Winning the Long War

Winning the Long War is a trenchant examination of the past seven years of the Global War on Terror, the future battlegrounds that will confront the United States in the struggle against radical Islam in the years ahead, and how America can reclaim the initiative in what has become the defining struggle of the twenty-first century. Middle East expert Ilan Berman offers new thinking on counterterrorism strategy and provides the new administration with ways to close the gaps in current American counterterrorism strategy.

While there are many books about fighting terrorism, none offer Berman's approach of integrating diplomatic, legal, economic, military, and theoretical strategies into a comprehensive national security action plan. Using cutting edge analysis of current terrorism trends, Winning the Long War identifies three central failings that triggered the West's retreat and radical Islam's simultaneous advance: the failure to properly define the enemy, the inability to dominate the battlefields, and the inability to calibrate counterterrorism strategies. Demonstrating the need for more creative thinking about the nature of the conflicts in which the West now finds itself, this book lays out the steps that must be taken to win the long war.

Ilan Berman is Vice President for Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council. He has written extensively on the Middle East and is author of Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States, coeditor (with J. Michael Waller) of Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes, and editor of Taking on Tehran: Strategies for Confronting the Islamic Regime.

Berman is an adjunct professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and editor of The Journal of International Security Affairs. As an expert on regional security and foreign policy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, he has consulted for both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Department of Defense.