The evolution of Iran's geopolitics after the 1979 islamic revolution

Abstract

The events of 1978-1979, which brought Khomeini and his supporters to power, completely changes the foreign and domestic policy of Iran. This phenomenon becomes one of the factors that form the modern geopolitical configuration of the region. Indicative of the historical scale of the revolution was the fact that the Persian monarchy with 2500 years of history, represented by many dynasties along with the Pahlavi dynasty, ceased to exist politically. The existing system was replaced by a clerical Shiite clergy with the teachings of Imam Khomeini's Wilayat al-Faqih. In the early years of the Islamic Republic, Tehran's foreign policy saw its political order as the ideal model of an Islamic republic for regional Muslim states. From the works of Iranian scholars studying foreign policy in the post-Islamic revolution period, the thesis of the change of revolutionary romanticism characteristic of the first years of the new political system, which manifested itself in attempts to export this model, should be highlighted. At the present stage, there is a gradual transition from romanticism to foreign policy pragmatism, which was facilitated by the era of Rafsanjani and Khatami. There has been a softening of the foreign policy, which since the 1979 revolution, has been based on two concepts - "Export of the Islamic Revolution" and "Neither East nor West, but the Islamic Republic".