Which Path to Persia?

An Essay on the 2009 Blueprint for the War You’re Watching Now

I. The Mediator

On February 27, 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. He had just brokered a third round of indirect talks between the United States and Iran in Geneva. He told Margaret Brennan that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of nuclear material, full IAEA verification, and the irreversible conversion of existing enriched uranium into fuel — concessions that exceeded anything achieved under Obama’s JCPOA. A peace deal, he said, was within reach.¹

The next morning, American and Israeli missiles hit targets across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and Kermanshah. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in his compound. Iran’s defence minister and the commander of the Revolutionary Guard died in the same wave of strikes. Schools and hospitals sustained damage. The Grand Bazaar in Tehran was hit. UNESCO World Heritage Sites were struck. At least 120 historical sites reported damage in the weeks that followed.²

Two days before the bombs, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had written on social media that a “historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement” was available, if diplomacy were given priority.³ A fourth round of talks had been scheduled for the following week in Vienna. Technical teams were to begin drafting a deal text.⁴

None of that happened. What happened instead had been described — in precise operational language, chapter by chapter — in a planning document published seventeen years earlier and still sitting, today, on the Brookings Institution’s website.

Which Path To Persia

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II. The Document

In June 2009, the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy published Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran. It runs 170 pages. Six authors contributed: Kenneth Pollack, Daniel Byman, Martin Indyk, Suzanne Maloney, Michael O’Hanlon, and Bruce Riedel. Their combined credentials span the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the 9/11 Commission. The paper was reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information. It was funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Crown Family Foundation.⁵

It is not a leak. It is not an exposé. It is a menu. Nine chapters, each evaluating a distinct method for neutralising Iran, organised into four parts: persuading Tehran, disarming Tehran, toppling Tehran, and deterring Tehran. Each option is assessed on goals, time frames, military requirements, diplomatic prerequisites, advantages, and disadvantages — and, critically, on how it integrates with the others.

The authors are not debating whether the United States has the right to reshape Iran. That question is settled before the first page. They are debating efficiency.

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III. The Saban Center

Note the institutional location. The paper was not published by the Brookings Institution at large. It was published by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings — a centre established with a $13 million donation from Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media billionaire who has described himself in multiple interviews as “a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”⁶ Saban told the New Yorker in 2010 that his three methods for influencing American politics were donating to political parties, establishing think tanks, and acquiring media outlets.⁷ The Saban Center was the think tank.

Israel is everywhere in Which Path to Persia? The word “Israel” or “Israeli” appears 270 times across the 170 pages. Chapter 5 is built entirely around the proposition that Washington could outsource the strikes to Jerusalem. In the invasion chapter, the authors note that “Israel is probably the only country that would publicly support an American invasion of Iran.” Chapter 5 opens by drawing an asymmetry: Iran has never been and “almost certainly never will be an existential threat to the United States,” but for Israel, Iran is an existential threat. The chapter then organises the proposed military option around that Israeli threat perception.

The straightforward reading is the one most commentators on this paper have reached: the document is evidence of Israeli influence over American foreign policy. A planning paper for an Iran war, hosted at a think tank named after an avowed single-issue Israel partisan, with Israeli concerns saturating every section — what more proof would anyone need?

This reading is true on its surface. It is also, by itself, the trap.

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IV. 1979 Was Not a Setback

Most readings of Which Path to Persia? never get past the surface. The deeper layer requires going back further than the document does — to the founding moment of the conflict the paper claims to be addressing.

The standard story of US-Iranian hostility begins in 1979, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew a pro-American Shah and seized the US embassy. In this telling, Washington lost a key regional client and has spent the decades since trying to contain or reverse the consequences. Almost every American policy discussion of Iran rests on this framing.

The framing is wrong. The Shah was not lost. He was removed.

By 1978, Iran under the Shah had built the fourth-largest civilian nuclear program in the world — twenty reactors planned by 1995, contracted to French and German firms (specifically not American ones, in defiance of Carter’s anti-proliferation regime), with a 10% stake in the French uranium enrichment facility at Tricastin and a 25% stake in Germany’s Krupp. The Shah was using Iran’s oil revenues to industrialise outside the Anglo-American banking and energy system, building economic ties with continental Europe and refusing to recycle his petrodollars through New York and London.⁸ This was not a client. This was a former client building independence.

