Who is winning the war on terror? It’s not the United States or the West, say researchers at London’s Royal Institute for International Studies, but Iran. Its borders are more secure and power less challenged in the region now that enemy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have been toppled. Its stature in the broader Middle East and Islamic world is greater, thanks to the perception that it and its proxies have challenged the Western world and survived. The institute’s report states bluntly that Iran has replaced America as the most influential power in the Middle East. One researcher, Ali Ansari, put it this way:

“The United States needs to take a step back and reassess its entire policy towards Iran and work out, first of all, what does it want and how is it going to achieve it because at the moment everything is rather like putting a sticking plaster on a fairly raw wound and it is not really actually doing much at all.”

This reading of the events and campaigns of the past five years is not limited to European fatalists or anti-American tenured radicals. It can be found throughout the pages of “realist” writings and websites.