The global war on terror is a dubious template for the security challenges faced by the United States because it distorts the focus of policy and exaggerates the effectiveness of military power. A grand strategy cannot rest solely on the idea of 'taking out' specific sets of bad guys and fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It is essential, as the Iran case demonstrates, to get at intractable political tensions and frozen geopolitical divisions that foster dangerous security conditions in much of the globe. Strategic debate should focus less on unilateral versus multilateral approaches or hard power versus soft power, and recognise the real missing ingredient in recent policy-smart statecraft using leverage in all its forms for engaging the world's zones of turbulence.