The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran

Alex Vatanka is Senior Fellow in the Middle East Institute and the Jamestown Foundation in Washington D.C. He is the author of Iran-Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence (I.B.Tauris, 2015) and has written for outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Americas Quarterly, CNN.com, Al Monitor, the Journal of International Security Affairs and BBC Persian Online.

Preliminary Chapter Outline:

· Background and the earliest intra-regime debate about the Islamic Republic’s international identity: to remain a nation state with a narrow and well-defined national priorities or to become a global revolutionary cause
· 1980-1988: The debate on how to break Iran’s international isolation during the Iran-Iraq War (what was out of necessity and what was due to genuine policy differences)
· 1989-1997: President Rafsanjani’s first attempt to return to the global mainstream (how much of a consensus was behind this policy shift?)
· 1997-2005: President Khatami and a second attempt to reintegrate into the global mainstream (The intensification of the link between factional legitimacy, power play and foreign policy)
· 2005-2013: Ahmadinejad’s populist and erratic foreign policy approach: from revolutionary zeal to challenging Ayatollah Khamenei’s conventional wisdom
· 2013-present: Ayatollah Khamenei’s balancing act to maintain an equilibrium between President Rouhani’s “moderates” and the “hardliners” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Each of these chapters will be further divided into sub-chapters based on specific turn of events. For example, what was the Iranian debate during the Iran-Contra affair or the debate on how to respond to the Taliban’s killing of Iranian diplomats in 1998? These are some examples of pivotal moments in Iranian foreign policy where American analysts, policy-makers and general audience will benefit from being exposed to Iranian accounts.