Lawrence Freedman’s post, “Iran, History, and Strategy by Analogy,” in the strategic and military affairs blog “War on the Rocks,” is a thorough and respectful engagement with Elliott Abrams’s recent article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “A Misleading Cold War Analogy: Don’t count on containing Iran.” 

Freedman, a former foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, and professor of war studies at King’s College London, takes on Abrams’s major points of alignment between the Cold War and the present, and focuses on what he describes as the most important question the article raises—“whether there are any grounds for optimism in the recent political developments in Iran.”