bout de papier, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2015) — Spring 2015 // Printemps 2015, pp. 5–7
économique avec l’UE (lAECG), cependant, la politique étrangère de notre gouvernement au Moyen-Orient a fait l’objet de beaucoup de controverse. Ce fut le cas en particulier lorsque le gouvernement a fermé l’ambassade du Canada a Téhéran et qu’il a clairement laissé entendre son appui au possible bombardement de l’Iran dans le contexte du conflit nucléaire avec ce pays. En l’occurrence, cet appel n’a pas été pris en compte. Mais, que ce serait-il produit dans le cas contraire? En retrospective, combien de Canadiens ne connaissent pas grand-chose du pays? Michael Bonner, historien de l’Iran, nous aide a aller au-delà des croyances populaires et humanise notre cible potentielle : certes une première étape qui s’ impose dans |’ elaboration d’une stratégie diplomatique réaliste et responsable pour nos rapports avec les pays dont nous ne partageons pas les valeurs ni les objectifs. Dans un article connexe, Louis Delvoie propose une voie a suivre, un retour a un effort diplomatique qui a peu a voir avec les prises de son et qui nous ramène au travail ingrat, frustrant et ardu de la négociation d’une paix durable — le pouvoir de la dissuasion. Cette voie aujourd’hui fait les manchettes.
The Achaemenids and Parthians are long extinct, and the Sasanian Empire fell nearly a millennium and a half ago. But the dream of an Iranian superpower, bound together by force of a revived religion, bestriding Eurasia, and projecting power into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Levant, has dominated Iranian history ever since.
The present Iranian regime is only about 35 years old. But a judicious historian may already discern in its brief history the same themes that I have just described. The revived political Shiism of the Safavids; a potent ideology of state
And yet, in diplomatic and academic circles it is common to assert that the present Iranian regime cannot last, that Iran’s young and well-educated population cannot stand for it much longer, and that another revolution is not far off. But this is a very tricky assertion. It is true that about 60 per cent of Iran’s population is below the age of 30. Although this demographic must include many critics or enemies of the regime, it also comprises the volunteer paramilitary group known as the Basij. The Basij is a force of at least one and half million youth subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and it is the organisation which arrests people for dress-code violations and other supposed threats to public safety. It is also the principal force that crushed the post-election protests of 2009. So it can hardly be said that the liberal wing of Iranian youth has now, or has ever had, the upper hand. Many young people also grew up during the war with Saddam that followed the 1979 revolution; and so, however critical of the regime many of them genuinely are, and however much they may wish for a rapprochement with the United States, Iranian youth are at least equally eager to avoid another upheaval, this time constitutional.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Iranian regime itself foresees social and political problems brought on by sanctions connected with Iran’s nuclear programme. This is the reason for the interim agreement of November 2013, in which Iran agreed to suspend enrichment of uranium in return for a relaxation of some sanctions, and for sustaining nuclear negotiations which were extended past the recent deadline of 24 November 2014. But it was also the reason for the seeming rejection of Ahmadi-Nezhad’s neo-conservatism and the election of president Rouhani who is often invoked in the West as a “moderate”.
Such developments can be understood as small concessions calculated to buy time and lighten sanctions just enough to relieve some economic and political pressure. That being the case, I would argue that Iranian foreign policy, self-image, and state ideology will change only with great difficulty.
Iranian attitudes and policy will always be highly influenced, if not determined, by geography and history. This state of affairs is what Professor Thomas Juneau at the University of Ottawa has aptly called Iran’s “strategic loneliness”. Iran’s chief assets are a high population, huge territory, and large reserves of petroleum. It must also be said that its language and the Shiite religion are diffused in sizeable minority groups in the Middle East and in Central Asia. It is only natural that a country with such advantages should seek to project power and influence throughout its regional context, and perhaps throughout the world. Yet because of its many frontiers, Iran must take an interest in whatever happens in the Middle East, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia.
