{"id":101830,"date":"2019-02-24T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-24T06:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scfri.com\/?p=729"},"modified":"2022-04-19T15:34:48","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T11:04:48","slug":"irans-40-years-of-strife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scfr.ir\/en\/politics\/101830\/irans-40-years-of-strife\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran\u2019s 40 Years of Strife"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1971, world leaders as varied as Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, US Vice President Spiro Agnew, and Soviet statesman Nikolai Podgorny gathered in the Iranian city of Persepolis, the ancient capital of the First Persian Empire. They were there to attend a sumptuous party, hosted by Shah Reza Pahlavi, to mark 2,500 years since the founding of the Imperial State of Iran. But less than eight years later, Iran had a new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who\u00a0referred<\/a>\u00a0to this gathering as \u201cthe devil\u2019s festival.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Khomeini had been living in exile (in Turkey, Iraq, and finally in Paris), owing to his denunciation of Iran\u2019s westernization and\u00a0dependence<\/a>\u00a0on the United States under Shah Pahlavi. In 1953, the US and the United Kingdom had propped up Pahlavi by\u00a0ousting<\/a>\u00a0the country\u2019s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized Iran\u2019s oil industry and had sought to reduce the Shah\u2019s powers.<\/p>\n

That fateful episode \u2013 imbued with the logic of the Cold War \u2013 marked the first US operation to depose a foreign leader during peacetime. But it certainly wasn\u2019t the last. Ever since, US foreign policy has been characterized by a steady procession of \u201cregime changes,\u201d which have poisoned Washington\u2019s relations with key regions of the world \u2013 perhaps most notably with the Middle East. In the case of Iran, the 1953 coup eroded the Shah\u2019s domestic legitimacy and, along with his repressive temperament and insensitivity to demands for greater social justice, planted the seeds of the 1979 Revolution. Throughout the ensuing 40 years, Iran and the West have been estranged, to say the least.<\/p>\n

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once\u00a0quipped<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.\u201d That was certainly true of Khomeini. After taking power by uniting forces adhering to vastly different ideologies, Khomeini\u2019s flexibility suddenly evaporated. He\u00a0distanced himself<\/a>\u00a0completely from leftist movements, accused his opponents of subversion, and repressed liberal voices with abandon, triggering four decades of tension between the Islamic Republic\u2019s theocratic and democratic elements.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, US-Iranian diplomatic relations imploded. After laying siege to the US embassy in Tehran, a group of Iranian students, with Khomeini\u2019s connivance, held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. They demanded that US President Jimmy Carter\u2019s administration extradite the Shah, who was in New York for cancer treatment. In the end, the hostages were not released until minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as successor to Carter, who had been severely weakened politically the crisis. By then, Pahlavi had died in Egypt, and Khomeini had consolidated the power of hardline theocrats over the revolution\u2019s more secular factions.<\/p>\n

On top of it all, Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, unleashing a bloody eight-year war. The conflict, in which the US and even the Soviet Union aided Saddam, ended in a stalemate. Around a\u00a0half-million Iranians and Iraqis died<\/a>, but Iran, having been subjected to Iraqi chemical-weapons attacks, bore most of the long-term physical and psychological consequences. It was during these years that Iran\u00a0began exploring<\/a>\u00a0the possibility of developing nuclear weapons, by building on the nuclear-energy technology that the US had previously furnished to the Shah as part of the Eisenhower administration\u2019s \u201cAtoms for Peace<\/a>\u201d initiative.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Iran\u2019s clandestine nuclear program did not come to light until 2002. By then, the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was already in charge, and the geopolitical chessboard had changed dramatically. The US had not only turned its back on Saddam but was preparing to invade Iraq. Ironically, that ruinous decision would end up yielding significant strategic benefits for Iran, despite the country\u2019s inclusion in US President George W. Bush\u2019s notorious \u201caxis of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, it fell to me as the EU\u2019s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy to initiate\u00a0nuclear negotiations<\/a>\u00a0with Iran. My first interlocutor was\u00a0Hassan Rouhani<\/a>, who now serves as Iran\u2019s president, and with whom we reached a preliminary understanding. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u2019s election to the presidency in 2005 set the process back by years, and the chasm widened further when Saeed Jalili took the reins of the negotiations. Jalili would consistently begin our meetings by reminding me that he had lost part of his leg during the Iran-Iraq War, for which he blamed the West.<\/p>\n

When Rouhani returned to the scene as Iran\u2019s newly elected president in 2013, the international community demonstrated the cohesion and\u00a0skill<\/a>\u00a0needed to take advantage of the opportunity. The result was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA<\/a>), a diplomatic milestone that ushered in a respite from decades of unproductive hostility.<\/p>\n

But then came the election of President Donald Trump, who decided unilaterally last year to cease implementing the JCPOA. The Trump administration has imposed new sanctions on Iran and is abusing the US dollar\u2019s dominant position in global trade by threatening foreign companies with\u00a0secondary sanctions<\/a>\u00a0if they continue to do business with the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n

As a result of these actions, the US has squandered any chance of forming a united front with Europe to push back against Iran\u2019s human rights violations, as well as its\u00a0destabilizing behaviour<\/a>\u00a0in the Middle East and beyond. The European Union has had to turn its focus to the noble cause of saving the JCPOA through an innovative\u00a0payment-clearing instrument<\/a>, which is about to become operational.<\/p>\n

At a recent US-sponsored\u00a0conference<\/a>\u00a0in Warsaw<\/a>, the Trump administration fruitlessly sought to divide Europe, and to expand the anti-Iran coalition that it leads together with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Yet, for all of the\u00a0domestic difficulties<\/a>\u00a0faced by the Iranian regime, precipitating its collapse is no more realistic now than it was at any other point during the past 40 years.<\/p>\n

Instead of antagonizing Iran and lending credibility to its\u00a0hardliners<\/a>, the West should be seeking a more inclusive formula for addressing regional threats. Whereas decades of hostility with Iran yielded nothing, the recent period of engagement and negotiation resulted in a historic nuclear accord. It should be obvious which approach is more effective.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0Project Syndicate<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madrid – The 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution could have offered the West an opportunity to reflect on the failure of four decades of disengagement to bring the Islamic Republic any closer to collapse, or the region any closer to peace. Instead, the Trump administration has doubled down on hostility, with nothing to show for it.
\nJavier Solana – President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34,17],"tags":[18485,33879,13369],"class_list":["post-101830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-politics","tag-islamic-revolution-en","tag-javier-solana-en","tag-warsaw-conference-en"],"yoast_head":"\nIran\u2019s 40 Years of Strife - Strategic Council on Foreign Relations<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution could have offered the West an opportunity to reflect on the failure of four decades of disengagement ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scfr.ir\/en\/politics\/101830\/irans-40-years-of-strife\/\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"AGOL\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/fa\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/d39f31143efe45f618d63ff00063e28e\"},\"headline\":\"Iran\u2019s 40 Years of Strife\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-02-24T06:30:24+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-04-19T11:04:48+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1036,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/fa\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"\",\"keywords\":[\"Islamic revolution\",\"Javier Solana\",\"Warsaw Conference\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Opinion\",\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scfr.ir\\\/en\\\/politics\\\/101830\\\/irans-40-years-of-strife\\\/\",\"name\":\"Iran\u2019s 40 Years of Strife - 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