March 29, 2024

Understanding Iran’s Foreign Policy

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U.S. Iran policy has long suffered from a poor understanding of the Iranian government’s behavior and goals

The U.S. has a history of misunderstanding its adversaries. There is a strong tendency in American foreign policy debates to ascribe ideological and fanatical motives to other states to the exclusion of other considerations, and this is particularly true of how Washington perceives governments that have come to power through revolution. This habit of taking revolutionary rhetoric at face value has often blinded our policymakers to the continuities in another country’s foreign policy, and it has caused them to misinterpret that government’s actions and to exaggerate the threat that they pose. It has also led the U.S. to dismiss evidence of the other state’s pragmatism as a ruse rather than seeing it as an opportunity for constructive diplomacy. Nowhere is this more relevant today than in the making of U.S. Iran policy.

The Trump administration has insisted on seeing every Iranian action as an expression of the state’s revolutionary ideology, and they have justified their destructive policies in the region largely in terms of opposing so-called Iranian “expansionism.” As Mike Pompeo wrote in a widely-panned article for Foreign Affairs, “The regime’s revolutionary mindset has motivated its actions ever since” 1979. He stated that this was the overriding motivation for everything Iran has done in the last forty years: “Ever since, regime officials have subordinated all other domestic and international responsibilities, including their obligations to the Iranian people, to fulfilling the revolution.”

The administration has made no attempt to understand Iran’s perspective or the reasons why its government behaves as it does. It is no coincidence that its Iran policy has been completely unsuccessful. U.S. officials condemn Iran for not being a “normal” country, and they imply that Iranian foreign policy would be radically different if Iran had a different government. These assumptions are outdated and wrong, and they have had a terrible distorting effect on U.S. policies in the Middle East. That has had and continues to have dangerous consequences for the U.S., Iran, and the entire region.

Most American policymakers have misunderstood why the current Iranian government behaves the way it does, and that has led them to both overstate the threat from Iran as well as to make serious mistakes that have redounded to the benefit of their government. That is why Ariane Tabatabai’s No Conquest, No Defeat is such a timely and important contribution to the debate. Through a careful, insightful study of Iran’s security policies from the Qajars until today, Tabatabai elucidates the security thinking of Iranian leaders and demonstrates significant continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian foreign policy. “Iran is motivated by more than ideology, religion, and politics. Instead, it holds a set of assumptions that are shared between different leaderships regardless of domestic politics.” It should not surprise us that states have permanent interests that remain the same no matter what kind of government they have, but this truth has often been neglected in Iran’s case.

According to Tabatabai, the recurring ideas in Iranian security thinking are these: a deep distrust of foreign powers based on their experience with Russia, Britain, and America; a belief that Iran must therefore be self-reliant and not too closely aligned with other states; no confidence in the protections of international law and institutions; and a commitment to maintaining territorial integrity and sovereignty through constant defense and deterrence. These assumptions shape Iranian foreign policy today, and they also link it to its pre-revolutionary past. Based on the arguments presented in the book, there are good reasons to expect that a post-Islamic Republic Iran would engage with the world in a similar fashion.

Pompeo has repeatedly demanded that Iran become a “normal” country (by which he means one that does what the U.S. wants), but in many important respects Iran could not be more normal. Tabatabai notes the similarities between Iran’s security thinking and that of other countries that have experienced foreign invasion and interference. She argues that “contrary to claims that post-revolution Iran is fundamentally different from the rest of the international community due to its ideology and the policies resulting from it, the country is largely similar to most other states.” While Iranian leaders continue to employ revolutionary rhetoric, the record of their actions shows a government that is much more concerned with protecting itself and its country rather than exporting its ideology abroad. Just as there have been strong continuities in Russian and Chinese foreign policy despite their revolutions, Iran’s foreign policy is informed and shaped by its historical memory of past defeats and colonial meddling.

Like other states that have suffered from external aggression and outside interference on many occasions, Iran is wary of other states and seeks to guard itself against potential attacks. The experience of the war with Iraq in the 1980s has strongly reinforced that view among Iran’s current leadership, and much of the Iranian government’s behavior in the last thirty years can be traced to the lessons that they drew from that bloody stalemate. But there are also important precedents in earlier modern Iranian history that continue to inform the thinking of Tehran’s leadership today: the humiliating treaties of Golestan and Turkmenchay signed with Russia in the 19th century that saw permanent losses of territory that had been under Iranian control for centuries, the devastating famine that resulted from the machinations of the great powers during and after WWI, and the Allied takeover of the country during WWII. The famine has had a particularly powerful effect on Iranian thinking: “The Great Persian Famine that marked the end and aftermath of the war remains engraved in the Iranian psyche. As today’s Iranians see it, the British and the Russians ignored Persia’s declaration of neutrality and deliberately sacrificed thousands of lives.”

Tabatabai’s study is an excellent example of strategic empathy done right. One does not have to approve of anything that the Iranian government is doing to understand why they have done it, and in order to make sense of Iran’s policies in the region it is essential to take seriously what they think they are doing. The policies that the U.S. routinely condemns as aggressive and destabilizing are the result of Iran’s efforts to guard itself against attack and to achieve strategic depth in a region where they have very few allies. For example, their development of a missile program stems from their disadvantage in this area during the war with Iraq and their determination not to repeat that experience. Developing their own weapons systems is driven by the desire for self-reliance. Their support for non-state groups in different countries is a product of their distrust of other powers and their relative isolation on the international stage. As the book’s title says, the goal is not conquest, but it is to avoid suffering another defeat like the ones Iran has experienced in the past. This is not a recipe for “expansionist” or “imperialist” foreign policy, as it is normally presented to the public by the administration and hawkish analysts. It explains why Iran usually behaves reactively and defensively, and it is why Iran seeks to wield influence but not to have direct control in other countries.

U.S. Iran policy has long suffered from a poor understanding of the Iranian government’s behavior and goals. Some of this is due to the lack of communication and lack of formal relations between our governments, and some of this comes from the ideological obsessions of some of our leaders and analysts. If we want to have a more constructive and successful policy towards Iran that both advances U.S. interests and improves relations between our countries, we are very much in need of more accurate assessments of Iranian foreign policy.

No Conquest, No Defeat is a valuable corrective to the conventional explanations of modern Iranian foreign policy. Professional analysts and casual readers alike will benefit enormously from reading it. When the Biden administration takes office next year, there will be a brief window of opportunity to correct some of the worst mistakes in U.S. foreign policy. Undoing the destructive Iran policy of the last four years should be one of their top international priorities. As Biden and his advisers prepare for the transition, they would do well to absorb the lessons from Tabatabai’s important book as they plan their policy towards Iran.

about the author

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on and written by:
Daniel Larison
The American Conservative 2020-11-25 05:01:00

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