ABSTRACT
Mark Gasiorowski sketches the political dynamics that have underlain the foreign policy of Iran since the 1978–1979 revolution. Iran under the shah had been closely allied with the United States and the West, but that very relationship ran counter to a deep anti-imperialist and even xenophobic current in Iranian political culture that opposes foreign influence. The conflict between modernist and traditionalist segments of Iranian society was a fundamental cause of the revolution, which established the current Islamic regime. The revolutionary fervor had subsided sufficiently by 1989 that President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani initiated a period of moderation, though one that encountered obstacles from both the Left and the Right. Rafsanjani was succeeded by Mohammad Khatami, whose 1997 landslide victory on a platform of fundamental change indicated that he had the support of a substantial bloc of pro-reformist voters. Nonetheless, Khatami’s reform efforts were largely blocked by the conservatives who controlled the key political institutions of the state, including most notably Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khatami’s ineffective rule led to the disaffection of proreformists and contributed eventually to the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Throughout the early revolutionary period, Iran’s foreign policy was dominated by hostility toward the United States, culminating in the seizure of the US embassy in 1979 and the consequent hostage crisis. Iran was an exporter of revolution and a fomenter of unrest, assisting Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon and attempting to trigger a Shiite uprising in Iraq both before and during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. Oddly, Iran at this time bought arms from Israel and then directly from the United States. Iran also established close relations with Syria, which (again oddly) led it to support the secularist Baath Party in Syria while opposing it in Iraq and also to stand silently by as Syria cracked down on the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Iran also developed connections to the Islamist Palestinian organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nonetheless, even with the weakening of the moderates by 2001, Iran made several conciliatory gestures toward the United States, especially in the wake of 9/11, but angrily ended most 260cooperation when President George W. Bush described Iran as part of an “axis of evil.” Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium and its testing of missiles remain a source of tense relations with the West.
