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First, a cliché: few topics are more pertinent, more intriguing, more confusing, and more contentious to contemporary scholars, policymakers, and media pundits than those concerning the triangular relationship--and crises--among the United States, Israel, and Iran. Yet, few scholars in recent years have attempted anything resembling what Trita Parsi has attempted to do in Treacherous Alliance--namely, recapturing within one unified framework the fundamental difficulties, paradoxes, and contradictions of the history of this relationship from the mid-20th century through the present. As Parsi observes in the preface, "it has been almost two decades since a book on Israeli-Iranian relations was published in English . . ." (p. xii); that book is Sohrab Sobhani's The Pragmatic Entente: Israeli-Iranian Relations, 1948-1988 (New York: Praeger, 1989).
By weaving together interviews with some 130 past and present decision makers in Iran, Israel, and the United States, Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, provides a fresh (even if not entirely new) view of this relationship, which has been obscured by rhetoric of the "clash of civilizations" and the "war on terror" type. In the process, he demonstrates with much clarity that the present conflict with Iran is the result of a complex web of miscalculations, misunderstandings, oversights, illusions, and, equally significant, the hubris of U.S. imperial designs.
Parsi's overarching argument is quite straightforward: the conflict between the United States and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other hand, "wasn't sparked by an ideological difference, nor is it ideological fervor that keeps it alive today." The major transformations in these relations, he writes, "have all coincided with geopolitical rather than ideological shifts" (p. 262). Thus, as Parsi demonstrates, the Israeli-Iranian entente before the 1979 revolution, which took shape within the framework of the anti-Arab "periphery doctrine," was rooted above all in mutual strategic interests and concerns emanating from these two states' position within the global balance of power during the Cold War era.
Likewise, despite the radical ideological reorientation of the post-1979 Iranian state (and that state's venomous anti-Israel rhetoric), Iran and Israel continued to collaborate secretly on security matters. This comes out most clearly in revelations stemming from the...