Iran's Deadly Ambition. Ilan Berman
to the Shah’s secular and stale authoritarianism. Yet in their first military outing, Iran’s holy warriors were bested by a secular adversary. The conflict left the Islamic Republic deeply traumatized, but it also helped instill a sense of unity among Iran’s populace. Iraq’s aggression and the West’s support of Saddam Hussein during the conflict bred in Tehran the sense that it was alone against the world.42
Nearly in tandem, the Islamic Republic suffered a major ideological crisis. Less than a year after the end of hostilities with Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini unexpectedly died of a heart attack, throwing his regime into partisan chaos. The resulting political tug-of-war led to the rise of a consensus candidate, the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also led many in the West to conclude that Iran’s revolutionary fervor had run its course, or that it soon would.43 For much of the following decade, Western analysis was colored by this vision of a post-revolutionary Iran, one in which practical concerns and economic priorities trumped revolutionary zeal.44
The message from Tehran, however, could not have been more different. In the aftermath of Khomeini’s passing, Iranian officials took pains to emphasize that the core tenets of Khomeini’s revolution—chief among them the ideal of “exporting the revolution”—remained in effect.45 This priority, however, would be achieved more subtly than it had been in the past. Whereas the heady early days of the Islamic Republic saw the Iranian regime become a locus of global insurgent activities, following the Iran-Iraq War the Iranian regime gravitated toward a new way of war, one characterized by the use of proxies, an economy of violence, and an exceedingly long view of global competition.46 This remains the strategy pursued by Iran’s leaders today.
MISREADING IRAN
Amazingly, most of this context is lost in contemporary political discourse over Iran. Precious few analysts of Iranian politics have bothered to read the formative texts that helped shape the behavior of the Islamic Republic. Fewer still are familiar with the history and strategic culture that continues to animate the Iranian state. As a result, the Beltway policy community is consistently caught off guard by the Iranian regime’s foreign adventurism and bankrolling of global terror, as well as by the scope of its international ambitions.
To be fair, not all branches of the U.S. government have been taken by surprise. In its inaugural report to Congress on Iran’s military capabilities, released publicly in the spring of 2010, the Pentagon noted that Iran simultaneously is seeking to ensure “the survival of the regime” and to “become the strongest and most influential country in the Middle East and to influence world affairs.” The Pentagon also pointed out that the Iranian leadership’s long-term “ideological goal is to be able to export its theocratic form of government, its version of Shia Islam, and stand up for the ‘oppressed’ according to their religious interpretations of the law.”47
The Pentagon’s subsequent 2012 report on the subject said much the same thing. “Iran continues to seek to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity,” it noted. “Iran also desires to expand economic and security agreements with other nations, particularly members of the Nonaligned Movement in Latin America and Africa.”48
Yet, as U.S. policy moved steadily toward engagement with Iran’s ayatollahs, this assessment was progressively watered down. Thus, in keeping with the Obama administration’s change in policy focus, the 2014 edition of the Pentagon’s report on Iran’s military capabilities was minimalist in nature and said nothing at all about the Islamic Republic’s ideological objectives.49 In that regard, it represents a more or less faithful reflection of the dominant view held by administration officials and supporters—these days, Iran is concerned above all simply with “regime survival.”50
Iranian leaders, however, are thinking considerably bigger. That was the message Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sought to convey to officials in his government as recently as September 2014. In a meeting with members of the Assembly of Experts, the Islamic Republic’s premier religious supervisory body, Khamenei asserted that the existing international system is “in the process of change” and a “new order is being formed.” These changes, he made clear, are a mortal blow to the West and a boon to Iran. “The power of the West on their two foundations—values and thoughts and the political and military—have become shaky” and can be subverted, Khamenei insisted.51
Iran, in other words, is still revolutionary after all these years. And today, very much in line with Khomeini’s famous 1980 dictum that his regime must “strive to export our revolution throughout the world,”52 the Islamic Republic is pursuing a truly global agenda, one that is built around three primary fronts.
The first, and most immediate, is sectarian in nature. The Iranian regime views itself as the vanguard of the so-called Shia Crescent in the Middle East and the ideological champion of the interests of the beleaguered Shia minority in the Sunni-dominated Muslim world.53 This outlook informs Iran’s ongoing sponsorship of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, its primary—and most important—terrorist proxy, as well as its backing of assorted Shiite insurgent groups in neighboring Iraq and Shia insurgents in Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere.
The second front is pan-Islamist. Iran’s leaders believe fervently that their regime is the natural ideological leader of the Islamic world and the rightful inheritor of the mantle of the Prophet Mohammed.54 This conviction underlies Iran’s long-standing strategic rivalry with Saudi Arabia, Sunni Islam’s most important player—a contest Iran’s leaders see as one not only for strategic position, but also for ideological primacy. It is also what animates Iran’s repeated efforts over the past decade to goad the countries of the Middle East into a security condominium of its own fashioning, thereby becoming the region’s geopolitical center of gravity.
Finally, the Iranian regime has embraced the language of third-world populism, using it in its efforts to enlist countries in Latin America and Africa in a shared revisionist agenda on the global stage. The crux of this message was encapsulated in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September 2012 address before the United Nations General Assembly, in which the Iranian president called for the formation of a “new world order” as a substitute for the current domination of the “bullying” West.55 It is a call that has resonated in many corners of the third world.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger once famously remarked that Iran faces a choice of being “a nation or a cause.”56 Today, Iran’s leaders believe that their regime can be both. Even as they engage in a dialogue with the West over their nuclear program, they are acting out that conviction.
When a 26-year-old fruit peddler in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest government corruption and a lack of economic opportunity, it ignited a regional firestorm. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation touched off escalating protests against the long-serving Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, first in Sidi Bouzid, and subsequently throughout the entire country. Within less than a month, Ben Ali stepped down and fled the country in the face of widespread and sustained opposition to his rule.
Egypt was next. Beginning in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak, Cairo’s immutable authoritarian sphinx for more than three decades, also found himself in the public crosshairs. Millions of disgruntled Egyptians took to the streets, congregating in the capital’s Tahrir Square to call for release from the political stagnation and economic malaise that had come to characterize Mubarak’s rule. In an effort to cling to power, the Egyptian president proffered a number of compromises and power-sharing arrangements. But by then, the crowd was seeking more fundamental change, and Mubarak was forced to resign.
Tunisia and Egypt may be the most dramatic examples of the widespread regional antiestablishment sentiment that became known