ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the underlying political and economic principles, or "imperatives," of Iranian foreign policy prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, what the imperatives have been since that time, and what degree of continuity or change there is between the two. Foreign policy-making in Iran, until the Constitutional Revolution of 1906—1907, was merely an extension of the power of the shah. "The means most often preferred was war, whether it was motivated by religious dogmatism, by irredentism and expansionism, or by the desire to restore or defend the independence of the state with which the monarch and his dynasty were closely identified." The dominant imperative of Iranian foreign policy was the need to preserve the independence of Iran as a sovereign nation in the face of political and economic pressure from Britain and Russia. The self-imposed political isolation that was a by-product of the ideology of the Islamic Revolution necessarily affected Iran's economic policies, too.
