What do Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the Iranian parliament have in common? Both are obsessed with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a bipartisan think tank in Washington that we’re proud to call our neighbor. Walt and the Iranians, on the other hand, both see FDD as a pillar of—you guessed it—the “Israel lobby.”  

“The Most Important Think Tanks of the United States on the Security of Iran” is a pamphlet published last month by the research center of the Iranian parliament, or maj-lis, that identified a number of U.S. think tanks that it deemed central to formulating Washington’s official Iran policy. Not surprisingly, the venerable Brookings Institution was named, as were the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but pride of place was reserved for what the Iranians perceive to be right-wing institutions, like FDD, which the pamphlet ranks as most influential.