Iran has always been surrounded by suspicious and hostile neighbours, some of whom, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have been historical enemies. Juneau draws our attention to the fact that Iran also abuts two countries who seek regional and great-power status: Russia and Turkey, who will brook no rival in their own spheres of influence. Historically the power occupying Anatolia has always been Iran’s chief rival, and today this is hardly different. The Roman and Byzantine Empires and later the Ottoman Empire were engaged in a seemingly interminable power struggle with Iran along their long porous frontier, running down from the Caucasus southwards into Arabia. A more powerful Iran would pose a serious challenge to Turkey’s ambitions there, and the reverse is also true. In the same vein, two of the largest Muslim states near Iran are Iraq and Saudi Arabia, two realms of very recent origin, run mostly by Sunnis, which will never make common cause with Iran, and whose long-term viability may now be seriously questioned.
Iraq and Saudi Arabia, along with Syria and Jordan, will sooner look to Turkey for regional support and cooperation than to Iran. Matters could evolve quickly. An Iranian defeat of ISIS in its sphere of influence, which is far from an unlikely possibility, would significantly increase its power and prestige well beyond the tolerance of Turkey’s Sunni Islamist leadership and of other countries in the region.
Iran also needs to keep a watchful eye on the east. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is larger by population than any of Iran’s immediate Muslim neighbours and it is the sole Muslim nuclear power, a source of great national pride. Pakistan faces serious Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict internally and while not interested in a test of wills with Iran, it certainly would not welcome a nuclear Iran, let alone a potential Sunni vs Shia arms race. Pakistan and Iran also both have Baloch nationalism to contend with. Iran has good reason to watch its back and keep Pakistan onside but how it will accomplish that remains to be seen.
Hostile competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran has manifested itself recently in the form of OPEC’s driving down the price of oil. Arguably it is driven by the Saudis’ fear that the UN Security Council and Germany will acquiesce in the continued development of nuclear arms in Iran. Could they actually be aiming at bankrupting Iran? One may doubt whether the ayatollahs can govern with a significantly diminished price of oil in the long term, but again, only time will tell.
Russia’s main interests vis-a-vis of Iran have changed little since the nineteenth century. Iran’s ties to Central Asia have always troubled Moscow, since any instability in Iran is liable to reverberate into Russia’s vulnerable southern flank with all its petroleum reserves and the trans- Siberian railway line. Fear that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 would spread into Afghanistan and northward into Russia’s Central Asian possessions is what prompted the last Soviet war in Afghanistan. Moscow still opposes any increase, however small, in Iran’s regional prestige and influence — except in so far as Iran may represent a bulwark against Sunni extremism in the form of ISIS or Wahhabism.
That is why Russia blocks efforts to relax sanctions against Iran, and why it opposes Iran’s building a nuclear weapon. Russian obstructionism at the UN Security Council has the added benefit of exaggerating its prestige, making it seem to be an indispensable country. Neither Iran nor America seems willing to wound Russian prestige, and this is one good reason why it was tentatively proposed for the present round of nuclear talks that Iran ship much of its stockpiled uranium to Russia for enrichment.
This brings us back to Iran under President Rouhani. His promises of reform, addressing Iran’s economic crisis, relaxing social restrictions, and release of political prisoners got him elected in June of 2013. So far it seems that Iran is still rather far from the sort of reform that would please westerners. But Rouhani appears to have made good on the main thrust of his platform, which was to try to undo the eight years of hardship which Ahmadi-Nezhad’s confrontation with the West had brought to Iran.
Rouhani revived nuclear talks with the UN Security Council and Germany. The first fruit of this was the temporary suspension of Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for a small relief of sanctions worth about seven billion dollars. That temporarily forestalled further progress down the road to economic ruin, but there will be few, if any, other benefits. Whatever the outcome of the nuclear negotiations, Iran will still be surrounded by hostile rivals. Juneau stresses that good relations between Tehran and Washington would further antagonise them all, and Russia would be particularly resentful if somehow displaced by the USA. The Iranian regime’s options for change on its own terms today seem extremely limited, and the incentives to change equally so.