What followed has been documented in detail by F. William Engdahl across multiple books drawing on declassified materials, congressional records, and the published work of the participants themselves. British Petroleum organised capital flight out of Iran through its banking network. The BBC’s Persian-language service flooded the country with anti-Shah broadcasting and gave Khomeini, then in exile in Paris, an unprecedented propaganda platform — refusing the Shah’s own government any equal time. American “security advisers” to SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, escalated the brutality of repression in ways calculated to maximise popular antipathy. The Carter administration, simultaneously, began publicly criticising the Shah’s human rights record. Within months, the Shah fled, Khomeini was flown into Tehran from Paris, and by May 1979 the new regime had cancelled the entire French and German nuclear program. Iran’s 3 million barrels per day of oil exports went off the market. The “second oil shock” began.⁹

The financial side ran in parallel. David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank held nearly $2 billion in Iranian loans and was already on the US Comptroller’s “problem banks” list. Through 1979, Khomeini’s new government continued making loan payments on time. Then Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and John McCloy pressured Carter to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment that Rockefeller’s own physician later admitted was not actually necessary. Carter was warned by his own State Department that admitting the Shah would trigger an embassy takeover. He admitted the Shah anyway, in October 1979. The embassy was seized two weeks later. Within ten days of the seizure, Iranian assets were frozen by US executive order, Chase declared the largest Iranian loan in default, cross-default clauses cleared the bank’s entire Iran exposure, and the US Treasury reimbursed Chase from the seized assets. The bank’s Iran problem was solved.¹⁰

So 1979 was not a setback to American imperial planning. It was the successful execution of imperial planning. A client who had become inconvenient — by building independent nuclear capacity, by industrialising with European partners, by accumulating leverage that the Anglo-American banking and energy system could not control — was removed through a coordinated operation involving propaganda, financial warfare, manufactured unrest, and a triggered hostage crisis that produced both political cover for asset seizure and a forty-five-year supply of casus belli.

The reasons the United States needs Iran neutralised are structural and continuous. They have not changed since 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh for nationalising Anglo-Iranian Oil. They did not change in 1979. They have not changed since. Control of Persian Gulf energy infrastructure. Severance of China’s western energy supply. Maintenance of dollar hegemony in oil markets. Prevention of any regional power capable of resisting American military positioning or developing autonomous industrial capacity outside the Anglo-American framework. None of these reasons can be sold to the American public. They are too cynical, too transparently imperial, and the public has been burned too recently by Iraq to accept them again.

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V. What the Paper Does Not Say

The reasons listed above are the ones the document permits a careful reader to infer. There is one more reason, larger than all of them, and the Brookings paper does not name it. That omission is itself the most important thing the paper does not do.

China appears in Which Path to Persia? sixty-two times. Russia appears almost as often. The two are usually paired, treated together as the “other great powers” whose cooperation must be secured for any sanctions regime to bite. The authors are realistic about the obstacle. They acknowledge openly that “Chinese firms have aggressively attempted to expand their business in Iran” and that Russia and China together have “done far less to hinder Iran than they might — or that their rhetoric would have suggested — and a great deal to help Iran, while also helping their own finances.” They acknowledge that Beijing has told Washington explicitly that Chinese cooperation on Iran sanctions depends on American cooperation on Chinese energy security elsewhere. The Chinese position, in the authors’ own words: their “strategic concern with Iran is energy resources,” and “because Iran is a pariah to so many countries, Tehran is willing to cut the kind of deals with Beijing that make Chinese planners happy, in return for Chinese diplomatic support.”¹¹

Read that sequence carefully. China is not a difficult diplomatic partner. China is an integrating power building energy and trade ties to a country the United States has been trying to neutralise for thirty years. The integration is the problem. Iran is the western anchor of a Eurasian system that does not run through Wall Street, does not price oil in dollars, and does not require American military protection. The more Iran integrates with China, the more Chinese energy security becomes Iranian sovereignty, and the more Iranian sovereignty becomes a structural challenge to the entire Anglo-American imperial order. By 2009, this integration was already visible. By 2026, it was the central geopolitical fact of the era.

The Brookings paper treats this as a sanctions management problem. It does not treat it as the strategic stake. The word “multipolar” does not appear in the document. The framing of Iran as a node in an emerging non-Anglo-American world order — the framing that any honest 2009 strategist would recognise as the actual story — is absent. The authors knew it was the story. They did not write it down.

