by dinner discussions with invited experts. It is, in a sense, the riposte from the two interventionist wings of American politics to Trump's iconoclasm in foreign policy. As Jim Lobe wrote, "It's fair to predict that the ... report is likely to be the best guide to date of where a Hillary Clinton presidency will want to take the country's foreign policy."

The question is if Israel has concluded that now -- with America engrossed in its presidential election -- is the moment to launch the war.

The report discusses how to maintain America's benevolent hegemony -- or how to maintain and expand today's "rules-based international order," which implies maintaining and expanding the geo-financial order as much as the political one. "[F]rom a resurgent Russia to a rising China thatis challenging the rules-based international order to chaos, and the struggle for power in the Middle East," the report reads, "the United States needs a force that can flex across several different mission sets and prevail." The report restates in more nuanced language many of ideas that underline the concept of the "American Century" and U.S.-led unipolar world order.

The report's authors argue that the U.S. needs to "undermine and defeat Iran's hegemonic ambitions in the Greater Middle East ... Whether in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria or Bahrain, Tehran's advances and longer-term ambitions should be regarded as a threat to stability that it is in the U.S. interest to counter and deter."

As I've previously noted, the report plays down Saudi Arabia's role in regional conflicts: "We also reject Iran's attempt