Iran' s Race for Regional Supremacy: Strategic Implications for the Middle East

The Iranian regime has accelerated its quest for regional supremacy through its nuclear weapons program and its mobilization of Shiite and Sunni terror surrogates from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Iran's advancing regional control on the ground has not been fully appreciated by the international community, and has even been downplayed in certain quarters. As a result, the U.S.-led Western Alliance has not forced Tehran to pay a price for its acts of aggression over the past several years while the West's skittishness has emboldened the regime across the Middle East. At the same time, the Europeans have pressed Washington for further diplomatic progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process. The net effect of the Western Alliance's dual-track diplomacy has been to push Israel to place its defensive requirements on the negotiating table opposite the Palestinians without adequately addressing Iran's offensive capabilities throughout the region in general and in the Palestinian areas in particular. Yet, while President Bush dispatched his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to advance Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, he frankly admitted to The Guardian on June 15, 2008: "Yes, there's concern about the Palestinian state, but the dialogue has shifted dramatically from, 'solve the Palestinian state and you've solved the problems in the Middle East to, now, 'solve the Iranian issue and you solve the problems in the Middle East'." The Jerusalem Center's latest policy monograph suggests that the Arab-Israeli conflict and the ongoing attempts to resolve it must be considered as part of a broader assessment of the Iranian regime's stated policy and current capabilities to destroy Israel and subvert Arab governments across the Middle East.