The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America, and the Rumors of War

There have been Five Central Crises in America's post-World War Il 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 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. The authors, Steven Simon, a former diplomat and senior National Security Council official, and Dana H. Allin, 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 Israeli 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 status quo is a path 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.

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.

Dana H. Allin is Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London and the editor of Survival, a leading security studies journal. He is also adjunct professor of European Studies at the SAIS Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University, and author of Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 1969-1989.
Steven Simon is a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a consultant on Middle East security. He has taught at Princeton and Georgetown universities, after a U.S. State Department career that included service on President Clinton's National Security Council staff. He is co-author of the prize-winning book, The Age of Sacred Terror, as well as The Next Attack.