"Iranian leaders have begun to wake up to a startling reality. Quite suddenly, their country has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the War on Terror"
Ilan Berman

In the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the Caucasus, Iranian policymakers are busy cobbling together alliances intended to exclude and marginalize the United States and its European allies. In Iraq, Iran is spending millions to perpetuate a lingering insurgency that threatens to transform the former Ba'athist state into another Islamic Republic. And through its nuclear advances, Iran is gaining the capability to catastrophically alter the balance of power far beyond its immediate neighborhood. All of this has been guided by an ambitious strategic agenda designed to make the Iranian regime the center of gravity in the post-Saddam Middle East. More than a quarter century after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has emerged as a major player in the Middle East and a growing threat to the United States. Washington is still woefully unprepared to deal with this mounting peril. Since at least 1997, the U.S. has lacked a coherent policy toward Iran. Instead, it has vacillated between engagement and isolation and, in recent times, has simply settled upon political inaction. Such an approach is no longer an option. Iran has become a grave and growing danger to U.S. national security and to American interests in the Middle East.

TEHRAN RISING, by foreign policy expert Ilan Berman, provides a detailed assessment of the current threat posed by the Islamic Republic, including:

• Iran's nuclear ambitions, the current state of its atomic effort, international assistance, and the impact a nuclear Iran would have on the Middle East and American interests there
• Iran's deep and continuing relationship with terrorism, including its present-day support for groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, and the implications for the War on Terror
• Iran's foreign policy toward the Persian Gulf, the impact of its military rearmament on the region's smaller states, its troublemaking in Iraq, and the implications for American regional policy
• Iran's activism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, where it has begun a multifaceted strategic effort to woo the former Soviet republics, and what this means for U.S. and European political and economic engagement in the "post-Soviet space"
• Iran's strategic doctrine, and what we can expect from Tehran's leaders in the future

TEHRAN RISING fills gaps left by current policy discourse regarding Iran, both within the U.S. government and outside it, with policy prescriptions designed to assist U.S. policymakers in dealing with Iran's strategic ambitions. Berman stresses the need for a new ôstrategic umbrellaö for friendly states in the Persian Gulf and suggests how to establish one. Also examined is how to adapt current American strategic initiatives to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to and from the Islamic Republic and how to enlist countries in Iran's immediate neighborhood, such as Russia and Turkey, in blunting Iranian foreign policy.

Slowly but surely, policymakers in Washington, as well as the American public at large, are waking up to a new threat: Tehran rising.