ABSTRACT
The specter of armed conflict is haunting the Persian Gulf for the fourth time in as many decades. Iran announced the removal of all restrictions on its uranium-enrichment program. The first assumption may be broadly true, but its corollary is highly questionable. The second assumption on means driving ends is an oversimplification. When accommodationist governments have coincided with low perceived external-threat environments, Iran has tended to prioritise engagement and, where necessary, some degree of retrenchment. The picture changes when revisionist factions dominate Iranian government. For much of the 1980s – a time of domestic political flux and a brutal war initiated by Saddam – rabidly anti-Western radicals epitomised by prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi dominated Iran’s external policy. During Khatami’s second term, from 2001 to 2005, Washington rebuffed Tehran’s reformist and hence accommodationist government despite its post-9/11 security cooperation and the unprecedented grand bargain that Iran proposed.
