In December 1977, US President Jimmy Carter delivered a speech in Tehran in which he praised the country’s close relations with his own. He described the oil-rich, pro-Western monarchical Iran as ‘an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world’. He attributed this stability to the ‘great leadership of the Shah’, stating, ‘this is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you’.1 As it turned out, President Carter spoke too soon about the Western-backed autocrat Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Little more than a year later, the Shah was overthrown in the mass revolution of 1978/79 that gave rise to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic government, and a new Iran with an anti-American and anti-Israeli posture.
Contrary to expectations, the predominantly Shi’a Islamic Republic of Iran has continued to function as a relatively stable and secure state in an increasingly turbulent region. It has done so despite myriad and mounting domestic and foreign policy complications and challenges, arising partly from the nature of its regime and partly from its adversarial relations with the United States. Iran’s current trajectory points to a future in which the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be any less significant than in its past. The Islamic Republic appears resilient and mature enough to uphold Iran’s place as the inheritor of a rich civilization and culture, with a capacity in the modern age to act as a critical player in its region and on the world stage.
Since the revolution, the Islamic Republic has shown its capacity for survival against remarkable trials. Not least of these was the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, which was imposed on Iran by the Sunni Arab Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein (1979–2003). This proved to be the longest, bloodiest and costliest war fought in the modern history of the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic has weathered both the US policy of containment, which involved the threat of regime change and military action, and severe sanctions, backed by some of America’s allies. It has also endured a number of highly destabilizing developments around it, ranging from the 1979 Soviet invasion and decadelong occupation of Afghanistan, to the 1991 first Gulf War between the US-led coalition and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
The Islamic Republic has also had to cope with growing apprehension from a number of Gulf Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia; the 2006 war between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon; and the ongoing crisis besetting Iran’s ally, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, since 2011. The latest episode that has confronted Iran, the region and the West is the rise of the Sunni extremist group of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and its proclamation of an ‘Islamic State’ – IS – (khilafat) in June 2014. This – together with the subsequent US-led military campaign to destroy IS, thereby helping Iraq to preserve its territorial integrity and, at the same time, hastening the fall of the Assad regime – has generated a new conflict on Iran’s doorstep. Iran has had to deal with this in ways that could both remove the threat of IS on the one hand and preserve its regional geopolitical and strategic interests on the other.
Throughout its existence, the Islamic Republic has endured a difficult journey. In many ways, this has been the fate of Iran since its consolidation as a distinct political and territorial actor more than 2,500 years ago. However, the period since the advent of Khomeini’s Islamic government has been characterized by a degree of exceptionalism: it is the first modern Iranian political order to have locked horns with a superpower like the United States and thus to have challenged the prevailing international system.
The Islamic Republic has proved to be more enduring, with a capacity to rebound, than some foresaw when it came to power. Indeed, in the early days of the regime, when Washington rejected it as contrary to US interests and as an anomaly in the international order, some specialists and policymakers seriously doubted its long-term chances of survival. Yet, these doubts have proved as ill-founded as President Carter’s praise of the Shah.
The resilience of the Islamic Republic can be attributed to a number of factors, with three worthy of special attention. The first is related to the nature of Iran’s unique pluralist Islamic political order, as defined by Khomeini’s Shi’a version of Islam. Khomeini and his zealous followers melded religious traditions and Islamic and nationalist ideas into a complex and at times contradictory framework in order to establish a two-tiered system of Islamic governance that is now firmly entrenched. One tier was premised on the ‘sovereignty of God’, personified in velayat-e faqih (the Guardianship of Islamic Jurists, possibly in the tradition of the Aristotelian ‘philosopher king’ or figures like Khomeini himself), who is endowed with supreme religious and constitutional authority over the polity. The other tier was designed to reflect the ‘sovereignty of people’, represented by an elected President and National Assembly (Majles). The system of governance that evolved from this may best be described as theocratic political pluralism.
Khomeini’s framework and approach to building this system, which have largely governed Iran’s domestic and foreign policy operations to the present day, have provided the Iranian political system with a degree of inbuilt Islamic-based political pluralism. Over time this has spawned various Islamic factions, with three at the forefront: conservative, pragmatist and reformist, with each multifaceted from within. Although the system from the beginning weighed heavily in favour of the conservative faction, it has nonetheless contained space for the other two factions to gain political ascendancy from time to time through the electoral process in order to make the Islamic government and its foreign policy postures more palatable to the government’s domestic and international audience. The election to the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–97) as the head of the pragmatist group, Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) from the reformist camp, and moderate Hassan Rouhani (2013–) with the backing of both the pragmatist and reformist factions, is indicative of this function of the Iranian political and factional system.
This is not to claim that factionalism has not fragmented the ruling clerical elite and resulted in bitter power struggles, as was the case over the disputed outcome of the 2009 presidential election. Nor is it to assume that the system of governance functions efficiently and effectively. To the contrary, the system suffers from serious internal stresses and tensions as well as patronage, corruption and dysfunctional features – the system’s two tiers have grown increasingly incongruous. However, notwithstanding the state’s coercive powers, the system has a measure of internal elasticity that enables it to engage in processes of reformation when necessary in order to cushion itself against internal discontent and foreign pressure. As such, whatever one’s view of this system, it appears to have built more enduring structures of survivability than had the Shah’s autocratic rule.
The second factor concerns the opportunities that have become available to the Iranian Islamic regime as a result of outside actors’ – especially from the United States – policy behaviour towards Iran and its region. Washington’s original rejection of the Islamic regime and its effort to contain it over the years have ultimately proved to be short-sighted. Although the regime has long proved itself resilient enough to overcome or defy the US’s adversarial efforts, President Barack Obama (2009–16) became the first American leader to recognize the futility of the US policy of containment. He has not only acknowledged America’s past hegemonic interference in Iran, but also promoted diplomacy as the first instrument to deal with Tehran, especially since Rouhani’s rise to power. With Iran’s nuclear programme becoming a defining issue in the country’s relations with the US and its allies, both sides have been availed of an opportunity to reach a settlement on the matter as a possible prelude to some kind of rapprochement.
