Leadership Quote by Howard Berman

“Central,” “major,” “key”: Berman stacks adjectives like sandbags, not to dramatize Iran, but to domesticate it. The sentence is a case for attention that tries hard not to sound like a case for entanglement. It’s technocratic diction doing political work, turning a volatile adversary into a set of policy domains - foreign policy architecture, energy markets, and “interaction with the Muslim world” - that can be managed, funded, and argued over in committee rooms.

The intent is coalition-building. By naming three different rationales, Berman gives every faction in Washington a door into the same conclusion: you can care about Iran if you care about regional security, oil prices, or America’s standing in Muslim-majority societies. That breadth is strategic; it turns Iran from a niche obsession (nonproliferation, Israel, sanctions) into a structural variable in U.S. power.

The subtext is also a warning against simplistic narratives. Calling Iran “central” concedes agency and gravity - an implicit rebuke to anyone who thinks the U.S. can ignore Tehran, bomb a problem away, or outsource the file to allies. At the same time, the phrasing keeps moral judgment at arm’s length. There’s no “threat,” no “terror,” no “regime.” Iran is described as a node in systems we depend on.

Context matters: a post-9/11, Iraq-and-Afghanistan era where “the Muslim world” became a diplomatic category and energy still shaped strategy. The line reads like a map legend for U.S. anxieties: legitimacy, stability, and the price of a barrel, all triangulated through one country.