ABSTRACT
Iran is a threat. There is hardly a U.S. president who has not served up this narrative since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. The crucial question is: What makes Iran a threat, compared to (a) all other illiberal and/or Islamic states that (b) either seek or already possess nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or massively invest in their military build-up and that (c) are not part of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)? To answer this question, the chapter uses an enhanced constructivist interpretation of Stephen M. Walt’s balance-of-threat theory and the concept of insecurity as a tool to analyze the perception and construction of Iran as a threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis serves as a blueprint for the analysis, since here, too, the perception and construction of a threat under the condition of insecurity has played a decisive role.
