It may look and sound like it sometimes, but Trita Parsi, an expert on the Middle East, said Iran and Israel are not locked in an ideological, winner-take-all struggle in the region.

Parsi, the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, laid out the case for continued U.S. engagement with Iran during a speech to an audience of about 100 people Thursday night in Franklin & Marshall College's Stahr Auditorium. The lecture was organized by the Lancaster Interchurch Peace Witness.

Engagement with Iran can work, Parsi said, because the country's ideology does not actually drive its actions.

"What you see is that the shifts in Israeli-Iranian relations are not coinciding with ideological shifts, but rather with geostrategic shifts," said Parsi, who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden with his family when he was four years old.

Parsi wrote "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States." The book, published in 2007, asserts that Israel and Iran are actually in a resolvable regional struggle.

Parsi presented this main argument in a 35-minute talk that traced the history of cooperation between the two countries and illustrated how they often shared common goals even as Iran was sometimes trying to win points in the Arab world by spouting anti-Israeli rhetoric.

"Often times, the intensity of their outbursts against Israel was directly propionate to their efforts to cover up how much they were dealing with Israel behind the scenes," Parsi said.

Soon after the formation of the Israeli state, Parsi said the two countries were drawn together by threats from the Soviet Union and Arab nationalism, which for Iran eventually meant a war with Iraq. During that conflict, Israel was Iran's source for spare military parts.

After collapse of the Soviet Union and the Arab countries that were part of the U.S. coalition in the Persian Gulf War, Israel felt less necessary to the U.S. in the region and began to see Iran as a threat to regional dominance.

Since then, the two countries have been undermining U.S. policies that seem beneficial to the other as they struggle for power in the region. Parsi said this is simply a strategic conflict and not an ideological battle.

As nasty as a strategic conflict may sound, it is resolvable — unlike ideological battles which Parsi said "never end up in a draw."

Consequently, officials from the United States need to continue negotiations with Iran without worrying that, by talking with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they're sitting down with the modern equivalent of Adolph Hitler.

Yet Parsi said that because of Iran's current instability following disputed June elections, its leaders can't currently commit to changes in its nuclear programs.

Talks should eventually be reopened, but Parsi said that for now the United States simply needs to "wait until a new situation emerges in Iran — hopefully soon — so that at a minimum they are capable of making big decisions of this kind."