In The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon tells the story of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic from September 11, 2001 until the present, starting with the Bush administration’s devastating use of economic warfare to restrain the regime’s ambitions. That policy was at first continued by the Obama administration even as the president began implementing his “secret strategy,” to cite the title of Michael Doran’s landmark essay in Mosaic, of letting Tehran take over the Middle East in exchange for pretending to give up its nuclear program. As Omri Ceren writes in his review:

Solomon matter-of-factly describes Barack Obama as obsessed with changing the U.S. position toward Iran, and willing to subordinate much of American foreign policy in service of that goal. Obama started sending secret letters to the head of state, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which recognized the prerogatives of the Islamic Republic and forswore regime change. . . . When nuclear talks seemed to be stumbling, he sent another letter to Khamenei effectively offering Syria as within Iran’s sphere of influence. . . .

But while Obama sought to redirect America’s focus, he did so mostly in the background, and the old policy continued entropically, due largely to the continued insistence of the U.S. Congress that its legislation be heeded. It produced remarkable results. . . . Though it would later claim credit for the [economic] pressure campaign, the Obama administration had fought against sanctions for years.

The Iran Wars highlights how the administration elaborately hid negotiation details from the very beginning. Much of the public drama between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif—including the reported walkouts and conflicts—was staged. For several years, the two made a show of conducting negotiations in multilateral forums while Kerry made concessions in private talks that would become the nuclear deal.

In 2013, Kerry and Zarif had ducked into a side room at the United Nations to exchange personal email addresses and mobile numbers, and by 2016 they were chatting multiple times a day. Solomon writes about them taking walks together in between hundreds of hours of negotiations in Vienna, Zurich, New York, Geneva, and Munich. These provided the backdrop to Kerry offering unprecedented concessions. At no point, Solomon points out, has it ever been clear that Zarif actually speaks for the Iranian regime.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.