Robbie Michaelson
Chosen Blindness: Iran’s Shadow Empire and the West’s Forty-Seven Year FailureFor forty-seven years, the West watched. And chose not to see.Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary regime announced its intentions from the very first day - in its founding ideology, its hostage-taking, its charter for Hezbollah, its fatwa against Salman Rushdie, its funding of terrorism on five continents. None of it was hidden. All of it was documented. And year after year, decade after decade, the democratic world looked at the evidence and decided that accommodation was preferable to confrontation.Chosen Blindness is the story of that decision - and of the compounding cost it produced.Drawing on decades of public record, Robbie Michaelson traces the full arc of Iran’s shadow empire: from the construction of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982, to the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, to Iran’s global assassination campaigns against its own dissidents, to the strategic lifeline provided by China, Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan that rendered Western sanctions largely hollow - to the catastrophic events of October 7, 2023, which were not a surprise. They were a bill come due.This is not a book about the Middle East alone. It is a book about how free societies make the choice to defer reckoning - and about what happens when the interest on that deferral can no longer be paid in someone else’s blood.Written from inside the region as the events of 2025 and 2026 were unfolding, Chosen Blindness offers what no news cycle can: the complete picture, in one place, for any reader who wants to understand how the world arrived at this moment - and what comes next.'Robbie Michaelson is also the author of The Broken Covenant: Netanyahu and Israeli Democracy.'