The third factor is that despite Tehran’s strong and publicly Islamic ideological stance, its foreign policy is driven largely by pragmatic rather than idealistic considerations. It has often relied on its ideological disposition as a source of policy justification rather than as a policy guide. A glance at the Islamic government’s foreign policy behaviour from the early years of the revolution clearly indicates that the regime has been very calculating in most of its foreign policy moves. It has made sure that they are conducted more or less in proportion to the changing domestic needs and regional and international environments. This has been as much the case with its on-again/off-again hardline stance against the United States as it has been in the conduct of its relations with regional states and beyond. It has rarely failed to make necessary foreign policy adjustments, albeit on a proportionate scale, when these have been required by changes in Iran’s domestic conditions as well as regional and international settings.
At times the Islamic Republic has given ground and at other times it has retreated, depending on the realities of the moment and the nature of the issues at hand, without appearing to make too many compromises that could render its Islamic ideology obsolete as an instrument of national legitimation and mobilization. There are many examples that illustrate this point. Major ones include Tehran’s acceptance of an unconditional ceasefire in the war with Iraq in 1988; its neutrality over the US-led military campaign to reverse the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; its acceptance of United Nations (UN) mediation to avoid a war with the Pakistan-backed Taliban over the militia’s killing of 11 Iranian consulate staff in northern Afghanistan in 1998; its decision to back America’s overthrow of the Taliban regime and to play a helpful role in support of American efforts to establish the Hamid Karzai government to replace that of the Taliban in 2001; and its decision not to create obstacles to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Lately, it has also included Tehran’s refraining from direct confrontation with Saudi Arabia over the latter’s 2012 military deployment in the Shi’a majority- but Sunni minority-ruled Bahrain and the Saudi-led military operations against the allegedly Iranian backed Shi’a Huthis in Yemen. Further, it has encompassed Rouhani’s conciliatory endeavours to secure a resolution of the nuclear impasse with the United States and its allies as a precondition for ending Western and international sanctions. Even in the current Iraqi crisis, Tehran has adopted a posture that largely coincides with that of the United States in confronting IS.
At the same time, Tehran has not hesitated to exploit favourable situations when available in order to boost its soft and hard power in pursuit of strengthening its regional influence, mainly for defensive purposes. It has managed, largely through proxy operations, to build strong leverages by cultivating close relationships with either governments or subnational forces in the region – from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon and Palestine. These relationships are not all of a security and military nature. Many of them also have serious political, economic, trade, cultural and humanitarian dimensions. The Iranian model of Shi’a Islamic governance has had little or no attraction in the Sunni-dominated region, but Tehran’s policy actions have helped it to become an important regional player.
In spite of its international isolation, the Islamic government has also succeeded in building its hard power. Certainly, Iran’s full military capability has not been tested since the end of the Iran–Iraq War. Also, by all accounts, the country’s military machine and security forces have not acquired an amount of technological and firepower capability to match, for example, that of Israel. However, Iran is not a pushover either. It has apparently achieved a level of military organizational and fighting capability whereby, in conjunction with Tehran’s proxy forces and soft power activities in the region, an attack on Iran would be very costly for its perpetrators. Its security forces, some of which are the largest in the Middle East, are vigorously trained – both militarily and ideologically – and equipped to act as the ‘guardians’ of the Islamic government and the Islamic Republic. They are heavily schooled to dispense loyalty to the Supreme Leader and act steadfastly against any internal disorder and foreign aggression.
President Obama is persuaded that for now diplomacy is the best means by which to settle US–Iranian differences, and to deal with Iran’s Islamic government. In this, he has overridden serious objections on the part of his detractors in the US and the region. He has resisted pressure from the forces of the right in the United States and Israel, which have persistently opposed any peaceful settlement that could normalize US–Iranian relations. He has also brushed aside concerns of a perceived Iranian threat from Saudi Arabia and some of its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners. The opposition to Obama’s moves has been echoed in Iran, where Rouhani has his own powerful hardline factional opponents, with strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo. These opponents have been wary of the consequences of Rouhani’s efforts to reach a lasting settlement of Iran’s nuclear programme and other differences with the US.
There is no guarantee that either Obama’s approach, or Rouhani’s equivalent need to improve relations with the United States, will result in anything substantial. However, should there be a major breakthrough leading to a US–Iranian rapprochement, it could produce the reverse effect of what the Gulf Arab states and Israel currently fear. It could result in less volatility and more stability in the region; possible US–Iranian cooperation could seriously assist the resolution of a number of deep-seated problems in the region.
Irrespective of one’s view of the Iranian Islamic regime’s domestic and foreign policy shortcomings, its Islamic government is now well entrenched, and has in the final analysis proved to be a widely responsible and shrewdly calculating player, not an irrationally fundamentalist one as has often been portrayed in the West. Given the state of turmoil in the Middle East, and given the Islamic Republic’s influential position within the region, the US and its allies are really confronted with two choices: either to isolate or to engage the Iranian regime. The best option is to engage it and through this help the moderates and anti-extremists within what is essentially a pluralist ruling clerical stratum to succeed in achieving their reformist agenda, as currently advocated by Rouhani. In the present regional climate, Iran is a relative island of stability and any strategy of debasement and isolation towards it would likely only leave the region with more turmoil and destruction.
Purpose and structure
This concise book has two primary objectives. One is to explain and examine the transformation of Iran from a pro-Western mo...