This is not an oversight. It is the same logic that put the planning at the Saban Center. A document that named China as the actual reason would be a document the American public could read and understand: this is a war for hegemony, fought over which civilisation gets to organise the next century. That war cannot be sold. So the document is written as if Iran were a discrete regional problem about nuclear proliferation and terrorism support, with China as a tiresome diplomatic counterparty rather than the rising power whose containment is the entire point of the exercise. The 270 mentions of Israel supply the public framing. The 62 mentions of China supply the operational reality, scattered through the paper in passages most readers will skim.

The 2026 strikes did not happen because Iran was building a bomb. Iran was not building a bomb. The IAEA confirmed this. The Omani mediator confirmed this. The CIA’s own 2007 National Intelligence Estimate confirmed this. The strikes happened because Iran was the western anchor of a Chinese energy and trade architecture that the Anglo-American system cannot permit to mature. Severing Iran severs the Eurasian integration. The bomb framing was the cover story. The actual operation was a move in a much larger game — the game the document declined to name.

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VI. The Misdirection

What can be sold is a war to defend an ally from an existential threat. So the planning has to be done somewhere — and somewhere with a built-in framing device that pre-loads the public justification before the operation begins. The Saban Center is not where the planning happened to land. It is the optimal location for it. Its institutional identity supplies the cover story in advance: when the war comes, anyone who notices the planning will conclude that Israel was behind it. The most likely critique is also the critique that protects the underlying machinery from scrutiny. A reader who concludes “this proves Israeli capture” is a reader who will not ask why the United States needs Iran neutralised in the first place, or what was already happening in 1953 and 1979 to make the answer obvious — or what is happening now in Beijing to make the answer urgent.

The MEK passage in Chapter 5 is the operational tell. The authors document — in a footnote sourced to former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon — that Iran’s secret enrichment programs were publicly exposed in August 2002 by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian dissident group, which had been “unwittingly fed the information by Israeli intelligence” through “a cutout.”¹² Read that sequence carefully. American interests benefit from public exposure of Iran’s nuclear program. The exposure cannot come from Washington because that would politicise it. Israeli intelligence runs the operation, but Israel cannot take public credit either, because that would expose the coordination. So the information is laundered through a third party — a Persian-speaking dissident group — which announces it as their own discovery. By the time the public encounters the story, it appears to be courageous Iranian exiles exposing their own government. Three layers of plausible deniability, one operational outcome.

This is the template the entire paper recommends. It is also the template the paper itself embodies. The American imperial machinery commissions the planning. The planning is published under the name of a centre identified with Israeli interests. When the resulting war comes, the public response divides between those who support it (because Israel was threatened) and those who oppose it (because Israel pushed America into it). Both sides argue about Israel. Neither side asks what Washington needed Tehran neutralised for, or who structured the conditions that made the war appear inevitable.

None of this minimises Israeli agency. Israel is doing what Israel does, and doing it with considerable success. The point is that Israeli action is being used — by a larger machinery that predates Israel by two centuries and would continue without it — as a load-bearing element of a programme whose ultimate beneficiaries are not in Tel Aviv. The Saban Center frame is not a confession of who is in charge. It is a misdirection about who is in charge. And the misdirection works precisely because the Israeli involvement it points at is real.

Keep this in mind as the chapters unfold below. The proxy structure documented in the MEK footnote — Israel runs the operation, the proxy takes the credit, the principal stays invisible — is not just one tactic among many in the paper. It is the architecture of the whole exercise, including the paper itself.

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VII. 2009: The Velvet Revolution

The paper was published in June 2009. That same month, Iran’s disputed presidential election triggered the Green Movement — the largest protests in the country since the 1979 revolution. Millions marched. The government responded with mass arrests, beatings, and killings. The shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan was broadcast worldwide.¹³

Chapter 6 of the paper is titled “The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising.” Its stated objective: overthrow the clerical regime and replace it with one more compatible with U.S. interests. The chapter proposes fostering a revolution modelled on those that toppled communist governments in Eastern Europe and notes that the United States could create “coercive leverage by threatening the regime with instability or even overthrow.”¹⁴

The chapter also identifies the core operational risk: overt American support could discredit the revolutionaries and make the uprising less likely to succeed. The appearance of organic, indigenous protest is essential.

