Since the 1979 revolution and the fall of the Shah, Iran's leaders have faced the challenge of balancing their ideological and geopolitical approaches to foreign policy. Gradually, the Iranian leadership has come to focus on the geopolitical factor in the conduct of foreign policy. An overview of Iran's actions in the region shows how and why Iran has shifted its policies to preserve themselves from the outside world. Today, ideology is one factor among many other sources of Iran's power, and serves the aim of preserving Iran's national security and interests.
The geopolitical factors govern the post-1979 Iran’s relations with other regional states in particular and the world in general. There is little evidence to believe that this trend will discontinue in the foreseeable future. The main reason for this is the nature of the issues that Iran faces in its immediate political-security environment, which is marked by multiple sources of insecurity, especially the US military threats. These conditions require that Iran build strategic coalitions. The post-Shah regimes have been openly antagonist and challenging to the US. For example, in 1979-1981 the Iranians held captive Americans for 444 days. The US responded to this defiance by attempting to isolate Iran from 1979 onwards, for instance through sanctions that have been progressively tightened over time. The more recent round of sanctions and its nuclear 'crisis' pretext is widely seen and understood to be the latest of American attempts to put Iran ‘in its place’. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by the mainstream media and in official statements by Western governments, there is no evidence that Iran is working on a military nuclear program today. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of evidence, available in a number of reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful.
The fact remains that all the geopolitics and foreign policy aspects of today’s Iran need to be seen in the right context. Iran is located in an unstable neighbourhood and this generalized condition of instability persists. There is sectarian conflict on Iran's western flank (Iraq). There are fragile states on Iran's eastern frontier (Afghanistan and Pakistan). There are states along Iran's northern border whose political, social, and economic transformations are unsteady and incomplete (Central Asia and the Caucasus). Such an insecure environment has the potential of fuelling regional rivalries, igniting crises or military conflicts, and inducing a larger presence or direct intervention of Western powers. A major portion of Iran's political and economic capital is being spent on tackling these varied threats. The Iranian leadership's determination to maintain a powerful army reflects the national security concerns stemming from them.
There is a direct relationship between the level and likelihood of Western (read US) military threats towards Iran and the implementation of the two elements of geopolitics and ideology in Iran's foreign policy. For example, during the Iraq crisis the Iranian government devoted its foreign policy to the Shi’a cause. As a result, the new Iraq is the place that Iran's ideological and pragmatic aspects of foreign policy have converged for the first time since the Islamic revolution. The greater the number of US threats made against Tehran and its overall political-security system, the more Iran asserted and employed the Shi'a ideological element in its foreign policy approach. Presumably, a diminution in foreign threats will lead Iran to remain focused on issues related to its immediate security perimeter, reducing the ideological element while emphasizing the economic and integrative aspects of its relations with regional states.
Another evidence to demonstrate the shift of Iranian foreign policy towards the geopolitical factor stems from the events in 2006 when Iran put the “oil weapon” card on the table in response to threats from the NATO that more stringent sanctions might be imposed on it for pursuing nuclear ambitions. Iran said it would cut its oil exports to the West if a U.S.-led coalition imposed sanctions on it in response to its alleged plans to develop nuclear weapons. In a much talked about speech, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in June 2006 warned the United States that “[Washington] should know that the slightest misbehavior on your part would endanger the entire region’s energy security…You are not capable of guaranteeing energy security in the region”.
Post-revolution Iran has proven time and again, that it is not ready to bog down to the threats by the US or by its hostile neighbours. The pattern, however, has clearly changed. During the
first decade of the revolution, Iran's regional foreign policy was defined principally in ideological terms. More recently, however, geopolitical factors have predominated. Today, ideology is placed in the service of Iran's national interests and security. Given the multitude of security challenges and opportunities facing Iran, one would expect the Iranian leadership to follow a pragmatic approach to relations with the regional states that reflects geopolitical realities.
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