalemate and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The time bomb of Iran's defiance and Israel's panic has the potential to spark a firestorm that would imperil US interests in the Middle East and engulf Obama's presidency. With the outcome of this unfolding crisis far from certain,
The Sixth Crisis
is required reading not only for policymakers, but also for anyone interested in world politics.
"Allin and Simon provide a masterful account of the defining security challenge of the?decade. The authors bring the right stuff to the task. Simon is an experienced Middle East hand who has witnessed presidential decision making up close and Allin is a demonstrated expert on international security. They are without illusions. Their book disposes of the myths on all sides to reveal the hard dilemmas facing Washington and Jerusalem."
?Richard A. Clarke, author of
Against All Enemies
"The best one-volume analysis of the Iran nuclear crisis in print."
?Peter Beinart, author of?
The Icarus Syndrome
"Sober, sobering, trenchant and important."
?Steve Coll, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
"Mandatory reading. These two deeply knowledgeable and objective authors transcend the polarized public debate, explaining why a war with Iran is a very real possibility, but also an avoidable one."
?Samuel Berger, U.S. n
ational security adviser, 1997?2001
Dana H. Allin
is senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the editor of?
Survival
, a leading security studies journal.
Steven Simo
n
is adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and coauthor of both?
The Age of Sacred Terror
and?
The Next Attack.