The Green Movement’s relationship to the planning described in Chapter 6 is a matter of debate. The timeline is too tight for the paper to have generated the uprising — the election and its aftermath had their own internal logic. But the coincidence is structural: the paper described precisely the kind of event that would serve American interests, and the event materialised within weeks of publication. Whether this reflects influence, anticipation, or alignment, the menu item appeared on the ground.

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VIII. 2010: Covert Sabotage

In mid-2010, security researchers discovered Stuxnet — a computer worm that had infiltrated Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility and destroyed approximately 1,000 centrifuges, delaying Iran’s nuclear program by an estimated two years. It was later confirmed as a joint U.S.-Israeli cyber weapon, developed under the Bush administration as “Operation Olympic Games” and expanded under Obama.¹⁵

The paper has no chapter on cyber sabotage. But its conclusion argues repeatedly that no single option is sufficient and that the ideal strategy combines methods in sequence: diplomacy to build legitimacy, covert disruption to buy time, military force when the political conditions are right. Stuxnet was the covert disruption piece. It did not eliminate Iran’s program. It was designed to delay it while other options matured.

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IX. 2012: The Insurgency Option

Chapter 7, “Inspiring an Insurgency,” evaluates arming and supporting Iranian opposition groups — Kurds, Baluch, Arabs — and the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). When the paper was published, the MEK was designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation. The authors note that the MEK had been armed by Saddam Hussein and had conducted “guerrilla and terrorist operations against the clerical regime.” They add that although the group was “supposedly disarmed,” this “could quickly be changed.”¹⁶

In September 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally delisted the MEK.¹⁷ The State Department’s own announcement acknowledged the group’s “past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran.” The delisting followed a lobbying campaign in which former CIA directors, former FBI directors, and former NATO commanders were paid to advocate on the group’s behalf.¹⁸ The National Iranian American Council warned that the decision “opens the door to Congressional funding of the M.E.K. to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran” and “makes war with Iran far more likely.”¹⁹

Chapter 7 recommended identifying Iranian opposition groups and supporting them. The group it named by name was taken off the terrorist list three years later.

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X. 2015–2018: The Superb Offer

Chapter 1, “An Offer Iran Shouldn’t Refuse,” lays out the Persuasion option — a diplomatic package combining incentives and escalating sanctions. The authors present the approach on its own merits. They also describe its utility as a prerequisite for everything else on the menu.

The paper observes that European and Asian publics were only willing to support sanctions against Iran if they believed Tehran had been offered a deal so generous that only a regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons would refuse. It then describes what it calls the ideal scenario for those who favour regime change or military strikes: present Iran with inducements so enticing that the Iranian public supports the deal, only to have the regime reject it.

The authors’ language:

*The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer — one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger.*²⁰

In July 2015, the JCPOA was signed. Iran accepted limits on enrichment, agreed to extensive inspections, and shipped out 98% of its enriched uranium stockpile. International monitors confirmed Iranian compliance throughout the deal’s lifespan.²¹

In May 2018, the Trump administration withdrew.²² Iran was in compliance at the time, according to the IAEA. The withdrawal reimposed sanctions and eliminated the diplomatic framework. Iran, no longer bound by the agreement, gradually resumed enrichment.

The paper’s logic accounts for what happens when Iran refuses the offer. It does not account for what happens when Iran accepts. But the withdrawal solved that problem. A working deal was retroactively converted into failed diplomacy. Iran’s subsequent return to enrichment — a direct consequence of the withdrawal — became the evidence that diplomacy couldn’t work.

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XI. 2020: The Provocation

On January 3, 2020, a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces.²³

The paper’s treatment of provocation deserves reading in full, because the authors return to it across three separate chapters with consistent logic. In the invasion chapter:

*It is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation).*²⁴

In the airstrikes chapter:

*If the airstrikes were launched in response to an Iranian provocation, the United States might find Arab, European, and Asian acquiescence, even enthusiasm.*²⁵

In the Israeli strikes chapter:

*Iranian retaliation [against Israel] might create a pretext for American airstrikes or even an invasion.*²⁶

Three chapters. The same structural concern each time: how to secure the provocation that makes military action politically viable, without being seen to have engineered it.

