ABSTRACT
The "U.S. Foreign Policy Myth" is an extremely powerful and pervasive belief system about the nature of foreign policy, its conduct, and its effect on American life. For Iran, the United States became the Great Satan, an external illegitimate force that continually strove to destroy the pure, internal core of the Iranian Revolution. For anthropologists it is particularly galling to see that in the United States' conduct of foreign policy, almost no attention is paid to cultural differences between nations. Iranian and US leaders have accused each other of manipulative and insincere dealings with each other. Such accusations are extremely difficult to evaluate in a multicultural context. The United States had indeed become accustomed to pursuing serious foreign policy negotiations over economic and military conflict exclusively with other Western industrialized nation states. Religious doctrine often serves as the most tangible concretization of the core symbols of society.
