Reflections on U.S.-Iran: No Straight Paths in World Politics

Most obviously, humility is in order. Those of us of a certain age can remember when many thought that the 1972 mining of Hanoi and Haiphong would lead to something worse than the Cuban missile crisis. In the mid-1980s, few analysts thought the Cold War would soon end. Many journalists and not a few scholars claim deep knowledge of the Middle East and the ability to predict how everyone will react, but we should recognize that the layer of regional expertise in the United States is, in reality, thin and that this knowledge, even combined with however much social...