The Soleimani assassination — whatever its other purposes — was an action designed to produce an Iranian response. Iran obliged, launching missiles at Al Asad Airbase in Iraq and injuring over 100 American service members. The Trump administration chose not to escalate further at that point. But the retaliatory cycle had been initiated. The precedent was operational.

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XII. 2025: Leave It to Bibi

Chapter 5 carries the title “Leave It to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike.” Its premise: the United States could encourage Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program so that “both international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel.” The chapter identifies this as a way out of the dilemma in which American strikes would undermine every other American initiative in the Middle East.²⁷

In June 2025, Israeli warplanes struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, including the enrichment site at Natanz — the same facility that Stuxnet had targeted fifteen years earlier. Iran retaliated with missile strikes against Israeli targets and U.S. bases, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. A ceasefire was brokered. Observers described it as fragile.²⁸

The chapter anticipated this sequence specifically. It noted that Israel had been planning such strikes for years. It observed that Iran would rebuild after any attack and would probably retaliate against Israel and potentially against the United States. And it identified the consequence that matters most for the next step on the menu: Iranian retaliation against Israel “might create a pretext for American airstrikes or even an invasion.”²⁹

Israel strikes. Iran retaliates. The retaliation becomes the casus belli for a wider American campaign.

Less than nine months separated the June 2025 Israeli strikes from the February 2026 U.S.-Israeli assault that killed Khamenei.

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XIII. The Sequence

2009 — Green Movement erupts. Chapter 6: The Velvet Revolution.

2010 — Stuxnet destroys centrifuges. The paper’s framework: covert disruption to buy time.

2012 — MEK delisted as a terrorist organisation. Chapter 7: Inspiring an Insurgency.

2015 — JCPOA signed. Chapter 1: An Offer Iran Shouldn’t Refuse.

2018 — JCPOA withdrawal reimposed sanctions and removed the diplomatic framework. The paper’s logic: the offer’s failure justifies escalation.

2020 — Soleimani killed. The paper’s provocation framework: take actions that make an Iranian response more likely.

2025 — Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities. Chapter 5: Leave It to Bibi.

2026 — U.S. and Israel strike Iran during active negotiations. Chapter 4: The Osiraq Option, integrated with the Persuasion conclusion.

The paper’s conclusion, “Crafting an Integrated Iran Policy,” argues that no single option is likely to succeed alone. The authors recommend combining options in sequence, as contingency plans, or as parallel tracks. Persuasion creates the predicate for sanctions. Sanctions create the predicate for strikes. Failed diplomacy — or diplomacy made to fail — provides the legitimacy that military action requires.³⁰

The only option that breaks this chain is Containment — Chapter 9, titled “Accepting the Unacceptable.” It is the option the paper assigns to last resort, the course you adopt when every tool for reshaping another country’s government has been tried. The title tells you how the authors regard it.³¹

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XIV. Sorrow, Not Anger

On February 27, 2026, hours before the strikes began, Oman’s foreign minister told American television audiences that a breakthrough had been achieved in nuclear talks with Iran. Zero stockpiling. Full verification. A deal that went beyond the JCPOA. Peace within reach.³²

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff told the press afterward that Iran had rejected a proposal for zero enrichment. Diplomats with knowledge of the talks said Witkoff was misrepresenting the exchange.³³ The Omani mediator — who had brokered all three rounds of negotiations — had given the opposite account on national television, publicly, with specifics, the day before.

The paper described this dynamic seventeen years ago: make the offer generous enough that rejection looks unreasonable. If they refuse, you have your justification. If they accept and you strike anyway, make sure the narrative is established before the missiles launch.

Sorrow, not anger.

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XV. On the Shelf

Which Path to Persia? is not unique. Documents of this kind exist for every adversary the United States designates. They are written by people who rotate between government posts and think tank fellowships, funded by policy foundations, published under institutional logos. They are written in a register designed to be legible to insiders and invisible to everyone else.

The public encounters the output of this process in its finished form: a news segment, a presidential statement, a Security Council resolution. The architecture that precedes and organises those events sits in the open. It is not hidden. It is simply not read.

This document was published in June 2009. The CIA clearance is on the title page. The authors’ government credentials are listed in their biographies. The chapter titles name the options. The conclusion explains how to combine them.

It has been on the shelf for seventeen years. The shelf is a website. Anyone can read it.

