US War on Terror and Iranian Foreign Policy Objectives (original) (raw)
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Israeli and Iranian Use of the "War on Terror" to Articulate and Achieve Foreign Policy Goals
This paper (presented to the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis Conference in Orlando, FL in April, 2004) examines the ways in which Israeli and Iranian political leaders rhetorically appropriated the U.S. “war on terror” in support of their own foreign policy goals after the September 11th attacks. It observes some interesting and rather unique features of Israeli and Iranian public diplomacy that have not, to the author's knowledge, been closely analyzed from a comparative perspective. Israel’s rhetorical campaign against Iran since September 11, 2001, has had four objectives. All had been foreign policy priorities for at least a decade. What was new was the opportunity to legitimize and achieve them as a concomitant of the U.S. “war against terror” declared by President George W. Bush. They include 1) upgrading and formalizing Israel’s strategic and security links with the U.S.; 2) preventing the normalization, or even moderate improvement, in relations between the U.S. and Iran; 2) blaming Iranian interference and support for terrorism for Israel’s failure to achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinians and 4) preserving Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East by convincing the U.S. to either destroy Iran’s nuclear capability and potential or to acquiesce to Israel’s doing so in a preemptive strike similar to the attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in June 1981. From the Iranian perspective, the “war on terror” and Bush’s uncompromising assertion that “you are either for us or against us” posed both dangers and opportunities. The greatest danger was that Iran might become the direct target of a U.S. strike against “Islamic fundamentalism.” But the “the war on terror” also seemed to present, at its outset, the possibility that the U.S. might modify its position sufficiently so as to allow for Iran’s inclusion in a coalition of “anti-terrorist” Muslim states. Within a week of the 9/11 attacks, Iran had articulated four demands which would influence its participation in such a coalition: 1) the insistence that military action in the “war against terrorism” be conducted under the auspices of the United Nations rather than of the United States; 2) a definition of “terrorism” that would encompass Israeli actions against Palestinians and Lebanon; 3) a crackdown by the U.S. and Europe on the activities of the Mojahedin-e Khalq; and 4) the assurance that the regime replacing the Taliban in Afghanistan would not be hostile to Iran. (This paper is being made available to academia.edu more than a decade after its presentation at the CIRA Conference because the arguments presented have retained their salience and are very much part of the debate on all sides about a nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran. Its detailed documentation from Israeli and Iranian media sources provide a useful timeline leading up to the current debate.)
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This research focuses on Iranian foreign policy. More specifically, it aims to discover whether Iranian foreign policy in the Middle East is offensive or defensive. Offensive foreign policy means that Iran would seek to dominate countries like Iraq and Yemen without the threat of U.S. intervention. Defensive foreign policy means that Iran is seeking to dominate countries like Iraq and Yemen because it fears that if these countries were to succumb to U.S. influence, the Iranian regime would be threatened. This research includes a literature review in the topics of international relations (IR) realism, constructivism, the history of the Middle East, the history of Iran, Middle Eastern geopolitics, Iranian foreign policy, and U.S. foreign policy. The research hypothesizes that Iranian foreign policy is offensive, seeking to dominate countries like Iraq and Yemen without the threat of U.S. intervention. Interviews were conducted with oral questionnaires distributed during the interviews. These interviews and questionnaires were given to experts on Iranian foreign policy, found at think tanks and universities like the Arab Institute for Security Studies, the Middle East Institute, and the University of Jordan. Because of Iranian foreign policy’s hypothesized offensiveness, U.S. policy toward the Middle East should invest in the Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, and Yemeni economies to gain leverage over these countries and regions. If these places continue to be places from which Iran will support terrorists, the U.S. should sanction the countries in which these terrorists congregate and offer U.S. personnel to combat these terrorists. Terrorists include members of Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Shia militias, al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. This study contributes qualitative perspectives from experts on Iranian foreign policy, Middle Eastern geopolitics, and U.S. foreign policy.
