Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American political scientist based in Washington, must be cursing Benjamin Netanyahu. As Israel’s ebullient prime minister seeks to reshape the Middle East, with the help of Donald Trump’s bunker-busting bombs, it may feel like Nasr’s new book is already yesterday’s news. That would be a shame, because Iran’s Grand Strategy is seriously good, profoundly insightful and full of fresh thinking.
A central pillar of Nasr’s argument is that the West’s understanding of Iran’s strategic calculations is “hopelessly inadequate and dangerously outdated”. I wonder if the same might be said of the mullahs in Tehran. After decades of containment and low-level sparring, Israel has suddenly called their bluff. It may fail in its mission, it may blow up the region, it may even trigger World War Three, but one thing it has already achieved is to expose the myth of Iranian might.
