The fascination which politics in Iran has held for the Western powers for over fifty years since the overthrow of the nationalist leader Mossadeq in the 1950s, will have been increased by the events surrounding the recent elections in that country. The reversal of over forty years of Western, and in particular American, influence in that country by the new nationalists cum Islamists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini was taken as a severe blow to Western interests. Few Americans will have forgotten the imprisonment of their citizens at that time, and the deep humiliation of their country and President Jimmy Carter as he stepped out of power in 1979.
The inclination to right this perceived wrong has remained over the years, but has had to be resisted, given the virtual political and economic closure of the country from Western influence that the new regime ensured. Yet, over the years the ruling group has shown a certain degree of diplomatic flexibility as circumstances in the environment of the country changed. At the same time, however, there has also been a determination to pursue economic and military policies which would enhance national strength and permit a certain degree of autonomy.
The Americans will have been somewhat surprised when the Iranians decided to assist them in ensuring the routing of the Russians from Afghanistan, an initiative which the Iranians still feel they got little credit for from the Western superpower. That effort demonstrated the Iranians’ strong perception of the significance of their location in Asia and the Middle East, and the necessity to balance their interests between contending powers more equitably than had been the case in the past. This group will not have forgotten what they would have considered the one-sided policies of the last Shah, when he sought to synchronise his policies not only with the United States but with Israel, increasingly perceived by nationalist opinion as essentially expansionist.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the loss of its grip on the Asian Soviet republics after 1990, gave the Iranians an even stronger belief in the necessity to play a more strategic role in Asia, designed to enhance its own protection from external interference, the main objective of its foreign policy. The country has geographic linkages with most of the major countries in the area, and the Islamists have felt the need to provide themselves with military capabilities appropriate to their geopolitical situation. The sight of Pakistan, India and Israel developing nuclear capabilities will have increased the desirability of this objective. Indeed the regime may even have felt that, in return for their assistance to the Americans in forcing the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, an effort seen in retrospect as contributory to the USSR’s demise, there would be a stronger appreciation by the US and the Western powers of their status as a significant power in the West Asian-Arabian sphere.
But the US has generally held strongly to its post-1979 view that wrongs committed at that time needed to be diplomatically righted. The US has been in the forefront of insisting that the Iranians have no right to pursue the development of a nuclear capability, though of course, the Iranians in turn have insisted that the ability to develop nuclear technology is not the same as pursuing a full-fledged nuclear capability. In internationalizing their diplomatic objective vis-à-vis Iran in this regard, the major powers, including the European Union, have insisted that the Iranian efforts come under the full purview of international supervision, and that there should, if the intent is not a full nuclear capability, be no reservation on Iran’s part to positively respond to United Nations’ objectives. The chief UN International Atomic Energy Agency operative in this regard, Mohamed El Baradei, has had to engage in a careful diplomatic dance.
In addition, Iran has played, in the years of the new decade, an increasingly influential role in events in Iraq, the US intervention having led to a certain revival of Shi’ite, and general Islamist, influence not only in that country, but also in Lebanon. This, in the Americans’ view, has complicated their own objectives in that Middle Eastern region, and has led them to establish a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia and Egypt against Iranian influence. This, of course, will have caused the Iranians to reflect on the efforts of the United States to establish, in the post-Second World War period, a Middle East Defence Organisation similar to NATO and the South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and their efforts to bring the Shah’s Iran under their wings.
In that context, the Israelis have sought to advance, from the perspective of their interests, the view that the development of a nuclear capability by Iran is the most dangerous thing to have occurred in the Middle East, and is a direct danger to Israeli security. The return of Binyamin Netanyahu to the leadership of Israel, has removed, as his recent visit to the United States has shown, all subtlety in forcing upon the NATO powers the view that the Iranian incipient nuclear effort should be eliminated without delay.
President Obama’s diplomacy so far has demonstrated a hesitation to follow the Israeli radical view, though his election was supported quite strongly by Jewish opinion in the United States. The President has sought to do the opposite of what the Israelis want: that is, he seeks to emphasise the lack of progress on resolving the Palestinian issue, rather than the nuclear capability of Iran, as the main impediment to peace in the Middle East and therefore to Israel’s long-term security and survival. But the coalition politics of the United States is forcing the President to walk a very thin line on the issue, balancing pressure on Israel with equal, if not more determined, pressure on Iran.
The election in Iran and the events following it, would certainly appear to the Iranian leadership to pose the possibility of creating an opening to external influence in Iran once again. They are insisting, in the face of the new telecommunications technology that exhibits events and popular pressure in every part of Iran to the world, and in turn permits open verbal intervention from external pressure groups into the Iranian political scene, that a solution to the present impasse must be a strictly internal Iranian one. The insistence by Ayatollah Khamenei that the issue must be dealt with strictly within the terms of the Iranian constitution and institutions – which are certainly far removed from Western forms – is directed towards this objective.
The definition of American hostility to Iran not only in terms of the nuclear issue, but in terms of the nature of the regime has, of course, never sat well with the Iranians, and indeed with other non-Western countries. Opinion from that direction has always insisted that if the Americans can tolerate the de facto military regime in Egypt, and the Sunni Islamist authoritarian state in Saudi Arabia, they should leave Iran alone. The response of the Americans and other Western powers is that the difference between Iran and these regimes, is the Iranian determination to join its exertion of nationalist influence in the Middle East with Shi’ite irridentism.
Iran is, historically, part of what is called the Great Game in West Asia – part of the continuing contestation among the powers for influence in that part of the world, deemed strategic, with Afghanistan as a focal point. From the Iranian regime’s point of view the area must solve its problems without what it deems to be external interference. The ability of the regime to withstand external influence on the outcome of the present political impasse in the country is, for it, a key test of the policy of nationalism in which it has engaged since the overthrow of the Shah.