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The anti-American inclination of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policymaking is well established, and the bitter aspects of the two nation’s history well known. However, to assert a simple causal relationship between history and foreignpolicy structure portrays the Islamic Republic’s anti-Americanism as inevitable, eternal and unrelated to actors’ agency. This article disputes this simple structural understanding by drawing on Greener’s method of applying path-dependency theory to political science. We first identify the ideas and structure of revolutionary Iran, benefiting in particular from the complementary insights of postcolonial theory. Following, we examine US policy choices in the Islamic Republic’s formative period of 1978–79—specifically those related to human rights, the shah and direct US intervention—and how these were perceived and acted upon in Tehran. Our findings indicate that American actions and Iranian decisions both influenced the establishment of a path-dependent process of perception and perpetration that continues until today. Successive Iranian governments have asserted that America ignores Iranian’s human rights, supports their enemies, and pursues direct intervention, while successive US government actions, motivated by Iranian counteractions, have generated ample evidence to validate such claims. This can explain how a spiral of distrust emerged between the two nations. Keywords: Ayatollah Khomeini, Foreign policy, Iran-US relations, Islamic Revolution of Iran, Jimmy Carter, Path dependency, Postcolonialism
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Over the years, the Islamic Republic has experienced enormous fluctuations in foreign policy objectives, which revolve around the notion that there are competing interests between those of the Islamic clergy and those of the nation in general (Salehzadeh, 2013: 1). In the early years of the revolution, the leadership of Iran under the influence of Khomeini Ayatollah sought for ideological reasons and advantages, to pursue isolationism and to reduce the power of the military. However, these ideological prisms were soon challenged by national interest proponents, and at times, the latter have triumphed over ideological clerics in foreign policy formulation (Kruse, 1994: 10). The triumph of pragmatic leaders in foreign policy formulation offered a compelling example for structural realists that cannot be ignored by state theories in discussing the determinants of Iranian foreign policy. Therefore, whilst acknowledging structural realist arguments, this paper argues that internal attributes, including history, environmental factors and domestic politics all play a decisive role in shaping the behavior of Iran towards other countries.
Iran's Foreign Policy in Iraq and Syria after 2011 EZGİ UZUN
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While scholars of Iran’s foreign policy interpret the nuclear deal as a move towards pragmatism under the administration of Hassan Rouhani, the strong ideological contours of Iran’s simultaneous political and military engagement with Shia political movements in the Middle East is relatively underscored. This study thus seeks to examine the Axis of Resistance – a dense Iran-led alliance network of state and non- state actors covering a wide range of Shia mobilization activities across the Middle East. The study rst maps out Iran’s foreign policy discourses addressing the political transformations in the Middle East at three critical junctures: the Iraq War of 2003, the Syrian civil war of 2011, and the rise of ISIL in 2014. This is followed by an analysis of how these discourses are translated into policy strategies, with a focus on Iranian support for Shia militias across Iraq and Syria and the development of popular mobilization units like Hashd al-Shaabi. The study shows that the discursive and organizational institutionalization of ‘religion’ in foreign policy has the capacity to reshape the existing military orders and to challenge power balances across the Middle East. This research is based on two eld trips conducted in Tehran in the summers of 2015 and 2016, as well as data retrieved from Persian news sources and Iranian policy elites’ of cial websites.
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As one of the most significant actors of the region, Iran’s interactions with great powers (as well as regional powers and non-state actors) have come under scrutiny. This article adopts an historical account and suggests a framework to study Iran’s foreign policy. The framework is contextually built with a multilevel approach to specify the independent and intervening variables of Iran’s foreign policy through the light of neoclassical realist theory. In this context, it is argued that the independent variables of Iran’s foreign policy are geopolitics, threat perceptions and balance of power politics. These systemic variables are filtered through nationalism, theological and revolutionary ideology and policy making mechanisms.