Iran’s regional centrality and isolation

The U.S. has a tough choice between its strategic objectives in West Asia and the implications of Iran’s location 

A recent essay in Foreign Affairs argues that “Tehran has not achieved any of its lofty ambitions, but it has made progress towards them – and it is feeling emboldened by its recent successes”. It argues that “Iran is both self-assured and deeply insecure”, “displays external vigour that conceals ultimately incurable internal maladies”, has “built its foreign policy on the twin pillars of confronting the United States and Israel” and is “closer to realising its vision than it was a decade ago”. Yet, despite its success in cultivating militant groups across West Asia, there are tangible signs that it has overreached and that two-thirds of young Arabs in the region now view Iran as an adversary. The essay concedes that “Washington’s perception of Iran has suffered from four decades of estrangement and strategic narcissism”. Given the geopolitical and historical backdrop of Iran, does this reflect the totality of the country’s interests and strategic perceptions?

A decade earlier, John Limbert, former senior diplomat who was one of the hostages of the embassy siege of 1979, felt certain rules seem to guide U.S. policy over the years. They include: “(i) Never walk through an open door. Instead, bang your head against a wall; (ii) Never say yes to anything that the other side proposes. Doing so will make you weak; and (iii) The other side is infinitely hostile, devious, domineering and irrational. It is the embodiment of all that is evil.”

With an area of 1.6 million sq km, Iran is the 18th largest country in the world in terms of area. It shares land borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Iraq and maritime borders with Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman. In its long history it has experienced periods of conflict, imperial dominance and foreign occupation and most recently, a revolution. All these left a mark on its collective memory. Its culture has been hugely influential in world history and rightly depicted as an ‘Empire of the Mind.’

Since the revolution of 1979, and the end of the U.S. security umbrella under the latter’s Twin Pillars policy, Iran has been concerned about national security given its long and porous borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Refugees have poured in from Afghanistan and an armed aggression resulted in the decade-long war with Iraq. With Pakistan, there was a moment of unease after the Bangladesh War of 1971, but was soon set at rest by India.

Despite the upheavals of the post-revolutionary era and the war, Iran maintained a degree of political stability. This was thanks to its power structure, based on a multitude of loosely connected and generally fiercely competitive power centres. These power centres remain formally grounded in the Constitution and the structure emanating from it and actually grounded in the religio-political associations emanating from the clerical leadership that retains an exclusive grip on state power. Each of these also has its own factional tussles with its own power to facilitate or obstruct individual policies. The locus of individual decisions therefore is always a challenging exercise.

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Revolutionary slogans apart, Iran’s foreign policy has focused on safeguarding independence, national sovereignty, and national interests and is characterised by conscious adjustment to the reality of regional interests in what has been described as the reality of strategic loneliness. This was evident in the ambivalent reaction to the U.S. attack on Iraq.