Afshon Ostovar, a political scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School and the leading scholar of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, offers a comprehensive history of post-9/11 conflict in the Middle East and the strategic rivalry between the United States and Iran that has structured it. The book moves through the twin American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise and collapse of the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war and the rise and defeat of ISIS, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the proxy wars in Lebanon and Iraq, and the Israeli-Iranian shadow war that escalated into open conflict in 2024. Ostovar's central argument is that the region became the stage on which an increasingly multipolar world order took shape, with Iran building a transnational network of allied militias, Russia returning to the region as a power broker, Turkey and Saudi Arabia pursuing their own ambitions, and the United States slowly disengaging without ever finding a stable exit. Drawing on his previous book on the IRGC, Ostovar treats Iran less as a religious aberration than as a state pursuing recognizable great-power objectives with a particular toolkit. The book is dense with operational detail but written for a general policy audience, and it has become a standard one-volume guide to a quarter century of conflict that has reshaped global politics.