WASHINGTON — Dennis B. Ross, the former Middle East adviser to President Obama, faults Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, for exacerbating tensions with Israel during the talks that led up to the recent nuclear accord with Iran and quotes her casting the dispute in racial overtones.

In a new book on Israeli-American relations, Mr. Ross, who has worked on Middle East diplomacy for presidents of both parties, concludes that Ms. Rice’s “combative mind-set” worsened an already troubled relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who feared that negotiations would leave Iran a threshold nuclear state.

Mr. Ross also reports administration divisions on whether to consider a military strike against Iran to stop it from obtaining nuclear weapons if all other means failed. Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “made it clear that we were in two wars in the region and that was quite enough,” Mr. Ross writes in “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama,” out next week.

Mr. Ross says that he, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state; James B. Steinberg, then her deputy secretary; and Thomas E. Donilon, Ms. Rice’s predecessor as national security adviser, “had a different view” and believed that “for coercive diplomacy to succeed,” the Iranians “had to believe we would use force if diplomacy failed.”