Historically, Iran’s response to being surrounded by rivals was to swallow them all up in a vast trans-continental empire — in effect to set up a world system with Iran at the centre. This worked so successfully in the past that Islamic thinkers (such as the mediaeval savants Dinawari and Mas’udi) conceived of monarchy and empire as distinctly Iranian achievements — an idea which is most elaborately set forth in the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh or “Book of Kings”. Henry Kissinger noted in his recent book World Order that many Iranians seem to think of themselves and their land not so much as a country but rather as a concept or an idea. Such a notion lies beneath the modern Iranian theory of a world order designed to usher in the end of time, with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic as temporary stand-in for the twelfth Shiite Imam, the Mahdi, who will return to rule the world. This is the doctrine of velayat-e faqih (political leadership by a cleric) propounded in its most extreme form by ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s. But the velayat-e fagih is best understood as grounded in far more ancient notions of. Iran as a world order unto itself ruled by a semi-divine “king of kings” maintaining peace, justice, and the principles of the Zoroastrian religion until the coming of Saoshyant, the Zoroastrian messiah. The origin of this idea is certainly even older than Zoroastrianism, but it was given new, Islamic garb in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Kissinger stresses that Iran’s self-image conjoining imperial and religious causes clearly runs aground on the shoals of modern diplomacy among nation states. Former President Ahmadi-Nezhad often demanded that Iran be treated as a respected member of the modern system of nation-states, and the same demand is often made in Western academic and diplomatic circles. Yet in 2007 Ahmadi- Nezhad spoke at the UN to the effect that the world order inevitably would be overthrown and replaced by the rule of the Mahdi and that only submission to the right religion would bring peace to the world. This is little more than a populist recapitulation of Khomeini’s doctrine that the new Iranian state would not be legitimate in its own right, but only as a vehicle in a religious struggle on a global scale. According to Khomeini, no states are legitimate — at least not as they are normally construed after the establishment of the international system of nations as we know it following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
In the circumstances, is not surprising that Iran has shown little compunction about storming embassies, detaining foreign nationals for no reason, violating diplomatic immunity, trying to export its revolution through international espionage and Hezbollah, and addressing other nations in haughty and condescending terms. Western observers find this sort of behaviour particularly odd coming from a country which at times portrays itself (disingenuously) as a young nation struggling out of the “post-colonial” shadow of Great Britain and America, and at times as a world order unto itself and a reflection of the kingdom of God on earth.
How should the West deal with Iran? While cutting off diplomatic contact with Iran will achieve nothing, neither will engagement for its own sake. Western powers must determine what they want to get out of a relationship with Iran before such engagement begins. For most Western countries, the highest priorities would be halting the spread of terrorism, espionage, and the building of nuclear weapons. Lifting sanctions would also help open Iran to Western business interests. There may be little other real benefit from good relations with Iran because it will never become a close ally of the West as long as memory of the last Shah lingers.
Finally, a word about false assumptions. Westerners need to understand that Iran’s young population, whatever its political allegiance and attitudes to the West may be, is just as proud and just as conscious of Iran’s greatness as is any other age-group. I am not suggesting that there is nothing resembling what might be called “ayatollah fatigue”, and I am sure that many youth are disappointed by the Islamic Republic’s failure to live up to its grandiose claims — especially after 35 years of suffocating authoritarianism. But disenchantment with political Shiism, does not mean that Persian youth have re-evaluated their belief in Iran’s past and future greatness. Striking a new balance with the Iranian regime may be as much as can be achieved today. Given the Middle East’s spreading instability and violence, we urgently need to find a meaningful forward plan, because Iran will be a major player no matter what else happens. But perhaps the best possible change for all concerned is that Iran will use other, more friendly, and less abrasive means to pursue its historic goals.
Michael Bonner received his doctorate from Oxford in 2014. He has travelled throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan. A specialist in Late Antique Iran and its early Islamic history, his master’s thesis on sixth-century Iran was published in 2011 by Studia Iranica in Paris; they will publish his translation (with commentary) of part of the Iranian National Epic later this year. While completing his doctorate, he served as a policy adviser to a Member of Cabinet in Ottawa. Michael and his father, Communications and Negotiations Consultant Allan Bonner, have a long association with PAFSO and are notable friends of Canada’s Foreign Service.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2015) — Spring 2015 // Printemps 2015, pp. 5–7. Read the rest of this issue →
