In November 2002,
Al Ahram Weekly quoted him as remarking with regard to the U.S.'s targeted killing of al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen,
It is too early to tell whether this event alone will precipitate a shift toward explicit support of such tactics as employed by Israel on Washington's part. What does seem clear, however, is that the United States and Israel are gravitating toward increasingly similar perceptions, and possibly strategies, in the war on terrorism.
In his 2005 book
Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States, Berman noted that the U.S. had inadvertently removed two major brakes on Iranian regional power: Saddam Hussei in Iraq and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. In August 2006 he noted that to that point in time, the U.S. had had a lot of difficulty in convincing especially Russia and China, to support sanctions on Iran for its moving forward with its uranium enrichment program, and that "both Moscow and Beijing are major strategic partners of the Islamic republic and have a vested interest in protecting their investments in the Iranian regime." In July 2008 he observed: ""The Iranians are playing a colossal game of chicken with us," says Ilan Berman, vice-president of the American Foreign Policy Council. "Does the international community have the will to take the short-term pain and disarm these guys, or accept the long-term pain of a region completely dominated by this regime? I think the world community has essentially come to grips with the fact that Iran is going to go nuclear."
In October 2009, Berman noted: "“The Iranian strategy has been pretty consistent all along; to keep the West talking while they work on their nuclear program." In March 2010, commenting on Iran's warning to Europe not to sanction it, he observed:"The Iranians have a pattern of warning anyone threatening to get tough with them, basically saying, ‘Don’t do this, because there will be consequences. What’s notable here is that they are singling out Europe. It’s a sure sign Europe is being more activist [about curtailing economic ties to Iran] than it normally is.