The U.S.-Iran Showdown in the Struggle for the Middle East

BOOK REVIEW: Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East

By Afshon Ostovar/Oxford University Press

Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole

The Reviewer — Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.

REVIEW — Dr. Afshon Ostovar is an Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and the author of “Wars of Ambition.” He came to NPS after a decade of experience working on Department of Defense and federally funded projects related to national security and the Middle East. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and has taught at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Ostovar is a contributor to War on the Rocks and Lawfare, and his commentary regularly appears in PoliticoForeign PolicyVoxThe Guardian, and other popular media such as the New York TimesReutersBloomberg, and National Public Radio.

Dr. Ostovar’s research focuses on conflict and security issues in the Middle East, with a specialty on Iran and the Persian Gulf. His previous book, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards examined expertly the rise of Iran’s most powerful armed force—the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)—and its role in power politics, regional conflicts, and political violence.

The book is both the first comprehensive history of the IRGC and a thematic history of the Islamic Republic, from the roots of its revolutionary system in the Islamic revivalism of the 19th century, to the impact of sanctions and the Arab Spring on Iranian foreign involvement.

Situating the rise of the Guards in the larger contexts of Shiite Islam, modern Iranian history, and international politics, Ostovar’s account of the Guards’ history since 1979 demystifies the organization. As he shows, the Guards have been fundamental to the success of the Islamic revolution, and their symbiotic relationship with the clerical leadership has been fundamental to the regime’s ability to retain power.

They have also exported Iran’s revolution beyond its borders, establishing client armies in their image and extending Iran’s strategic footprint in the process. Ostovar therefore documents the Guards’ transformation into a global power player and explores why the group matters now more than ever in both the region and the wider world.

Similarly, in Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East, Ostovar reminds his readers right from the outset that perhaps more than any other state, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been dedicated to countering Western influence and uprooting the United States as the principal outside power in the Middle East. By becoming a combatant in the war on Ukraine, Iran reiterated that position, and expanded its involvement to the battlefields of Eastern Europe.

Along these lines, following Ostavar’s reasoning, providing support to Russia was a culmination of Iran’s growing power and confidence, both of which have been honed through decades of militarized policies aimed at overturning the Middle East’s political order. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a catalyst in that regard.

So, in many ways, this book is about Iran’s emergence as a regional power with global ambitions. Conversely, to put it bluntly, it further reveals the West’s failure to contain Iran as a strategic threat. In other words, this book explores the interaction between America’s involvement in the Middle East following 9/11, Iran’s counter to it, the reverberations that the actions of both generated, and how the U.S.- Iranian show­down became entwined in a much broader, more complicated struggle.

Indeed, Iran’s quest to upend American supremacy in the Middle East has been in­separable from its campaign against Israel, its rivalry with Saudi Arabia, and the ebb and flow of regional politics writ large. Those adversarial relationships are thus interwoven into the larger tapestry of social upheaval and strategic competition involving both regional and external powers.

Consequently, in order to consider Iran’s involvement in that competition, Ostavar scrutinizes at great lengths the broader environment in which the decisions of Iran, its partners, adversaries, and other influential players were made; that expands the aperture considerably, maybe too much, ultimately encompassing the region’s major conflicts in the post-9/11 era and the sociopolitical convulsions that molded them.

The United States and Iran receive the most attention in this story because their opposing campaigns to transform the Middle East have been the most prominent and have fueled the most instability. Yet, according to Ostavar, to focus solely on the United States and Iran would be to minimize the impact of the region’s other main players: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, and Qatar.

Geographically, the focus of the inquiry is then the Middle East understood as an area of West Asia stretching roughly from Iran to the Mediterranean, and from Turkey to Yemen; an exception is made for Libya since it demonstrates how the struggle to remake the wider region transcends the U.S.- Iranian feud. It is therefore an instructive case, and is considered alongside conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Gaza.

As Ostavar notes well, the resonances of that fight have been global. What Iran has worked to achieve has run parallel to, and acted in concert with, the much broader revi­sionist campaigns of Russia and China. In that way, the struggle for the Middle East has been a microcosm of the larger geopolitical battle between those aiming to preserve the American-led global order and those seeking to overturn it— and thus reflective of the politics and dividing lines of an emergent multipolar world.

The story is not finished yet; it is still very much unfolding before our eyes, and it is always a little bit more complicated than expected. Let us then remember consciously with the author: a new order is emerging in the Middle East; but it is neither settled, nor does it neatly conform to the American or Iranian projects. Rather, more so than the forging of new loyalties, it has been characterized by a broad shift toward greater independence and nonalignment in geopolitics.

Wars of Ambition earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats

3.5

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