Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance is a history of relations between the United States, Israel, and Iran from 1947 on. It principally argues that Iran and Israel’s relationship has become poisoned not because of Iranian ideology — specifically, that of the Muslim clerics who control Iran — but through each power pursuing geopolitical interests that sometimes included one another, but increasingly did not. Specifically, Parsi argues that the Israeli-Iranian animosity that exists at present owes to Israel changing its priorities: rather than court Iran as an ally against the Arab nations that surrounded it, in the 1990s Israel began courting its Arab neighbors and using Iran as a common enemy. This was partially entangled with DC’s decision to abandon its mission of balancing Iraq and Iran against one another, and instead settling on the more ambitious and imperial cause of “dual containment”, a cause enabled by the sudden folding of the Soviet Union and the fleeting establishment of the unipolar world. Treacherous Alliance is dense but informative, covering every step of the constant dance between Israel, Iran, and DC — a dance that has more than a few surprises.

A key point in Treacherous Alliance is that Iran and Israel both view themselves as regional outsiders: Israel is a quasi-western and Jewish outpost planted in a largely Arab world, and the Iranians have both ethnic and religious differences with their own Arab neighbors. These are not insignificant differences, but Iran has tried to overcome them from time to time — positioning itself as a regional leader through different means, first its connections with the west and then its status as an Islamist state. Parsi’s deep history shows how Iran has tried different tacks at different times — depending on how the geopolitical winds were blowing — but how realpolitik and not ideological fixation has always been the ultimate driver for Iran. The Shah, who was far more open to working with Israel than the bigbeards who followed him, still kept them at a bit of a distance: they were largely useful as a means of connecting more readily with the west, and as an ally against Arab (principally Iraqi) or Soviet aggression.

Events like the Iraq War or the collapse of the Soviet Union would change the dynamics — and the respective party’s priorities. Realpolitik is king: even when DC was inveighing against Iran, and Iran against Israel, in back rooms deals were cut to allow information and war material to flow as each state pursued its respective interests. (The Iran-Contra affair comes readily to mind.) While the mullahs might harangue Israel rather than offer terse depreciation of them the way the Shah did, both regimes were still willing to deal. In the 1990s, though, Highlander politics started to dominate each nation’s rulers’ more: in terms of regional hegemony, There Can Only Be One. Both Israel and Iran had the potential to dominate the area’s politics, but only if they could marginalize the other. This was especially true when Israel began making traction with the PLO, and Iran — which had made support of the PLO one of its planks for authority in the region — felt further isolated. DC was frequently complicit in this, think tanks declaring Iran a chief sponsor of terrorism even as the house of Saud funded wahhabist schools who would give us virtually all of the 9/11 hijackers. DC’s dismissal of the Iranians was partially fueled by lobbying groups like AIPAC, which also pushed the Clinton admin to ending trade between America and Iran.

But lest readers think “Ah, okay, now we’re at more or less present relations” — oh, no. At this point Netanyahu was a voice for moderation, pushing to preserve the relationship between Tel Aviv and Tehran. He viewed the PLO as a far more pressing threat. Another fly in the soup, though, is that Israel and Iran both viewed the United States in the context of their own struggle for power; neither power wanted the other to draw too close to DC for fear of being isolated. So, when DC and Tehran had golden opportunities to work together destroying the Taliban regime — foes of both governments — the Israeli lobby in DC kicked into overdrive, helped by Israel’s discovery of a ship full of weapons manufactured in Iran enroute to Arafat. Plans that were developing for DC and Tehran to stabilize Afghanistan together — complete with a jointly-trained army — disappeared, and the conduit for talks closed when Bush declared Iran to be part of the ‘axis of evil’. Clinton and Bush’s previous progress with the PLO was also undermined, as Bush’s team wrote Arafat off as untrustworthy. Ultimately, Tel Aviv appears to have been far better at navigating the particular tug-of-war, as our present circumstances (the 2026 – ? Iran War) prove.

The last section of the book, “Looking Ahead”, is now sadly moot. I appear to have a bad habit of reading Parsi books after Trump’s gunboat approach to Iranian diplomacy has rendered them somewhat irrelevant. Parsi comments that DC could benefit by leaning more on Iran as a potential ally, cultivating it as a guardian against Chinese encroachments into the region: instead, Bush, Obama, and Trump’s continued aggression against Iran (including funding al-queda in Syria to undermine Iran’s ally Assad) have pushed the regime deep into partnership with China and Russia, and the present war may have the perverse effect of rallying Iranians around the flag in addition to deep-sixing the global economy. Still, as far as understanding what’s gone before, this is an extremely detailed and generally fair-minded approach.

Okay, this is the actual cover: