ABSTRACT
The Islamic Revolution in 1979 completely transformed Iran’s regional status and its regional relations. The mission of the Islamic Republic has been to delegitimize the Westphalian order. Therefore, Tehran has changed its foreign policy strategy, transforming it from an alliance with the West to a strategy of maximizing revolutionary influence. These controversial trends have led to negative and conflictual interactions and conflicts between the agent and the structure in the post-1979 Middle East. The regional relations of the Islamic Republic are divided into two separate macro-discourse typologies of revolutionary idealism and revolutionary realism. The former concentrated more on the priority of Iran’s revolutionary targets with a revisionist approach and the latter, for instance, the first post-revolutionary government in Tehran, insisted that the national interests are based on the status quo in the international and regional structures. The division of the ideologically-oriented foreign policy or revolutionary idealism into two sub-discourses of Islamic Ummah-centered and also pragmatically oriented categories has been important. As such, five sub-discourses have already dominated Iranian foreign policy since 1981. They were comprised of Ummah-oriented idealism, expediency-oriented pragmatism, peace-oriented Islamic realism, justice-oriented fundamentalism and moderate-oriented pragmatism.
