Iran’s Special Stability
“Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world”. On December 31st, 1977, President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in the Niavaran Palace and praised him as a great leader who had won “the respect and the admiration and love” of his people.
When Carter named Iran as an ‘island of stability’, he did not only refer to Iran’s domestic stability; but he also bolded the US-Iran common interests in the Middle East. It was Iran’s ‘special stability’, a very combination of Iran’s power and its recognized regional role in deterring communism, that made the White House see Iran as its key ally in the Middle East.
The US-Iran alignment in return provided a unique opportunity for Iran to seek regional primacy. The major domain that Iran under the Shah sought to impose its power and take its regional role was in the suppression of the communist, leftist movements and guerillas like the Omani Dhofar.
“We regard what is going on in Dhofar (in Oman) as a form of aggression and subversion. Imagine if those savages (the Omani Marxist rebels) took the other side of the Hormuz Strait at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Our life depends on this ... So, Iran will never tolerate any hostile communist regime in the Persian Gulf. This is my mission”, the Shah said in the middle of Iran’s military campaign against Marxist rebels in Dhofar.
But Iran’s stability did not last long. Within weeks of Carter’s visit, a series of protests broke out in the religious city of Qom. Only two years later, the Shah left Iran after massive, unrelenting waves of demonstrations and the charismatic religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, returned to Iran, preaching the doctrine that the United States was the “Great Satan” behind the Shah.
Initially, the revolutionary regime was suffering a deep instability. Deep power competition among the new revolutionary elites, violent civil war with the Islamic-Marxist MEK, local demands in Turkmen-Sahra and Iran’s Kurdistan, and finally a long, bloody war with Iraq intensified Iran’s instability.
The end of the Iran-Iraq War finally put an end to Iran’s unstoppable instability. Rafsanjani’s pragmatism in the post-Khomeini era aimed to rebuild Iran’s poor economic foundations. At the same time, the overall energy of Iran’s foreign policy attitude was geared towards détente, an element that could have reshaped US-Iran relations. In 1989, the American hostages in Lebanon were finally released with Iran’s effective intervention. With this move, Iran signaled a demand to recognize its role in the regional decision-making processes.
However, George Bush’s “Good will begets good will” was not translated into cooperation between two countries. Even Iran’s indirect support of the western coalition in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 did not prevent the imposed US sanctions in the 90s.
In fact, the US leaders at the time were not aware that major tensions and conflicts had broken out when the divergence between states’ power and their regional role became intolerable. As history has proven, a gap between a powerful state’s demand and what it gains leads to a deep disequilibrium which is removed through either military tensions or recognition by their neighbors. Thus, when revolutionary Iran’s demand was ignored by the West, Tehran intensified its strategy to make the Middle East instable for the US and its regional allies.
With the terroristic 9/11 attacks, Tehran initially sided with the White House and assisted the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Iran also helped the US to shatter down the anti-Shia al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, Iran played a critical role in international efforts, especially in the U.S.-sponsored International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, in December 2001, to establish a new Afghan government.
For the next time, Iran tried to prove its stability by taking a role in deterring terrorist-radical groups in the greater Middle East. Nonetheless, in the years that followed, the George W. Bush administration branded Iran and its regional proxies, along with North Korea and Iraq, as part of an ‘Axis of Evil’. It was a doomsday scenario for regime change, Tehran saw this.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked a turning point in Iran’s approach in the region. The power vacuum in Iraq and the following rise of radical-Salafist militant groups, who were seeking to challenge both the US and pro-Iran forces in Baghdad, put White House and Tehran on the same side. The Sunni extremists, led by Al Zarqawi, saw Shia Muslims as heretics and viewed Tehran’s regional ambitions as a greater threat than the West. Within this context, Iran did help the US in the stabilization of Iraq during its bloody civil war in 2006-7 through its ties with Iraqi Shia and the Kurds.
The rise of ISIS has once again put both countries on the same side, opposing Sunni sectarian extremists who hate both Americans and Shia Iran. Within this context, the possible Iranian-American cooperation would be imaginable, especially after the historic Iran Deal in Vienna that downgraded the enmity between the ‘Great Satan’ and the ‘Pivot Axis of Evil’.
More importantly, the US-Iran cooperation in cracking down the Sunni extremists of ISIS would finally recognize Iran’s regional role and provide a benchmark to set a recently unimaginable alliance in motion.
A cursory glance at Iran’s modern foreign policy and national interests show that Tehran’s main demand of the US is to recognize its role in the region. It is not a strange demand for a country whose regional primacy has been the norm, rather than an exception, throughout most of its 3000-year history. Nevertheless, Iran’s role in the participation in the regional decision-making processes has been extensively ignored in the post-1979 Revolution era.
On top of that, both the Shah and Ayatollahs have been aware that a state’s role is the currency of power, and is granted to a state by its neighbors by recognizing the legitimacy of the state’s interests. They have been also aware that the main domain that could accelerate the recognition of Iran’s role in the region is to deter the threat of radical, extremist, militant non-state actors. On top of that, they have seen the interconnection of Iran’s stability with its regional role in deterring the threat of radical, militant groups, of the pre-Cold War Marxists and the post-Cold War Sunni extremists.
Thirty years ago, the Shah of Iran sent an Iranian Army brigade to Oman and shattered down the Marxist rebels in Dhofar. Now, and in the eve of melting down the icepack of their enmity, both Iranians and Americans are fighting with ISIS in Iraq. This strategic move reaffirms that geography, not ideology, dictates that Iran is the pivot to the trend lines in the Greater Middle East. That is the ‘Revenge of Geography’.
Real men do not go to Tehran; rather, they side with Tehran to shatter down terrorism in the Middle East.