The President of the United States of North America, and his Majesty as exalted as the Planet Saturn; the Sovereign to whom the Sun serves as a standard; whose splendor and magnificence are equal to that of the Skies; the Sublime Sovereign, the Monarch whose armies are as numerous as the Stars; whose greatness calls to mind that of Jeinshid; whose magnificence equals that of Darius; the Heir of the Crown and Throne of the Kayanians, the Sublime Emperor of all Persia, being both equally and sincerely desirous of establishing relations of Friendship between the two Governments, which they wish to strengthen by a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce, reciprocally advantageous and useful to the Citizens and subjects of the two High contracting parties, have for this purpose named for their Plenipotentiaries …
At the intersection of East and West and administering provinces and dependencies stretching at their widest extent from modern-day Libya to Kyrgyzstan and India, Persia was either the starting point or the eventual target of nearly every major conqueror on the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the Cold War. Through all these upheavals, Persia—like China under roughly comparable circumstances—retained its distinct sense of identity. Expanding across vastly diverse cultures and regions, the Persian Empire adopted and synthesized their achievements into its own distinct concept of order. Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained its independence through its worldview, charting “great interior spaces” in poetry and mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers recounted in its epic Book of Kings. Meanwhile, Persia distilled its experience managing all manner of territories and political challenges into a sophisticated canon of diplomacy placing a premium on endurance, shrewd analysis of geopolitical realities, and the psychological manipulation of adversaries.
This sense of distinctness and adroit maneuver endured in the Islamic era, when Persia adopted the religion of its Arab conquerors but, alone among the first wave of conquered peoples, insisted on retaining its language and infusing the new order with the cultural legacies of the empire that Islam had just overthrown. Eventually, Persia became the demographic and cultural center of Shiism—first as a dissenting tradition under Arab rule, later as the state religion starting in the sixteenth century (adopted partly as a way to distinguish itself from and defy the growing Ottoman Empire at its borders, which was Sunni). In contrast to the majority Sunni interpretation, this branch of Islam stressed the mystical and ineffable qualities of religious truth and authorized “prudential dissimulation” in the service of the interests of the faithful. In its culture, religion, and geopolitical outlook, Iran (as it called itself officially after 1935) had preserved the distinctiveness of its tradition and the special character of its regional role.
THE KHOMEINI REVOLUTION
The revolution against Iran’s twentieth-century Shah Reza Pahlavi had begun (or at least had been portrayed to the West) as an antimonarchical movement demanding democracy and economic redistribution. Many of its grievances were real, caused by the dislocations imposed by the Shah’s modernization programs and the heavy-handed and arbitrary tactics with which the government attempted to control dissent. But when, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris and Iraq to claim the role of the revolution’s “Supreme Leader,” he did so not on behalf of social programs or of democratic governance but in the name of an assault against the entire regional order and indeed the institutional arrangements of modernity.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle. The twentieth-century map of the Middle East, Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of “imperialists” and “tyrannical self-seeking rulers” who had “separated the various segments of the Islamic umma [community] from each other and artificially created separate nations.” All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were “illegitimate” because they “do not base themselves on divine law.” Modern international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false foundation because “the relations between nations should be based on spiritual grounds” and not on principles of national interest.
In Khomeini’s view—paralleling that of Qutb—an ideologically expansionist reading of the Quran pointed the way from these blasphemies and toward the creation of a genuinely legitimate world order. The first step would be the overthrow of all the governments in the Muslim world and their replacement by “an Islamic government.” Traditional national loyalties would be overridden because “it is the duty of all of us to overthrow the taghut; i.e., the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire Islamic world.” The founding of a truly Islamic political system in Iran would mark, as Khomeini declared upon the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979, “the First Day of God’s Government.”
This entity would not be comparable to any other modern state. As Mehdi Bazargan, Khomeini’s first appointee for the post of Prime Minister, told the New York Times, “What was wanted … was a government of the type seen during the 10 years of the rule of the Prophet Mohammed and the five years under his son-in-law, Ali, the first Shiite Imam.” When government is conceived of as divine, dissent will be treated as blasphemy, not political opposition. Under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic carried out those principles, beginning with a wave of trials and executions and a systematic repression of minority faiths far exceeding what had occurred under the Shah’s authoritarian regime.
Amidst these upheavals a new paradox took shape, in the form of a dualistic challenge to international order. With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it.
This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as “the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini, then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and “the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.”
The Islamic Republic announced itself on the world stage with a massive violation of a core principle of the Westphalian international system—diplomatic immunity—by storming the American Embassy in Tehran and holding its staff hostage for 444 days (an act affirmed by the current Iranian government, which in 2014 appointed the hostage takers’ translator to serve as its ambassador at the United Nations). In a similar spirit, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini claimed global juridical authority in issuing a fatwa (religious proscription) pronouncing a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen of Indian Muslim descent, for his publication of a book in Britain and the United States deemed offensive to Muslims.
Even while simultaneously conducting normal diplomatic relations with the countries whose territory these groups have in part arrogated, Iran in its Islamist aspect has supported organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mahdi Army in Iraq—non-state militias challenging established authorities and employing terror attacks as part of their strategy. Tehran’s imperative of Islamic revolution has been interpreted to permit c
ooperation across the Sunni-Shia divide to advance broader anti-Western interests, including Iran’s arming of the Sunni jihadist group Hamas against Israel and, according to some reports, the Taliban in Afghanistan; the report of the 9/11 Commission and investigations of a 2013 terrorist plot in Canada suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had found scope to operate from Iran as well.
