Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 1, February–March 2009, pp. 165–190
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Iran–US relations – strained at the best of times since the 1979 Iranian revolution – have never been worse than during the past six years, due to the much more intense interaction between the two states since the revelations about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The United States sees Iran as a potential strategic rival, while Tehran views the American presence in the Middle East as a potential existential threat. This has led to zero-sum thinking and has raised the stakes correspondingly. In the process there has been an inflation of the Iranian threat, which is poorly understood and often exaggerated. Depicting Iran as a military threat obscures the real political threat the country poses to its region; Iran’s regional behaviour has been neglected and overshadowed by the contentious nuclear issue. However, it is precisely Iran’s behaviour and goals which feed concerns about its nuclear ambitions.
It is important to put the Iranian threat in context. In recent years, what was largely a bilateral rivalry between Iran and the United States has become displaced and expanded throughout the region: Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf states have all been affected by the growing tension, and there are signs that Iranian influence is becoming stronger in these areas. Iran’s more active and effective diplomacy in the Middle East is due to the conjunction of three separate trends, all of which are reversible. The first is the emergence of a permissive regional environment, hospitable to Iran’s diplomacy; the second, the ascension of an ideological and hardline conservative government in Tehran, predisposed to a more activist diplomacy; and third, the oil windfall, which freed resources for seeding movements and clients supportive of Iranian goals. However, the influence that has accrued to Iran as a result of these trends is transitory and precarious, and there are constraints on Iran becoming a regional superpower.
Iran–US relations
A foundational myth of the Iranian revolution was that anti-Americanism was the equivalent of anti-imperialism. This belief, together with the revolutionary desire to ‘export the revolution’, has become part of Iran’s identity and raison d’être, which includes support for ‘oppressed’ people. Because these concepts are seen as vital to the regime’s legitimacy, and hence security, they would be difficult to drop, not least because the sense of embattlement they engender is an integral part of maintaining elite control of the beleaguered and ‘endangered’ revolution.
In the Iranian view, the United States seeks to dominate the Middle East, and together with its local allies control the region strategically and loot its resources. Iran’s mission is to keep its independence by fighting this hegemonic and oppressive system and spreading its revolution by ‘presenting a blueprint for an Islamic republic … and defending the deprived masses in the world of Islam and the wronged people who have been trampled upon by tyranny’. In the regional context this translates into calls for the expulsion of the Western presence and support for the Palestinian and other ‘resistance’ forces...
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Shahram Chubin is a Senior Non-resident Fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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