Neighbors and Rivals: Iran and Great Power Diplomacy

Abstract

This chapter seeks to place Iran’s recent foreign policies in the Cold War and beyond in the broader context of the country’s experiences in international affairs. Modern Iran emerged around 1501, when Esma‘il I, a youthful prince descended from Muslim, Georgian, Turkish, and Byzantine royalty and nobility, proclaimed himself shah and re-established a Persian state after a hiatus of nine centuries. From that time onward, ensuring Iran’s security and at times its survival repeatedly impelled its leaders to seek support from imposing external allies or patrons who could help the new state to resist the threats, demands, and assaults of powerful and often threatening neighbors. From the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was by far the most dangerous international opponent of Iran. In response, Esma‘il and his successors turned to European powers and Russia for assistance. From the late eighteenth century, expansionist Russia represented the greatest threat to both Iran and the Ottoman Empire, prompting both states to seek the protection of the British Empire. In practice, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this often meant that Britain and Russia effectively colluded in dividing Iran into spheres of influence. This pattern recurred when Britain and the Soviet Union were allied against Adolf Hitler’s Germany during World War II, a conflict that also brought the United States into direct involvement in Iran’s affairs. As British power in Iran declined, the United States stepped in, organizing a coup that cemented the hold on power of Shah Reza Mohammad Pahlavi and effectively replacing Britain as Iran’s foremost international ally and patron. Following the Shah’s overthrow in 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, which left the nation locked in bitter antagonism with the United States and vulnerable to attack by neighboring Iraq, Iran was initially somewhat friendless. From 1980 to 1988, it was locked in a bitter, stalemated war with Iraq, in which up to one million Iranians died or were seriously wounded. Facing continued hostility from the United States and also from Israel and Saudi Arabia, together with threats to its nuclear program, in the early twenty-first century Iran turned for security to post-Soviet Russia. As China’s reach expanded dramatically in these years, stretching well into Central Asia and beyond, Iran’s leaders also believed it profitable to align their country with the ambitious and increasingly influential new global superpower. The history of Iran’s involvement with major external powers nonetheless suggests that the purported new triple alliance will soon find itself navigating treacherous territory and troubled waters.