In Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy, Dalia Dassa Kaye sets out to explain and re-estrange one of the most stubborn antagonisms in international politics over the last 50 years. Scratch the surface, she claims, and there is something odd about the apparent imperviousness of this rivalry across multiple geopolitical upheavals, leadership transitions, and diplomatic overtures. Since the book went to press, familiar patterns of enmity have given way to outright war, first with Israeli and US strikes in June 2025, and again in February 2026 with the launch of “Operation Epic Fury.” As of the writing of this review, these conflicts have resulted in the death of one Supreme Leader, the succession of his son, and the assassinations of wide swathes of Iranian leadership. Tehran, meanwhile, has made good on threats to bring war to the region, including the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. Already, current events are outpacing Enduring Hostility. Yet the fact that so many Americans have interpreted these unprecedented outcomes as unsurprising, even inevitable, also validates Kaye’s central argument that this enmity is at least in part homegrown.
Kaye’s main contribution to the literature on the US–Iran relationship, and international rivalries writ large, is a detailed account of how antipathy toward Tehran has assumed a life and logic of its own within the corridors and conference rooms of Washington, DC. In other words, “enduring hostility is not just about them; it is also about us” (p. xi). As her pronoun selection suggests, this is a book about US foreign policy, oriented toward an audience that includes practitioners and policy analysts. As such, Kaye does not explicitly anchor her intervention in academic debates, although it is conceptually consistent with existing work on the habits and routines of enmity, the constraining power of political narratives, and the bureaucratic politics of US foreign policy.
The book itself provides an insider’s account of US–Iran policy from 1979 to the present, based primarily on interviews with high-level United States and allied decision makers. Kaye, who previously worked at the RAND Corporation, also draws upon her personal experiences, including participation in dozens of “track two” dialogues on Iran policy over the last 20 years. To borrow a term that Obama advisor Ben Rhodes infamously coined to describe the DC foreign policy establishment, “the blob” is at once the book’s subject, source, and intended audience, yielding an account that is in turns historical, ethnographic, and prescriptive.
Individual chapters, which roughly align with successive administrations, take umbrage with what passes for conventional wisdom (at least among US officials and pundits), and highlight various points at which the internal politics of US foreign policy thwarted or obscured strategic windows for re-routinization. Each chapter touches upon a few consistent themes, including the prevailing strategic context, views of key personnel, domestic political considerations, and Israel’s influence (or lack thereof) on US decision-making.
Kaye peppers the book with memorable quotes and anecdotes, though the chapters themselves would have benefitted from more rigorous conceptual scaffolding, both to streamline their exposition and to underscore Kaye’s most original contributions. For example, the contention that there are “certain boundaries and accepted narratives in Washington that may limit policy options and the testing of new approaches” (p. 19) is well-substantiated, but not particularly novel. Scholars like Ronald Krebs, Brent Steele, and Stacey Goddard have advanced similar arguments. Where most of the existing literature falls short, however, is in unpacking the mechanics of hostility endurance. This is where Kaye’s access to and experiences in the so-called “blob” prove to be an asset, allowing her to show how the notion of Iran as “the ultimate rogue state” has been operationalized through the push and pull of bureaucratic politics.
Kaye alludes to two potential mechanisms of perpetuation. The first resembles what Jordan Tama has dubbed “anti-presidential bipartisanship” (see his 2020 article in Foreign Policy Analysis and 2023 book, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy). Perhaps the most vivid example of interbranch politics enforcing rivalry is a series of decisions during the 1990s that translated enmity narratives into a more systematic program of economic coercion. Readers may be surprised to learn that as late as 1994, the United States was the largest importer of Iranian crude oil. Nor was the strategic case for doubling down on rivalry at the time self-evident. Iran was still reeling from the death of its first Supreme Leader and recovering from a brutal war of attrition with Iraq. And while the heavily mediatized spectacles of the hostage crisis and Iran-Contra scandal had tempered appetite for more proactive engagement among US officials, neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration viewed Iran as a major priority (or threat).
Iran’s salience in public imaginations, however, furnished a cudgel that legislators could wield against the White House. In 1995, under mounting congressional pressure, the Clinton administration imposed a complete trade and investment embargo on Iran. This included scrapping a lucrative contract between Iran and an American oil company, which the State Department had previously encouraged. The following year, Congress passed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) with almost unanimous support. While the efficacy of individual sanctions authorities can be debated, in aggregate, these decisions lay the groundwork for a complex regime of economic coercion that would make enmity significantly harder to undo both politically and technically.
Congress again surfaces as a spoiler during the Obama administration. Members of Congress could not prevent the negotiation or implementation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which imposed verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. Yet in passing the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), they were able to effectively mandate its continuous politicization by requiring the incumbent president to recertify Iran’s compliance every 90 days. Donald Trump reportedly loathed this exercise, which in practice entailed repeatedly endorsing his predecessor’s signature foreign policy achievement. Trump decided to walk away from the JCPOA in 2018, even though Iran was still in compliance.
The fact that this decision was not particularly controversial, even after the Trump administration’s alternative “maximum pressure” campaign failed to curtail further Iranian nuclear advances, points to a second mechanism of perpetuation—namely, concerns about professional advancement in the US system. As Kaye makes clear, every administration from Carter onward has had optimists, pragmatists, and hawks, and almost every US president has eventually authorized some form of engagement with Tehran. Still, those interested in pursuing careers in the “blob” have little incentive to buck the conventional wisdom on Iran (and ample cause to reify it). In Washington, political appointees rather than civil servants dominate key foreign policy decision-making roles, and Iran has become a professional minefield for anyone aspiring to a job that requires Senate confirmation. At the same time, the revolving door between positions in government, think tanks, and the media continuously recycles current events through stale frameworks. Kaye quotes Rob Malley, the US Special Envoy for Iran during the beginning of the Biden administration, who laments “a system that rewards certain views despite a record of failure” (p. 172).
Reading this book, I was also struck by just how little many US policy makers know about Iran itself. This myopia has led to repeated gaffes, such as when Madeline Albright assumed that she was speaking with Iran’s Foreign Minister, only to realize mid-meeting that it was his deputy. (Her staff could not identify either man.) George W. Bush’s decision to include Iran in the “Axis of Evil” represents a more consequential miscalculation, capsizing a nascent but promising diplomatic backchannel that emerged in conjunction with the war in Afghanistan (where the United States and Iran had mutual interests). Without dismissing genuine tensions over issues such as Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities and its support for Shia militias in Iraq who were responsible for the deaths of many US troops, it is striking how often American officials appear to have been genuinely taken aback by the consequences of their actions.
In retrospect, Kaye’s warning about what passes for common sense among “a Washington policy audience that had marinated in anti-Iran rhetoric for four decades” seems prescient (p. 165). Yet reading this book against the backdrop of “Operation Epic Fury” also made me wonder if the persistence of hackneyed narratives about mad mullahs might obscure other ways in which the relationship (if not the rivalry) has changed over the years. While Kaye writes that efforts to put US–Iran policy on more positive trajectory have ultimately been “like bends in a river flowing largely in the same strategic direction” (p. 3), she also identifies intermediate points—such as the hardening of sanctions policy during the 1990s, the ascendance of the nuclear file in the 2000s, and Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA—which may not have reversed the river’s flow, but still channeled it in new directions. The normalization of direct military confrontation might be yet another inflection point. For those beyond “the blob,” the fact that the specter of war has loomed over this rivalry for decades does not make its realization less consequential.
