Abstract
From its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran struggled with two hard-to-reconcile approaches to foreign policy. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the “Iranian Trotsky” who wanted to export the revolution to Muslim countries occupied the idealist part of the spectrum. His chief lieutenant, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was much more of a realist. He believed that the new republic should concentrate on economic viability for which a more traditional foreign policy was required. Making the idealist-realist schism worse was the negotiated political order whereby the Revolutionary Guards and other parastatals operated virtually outside the purview of the state. The resulting opaqueness and confusion of the foreign policy-making process have vexed policymakers, academics, and lay observers alike. Still, the detailed analysis of the major foreign policy issues has uncovered specific patterns that should help to decipher this complex system.
Keywords
- Major Foreign Policy Issues
- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
- Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)
- Islamic State Of Iraq And Syria (ISIS)
- Quds Force (QF)
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Rezaei, F. (2019). Conclusions. In: Iran’s Foreign Policy After the Nuclear Agreement. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76789-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76789-5_10
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76788-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76789-5
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