On February 25, 2026, Iran’s foreign minister said a historic agreement was within reach. On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister said a breakthrough had been achieved. On February 28, the strikes began.

The document says what it says.

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References

1. Badr Albusaidi, interview, Face the Nation, CBS News, February 27, 2026. Full transcript published by CBS News.

2. “2026 Iran War,” Wikipedia, citing BBC Verify, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Iranian state media reporting.

3. Abbas Araghchi, post on X (formerly Twitter), February 25, 2026. Reported by Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera, CBS News.

4. “2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations,” Wikipedia, citing diplomatic sources; Al Jazeera, February 28, 2026.

5. Kenneth M. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution, Analysis Paper No. 20, June 2009.

6. Connie Bruck, “The Influencer,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2010; quote also given to the New York Times, 2004; repeated in interviews with the Hollywood Reporter, 2014, and elsewhere.

7. Connie Bruck, “The Influencer,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2010, citing Saban’s remarks at a conference in Israel describing his “three ways to be influential in American politics.” Saban Foundation press release on the $13 million donation establishing the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

8. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 163–165, on the Shah’s nuclear program (twenty reactors planned by 1995, contracts with French and German firms, Iran’s stake in the Tricastin enrichment facility, and the Shah’s investments in Krupp and other European industrial firms).

9. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War, pp. 171–173, on the Anglo-American operation to destabilise the Shah: BBC Persian-language broadcasting and the platforming of Khomeini, BP-organised capital flight, escalated SAVAK repression under American “security advisers,” the Carter administration’s simultaneous human rights criticism, the Shah’s flight in January 1979, and the cancellation of the French and German nuclear program by May 1979.

10. F. William Engdahl, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, on Chase Manhattan’s $2 billion exposure to Iran, the Rockefeller-Kissinger-McCloy pressure campaign to admit the Shah to the United States despite State Department warnings, the November 1979 embassy seizure, the freezing of Iranian assets, Chase’s declaration of default and the cross-default cascade, and the Treasury’s reimbursement of Chase from seized Iranian assets.

11. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 1, pp. 47–49 and 53–54, on Russian and Chinese resistance to sanctions and the structural obstacle of Sino-Iranian energy and trade ties; Chinese officials’ explicit linkage of cooperation on Iran sanctions to American cooperation on Chinese energy security; documentation that “Chinese firms have aggressively attempted to expand their business in Iran” and that “the Russians and Chinese have done far less to hinder Iran than they might.”

12. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 5, footnote 42, p. 90, citing former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon as the source for the claim that Israeli intelligence fed information about Iran’s enrichment program to the Mujahedin-e Khalq via a cutout. Original source: Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception (New York: Atlantic, 2007), p. 525.

13. “2009 Iranian Presidential Election Protests,” Wikipedia; “The Green Movement,” Iran Primer, United States Institute of Peace.

14. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 6, pp. 103–104.

15. David Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” New York Times, June 1, 2012; “Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say,” Washington Post, June 1, 2012.

16. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 7, pp. 113–114.

17. U.S. Department of State, “Delisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq,” press statement, September 28, 2012.

18. “MEK: When Terrorism Becomes Respectable,” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, October 17, 2012; Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on MEK, July 28, 2014.

19. National Iranian American Council, statement on MEK delisting, September 2012, cited in The Guardian and multiple outlets.

20. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 1, Advantages section, pp. 39–40.

21. International Atomic Energy Agency, quarterly reports on Iranian compliance with the JCPOA, 2016–2018.

22. White House, “President Donald J. Trump is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal,” May 8, 2018.

23. U.S. Department of Defense, confirmation of the strike on Qasem Soleimani, January 3, 2020.

24. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 3, pp. 65–66.

25. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 4, pp. 77–78.

26. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 5, p. 91.

27. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 5, p. 91.

28. “Twelve-Day War ceasefire,” Wikipedia; IEEE Spectrum, “The Real Story of Stuxnet” (updated June 2025).

29. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 5, p. 91.

30. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Conclusion, pp. 145–147.

31. Pollack et al., Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 9, pp. 131–132.

32. Badr Albusaidi, interview, Face the Nation, CBS News, February 27, 2026; Anadolu Agency, February 28, 2026.

33. “2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations,” Wikipedia, citing diplomatic sources; Common Dreams, March 2, 2026.