Steve Slick recently reviewed Solomon’s The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East (Random House, 2016) for the Lawfare Blog.
Steve Slick, the Director of UT-Austin’s Intelligence Studies Project, recently posted on the Lawfare blog a review of Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon’s The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and The Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East (Random House, 2016). Slick’s review, entitled A Costly Pause in a Troubled Relationship, tackles the United States-Iran relationship, President Obama’s foreign policy legacy, and the book’s detailed accounts of the diplomatic, economic, military, and intelligence activities that led to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, essentially a nuclear non-proliferation agreement) between Iran and the United States in 2015. Slick praises Solomon’s reporting, referring to The Iran Wars as the likely benchmark by which forthcoming memoirs regarding the Iranian nuclear negotiations might be judged, despite its lack of revelatory insights. The ISP Director praises the The Iran Wars thorough account of the development and use of coercive economic “tools” by the Department of the Treasury that helped drive Iran to the bargaining table. Slick judges the The Iran Wars to be a fair, thorough, and worthwhile reference for those readers who might be interested in the post-1979 American-Iranian relationship while allowing that realizing the modest gains of the JCPOA will prove a formidable task for the next president.
Click here to read the full review.