On the subject of the need to overthrow the existing world order, Islamists on both sides—Sunni and Shia—have been in general agreement. However intense the Sunni-Shia doctrinal divide erupting across the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, Sayyid Qutb’s views were essentially identical to those put forward by Iran’s political ayatollahs. Qutb’s premise that Islam would reorder and eventually dominate the world struck a chord with the men who recast Iran into the fount of religious revolution. Qutb’s works circulate widely in Iran, some personally translated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei wrote in his 1967 introduction to Qutb’s work, The Future of This Religion:
This lofty and great author has tried in the course of the chapters of this book … to first introduce the essence of the faith as it is and then, after showing that it is a program of living … [to confirm] with his eloquent words and his particular world outlook that ultimately world government shall be in the hands of our school and “the future belongs to Islam.”
For Iran, representing the minority Shia branch of this endeavor, victory could be envisioned through the sublimation of doctrinal differences for shared aims. Toward this end, the Iranian constitution proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims as a national obligation:
In accordance with the sacred verse of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.
The emphasis would be not on theological disputes but on ideological conquest. As Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.” This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”
Khomeini and his fellow Shia revolutionaries have differed from Sunni Islamists, however—and this is the essence of their fratricidal rivalry—in proclaiming that global upheaval would be capped with the coming of the Mahdi, who would return from “occultation” (being present though not visible) to assume the sovereign powers that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic temporarily exercises in the Mahdi’s place. Iranian then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considered this principle sufficiently settled to put it before the United Nations in an address on September 27, 2007:
Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior, will come. In the company of all believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.
The peace envisaged by such a concept has as its prerequisite, as President Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush in 2006, a global submission to correct religious doctrine. Ahmadinejad’s letter (widely interpreted in the West as an overture to negotiations) concluded with “Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda,” a phrase left untranslated in the version released to the public: “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.” This was the identical admonition sent in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad to the emperors of Byzantium and Persia, soon to be attacked by the Islamic holy war.
For decades Western observers have sought to pinpoint the “root causes” of such sentiments, convincing themselves that the more extreme statements are partly metaphorical and that a renunciation of policy or of past Western conduct—such as American and British interference in Iranian domestic politics in the 1950s—might open the door to reconciliation. Yet revolutionary Islamism has not, up to now, manifested itself as a quest for international cooperation as the West understands the term; nor is the Iranian clerical regime best interpreted as an aggrieved postcolonial independence movement waiting hopefully for demonstrations of American goodwill. Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.
Even at a moment hailed in the West as auguring a new spirit of conciliation—after the completion of an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program with the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany—the Iranian Supreme Leader, Khamenei, declared in January 2014:
By dressing up America’s face, some individuals are trying to remove the ugliness, the violence and terror from this face and introduce America’s government to the Iranian people as being affectionate and humanitarian … How can you change such an ugly and criminal face in front of the Iranian people with makeup? … Iran will not violate what it agreed to. But the Americans are enemies of the Islamic Revolution, they are enemies of the Islamic Republic, they are enemies of this flag that you have raised.
Or, as Khamenei put it somewhat more delicately in a speech to Iran’s Guardian Council in September 2013, “When a wrestler is wrestling with an opponent and in places shows flexibility for technical reasons, let him not forget who his opponent is.”
THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS is not inevitably permanent. Among the states in the Middle East, Iran has perhaps the most coherent experience of national greatness and the longest and subtlest strategic tradition. It has preserved its essential culture for three thousand years, sometimes as an expanding empire, for many centuries by the skilled manipulation of surrounding elements. Before the ayatollahs’ revolution, the West’s interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a perceived parallelism of national interests. (Ironically, the ayatollahs’ ascent to power was aided in its last stages by America’s dissociation from the existing regime, on the mistaken belief that the looming change would accelerate the advent of democracy and strengthen U.S.-Iranian ties.)
The United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to other societies’, especially Iran’s. They must allow for the possibility that the unchanged rhetoric of a generation is based on conviction rather than posturing and will have had an impact on a significant number of the Iranian people. A change of tone is not necessarily a return to normalcy, especially where definitions of normalcy differ so fundamentally. It includes as well—and more likely—the possibility of a change in tactics to reach essentially unchanged goals. The United States should be open to a genuine reconciliation and make substantial efforts to facilitate it. Yet for such an effort to succeed, a clear sense of direction is essential, especially on the key issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AND IRAN
The future of Iranian-American relations will—at least in the short run—depend on the resolution of an ostensibly technical military issue. As these pages are being written, a potentially epochal shift in the region’s military balance and its psychological equilibrium may be taking place. It has been ushered in by Iran’s rapid progress toward the status of a nuclear weapons state amidst a negotiation between it and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). Though couched in terms of technical and scientific capabilities, the issue is at heart about international order—about the ability of the international community to enforce its demands against sophisticated forms of rejection, the permeability of the global non
proliferation regime, and the prospects for a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.
The traditional balance of power emphasized military and industrial capacity. A change in it could be achieved only gradually or by conquest. The modern balance of power reflects the level of a society’s scientific development and can be threatened dramatically by developments entirely within the territory of a state. No conquest could have increased Soviet military capacity as much as the breaking of the American nuclear monopoly in 1949. Similarly, the spread of deliverable nuclear weapons is bound to affect regional balances—and the international order—dramatically and to evoke a series of escalating counteractions.
All Cold War American administrations were obliged to design their international strategies in the context of the awe-inspiring calculus of deterrence: the knowledge that nuclear war would involve casualties of a scale capable of threatening civilized life. They were haunted as well by the awareness that a demonstrated willingness to run the risk—at least up to a point—was essential if the world was not to be turned over to ruthless totalitarians. Deterrence held in the face of these parallel nightmares because only two nuclear superpowers existed. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to it from the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.
World Order Page 16