For America in the fall of 1979 the strategic center of the world is the Persian Gulf, and I shall discuss the effect of Middle Eastern developments on the security of that area. Certainly, nothing that has occurred within the past few months is reassuring. Iran is ruled by a regime—one can hardly call it a government—that practices an indigenous form of fascism with a medieval Islamic overlay. Its basic outlook is xenophobic; it opposes Western concepts of progress and, therefore, the West itself—and particularly the United States.