Atlantic Council SCOWCROFT MIDDLE EAST SECURITY INITIATIVE
ISSUE BRIEF
Is Iran an Ideological State? JULY 2024 MAHMOOD SARIOLGHALAM
“All politics are local.”
—Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, 1977 to 1987
Pillars of Iranian foreign policy
The Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative (SMESI) pays tribute to Brent Scowcroft’s efforts to ensure a cohesive and robust relationship between the US and the region. Those associated with the Initiative engage on a myriad of critical, panregional topics, including China, Russia, and great power competition in the Middle East; the future of Iran; impending regional security challenges; the politics of Middle East states and decision-making of its leaders; intraregional tensions and conflict; climate and human security challenges; interstate warfare; emerging technologies and their impact on strategic relationships; and the underlying threats facing regional states. SMESI provides policymakers fresh insights into core US national security interests by leveraging its expertise, networks, and on-theground programs to develop unique and holistic assessments on the future of the most pressing strategic, political, and security challenges and opportunities in the Middle East.
Iran’s foreign policy has generally been characterized by continuity in the postrevolutionary period, yet its motives have transformed over time. This research paper argues that Islamic fundamentalism goaded and motivated foreign policy in the first decade of the Islamic Republic of Iran. After the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country’s foreign policy maintained a fundamentalist posture, but was forcefully driven by policies to guarantee its political survival. From 1989 to the present, core revolutionary elites have applied ideology and religious symbolism to cloak policies to avoid normalization with the United States, pursue an anti-Israeli struggle to reinvigorate confrontation with Washington, and seek leverage vis-àvis the United States and Israel by nurturing proxies, an extensive missile industry, and a robust nuclear program. These components of leverage constitute a playbook to practice deterrence, with occasional compromises to circumvent large-scale military confrontation with the United States. Realpolitik is the underpinning of Iran’s foreign policy. Regime security is the core preoccupation of statecraft in Iran. All other essentials of modern governance—such as economic growth, net-zero policies, infrastructure development, research and development at higher-level institutions, civil society, and entertainment—are either downplayed or considered only insofar as they do not interfere with concerns about survival and security. Below, an analysis of Iran’s foreign policy highlights the dominance of ideology in the first decade following the revolution and its replacement by survival calculations over the past three decades. Moreover, this paper provides explanations about the pivotal role of the nuclear program in Iran’s security doctrine, while also addressing the institutional structure of the foreign policy decision-making process.
Ideology and Iranian foreign policy: 1979–1989 In line with the political tradition of other Middle Eastern countries, political outcomes in Iran since the 1978–1979 revolution involve the temperament, belief structure, and predilections of two men: Ayatollahs Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. The role of Islamic fundamentalism, epitomized by Khomeini’s character and worldview, is easily traceable in the conduct of both domestic and foreign policies, particularly in the first decade following the Iranian