Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic by Amin Saikal

Author:Amin Saikal [Saikal, Amin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, History & Theory, International Relations, Iran, Middle East, Political Science
ISBN: 9780691175478
Google: P293DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0691175470
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-02-05T03:00:00+00:00

6

Regional Relations

As a whole, any state’s regional and foreign policy is primarily a reflection of its domestic politics. The Islamic Republic of Iran is no exception in this respect. The feature that distinguishes the Republic from most other states is the extent to which the confluence of internally and externally generated factors has influenced its regional behavior. In the course of crises and opportunities, the Republic’s foreign policy has remained one of defiance on the one hand and pragmatic reflexivity on the other. In this, it has kept very much within the tradition of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s jihadi-ijtihadi approach and so has spawned a pattern of foreign policy conduct that can be described as resistance, negotiations, and agreement. In order to enable it to act as a major regional player, the Islamic regime has often looked for a workable nexus between its domestic situation and foreign policy objectives. It has done so despite its broad-based but top-heavy foreign-policy-making process and the challenges that the Republic has faced since its inception.

The Iranian Revolution brought about distinct ideological and political shifts that fundamentally altered the regional balance of power and Iran’s relations with its neighbors. Under the Shah’s pro-Western secularist rule, Iran’s political relations with its mostly Sunni Arab and non-Arab neighbors were still colored by historical differences and geopolitical rivalry. However, they were also defined by a degree of shared regional interests and constraints in the relatively stable regional setting generated by Pax Americana in the bipolar context of the Cold War. Khomeini’s Islamist politics radically reoriented Iran’s foreign policy objectives away from the West in favor of a “third way” that was “neither East, nor West, but Islamic,” also a motto for the “export of revolution” in defense of the downtrodden.1 Initially, the ruling clerics had high hopes that their revolutionary ideals and model of velayat-e faqih governance would attract widespread support in the region. In reality, however, they were soon confronted with challenges that required them to be less ideological and more pragmatic in their policies. As such, their pursuit of “export of revolution” was gradually deprioritized except where it had already borne some fruit.

Iran’s standing has benefited, more than anything else, from several recent events in the region—America’s faltering 2001 intervention in Afghanistan, its 2003 invasion of Iraq, and its decisive inaction in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fī ‘l-‘Iraq wa-sh-Sham, or Daish, commonly known as ISIS), which declared a khilafat (Islamic government) across large swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territories on June 29, 2014. These issues have led to a major reconfiguration of the status quo and the creation of power vacuums that Iran—along with its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and, since late 2015, Russia—has exploited to its advantage. By the same token, these developments, coupled with Iran’s nuclear program, have alarmed Israel and the Saudi-led GCC, which have come to cooperate in a broad front against Iranian regional influence well beyond their parallel interests. Saudi

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