Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Juneau, Thomas, author

Squandered opportunity : neoclassical realism and Iranian foreign policy / Thomas Juneau.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9305-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Iran—Foreign relations—1997–   .   2. Iran—Politics and government—1997–   .   3. Political realism.   I. Title.

DS318.9.J87   2015

327.55—dc23

2014036171

ISBN 978-0-8047-9508-1 (electronic)

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion

Squandered Opportunity

Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy

Thomas Juneau

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

I wish to dedicate this book to my wife,

MARIE-HÉLÈNE,

and to our two sons,

RÉMI and PHILIPPE

CONTENTS

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Neoclassical Realism

2. From Power to Foreign Policy: The Causal Chain

3. Power

4. Domestic Pathologies

5. Iran’s Policy in Iraq

6. Iran and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

7. Iran’s Nuclear Program

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

FIGURES

I.1. Capabilities Shape Intentions

1.1. Rose, Rathbun, Specificity and Generalizability

TABLE

5.1. Deaths in Iraq

Acknowledgments

I would first and foremost like to thank Brian Schmidt for the extraordinarily valuable feedback and support he gave me throughout the research and drafting process of this book. I also thank Farhang Rajaee and Mira Sucharov, as well as Elinor Sloan and Brian Rathbun, for their advice.

I also express my deepest gratitude to all my superiors at the Department of National Defence with the Government of Canada, where I worked from 2003 until July 2014: Harky Smith, Claude Leblanc, Ben Lombardi, Vincent Rigby, James Groen, Michael Margolian, Martin Green, Col. Brian Irwin, Jean-François Morel, and Yves Goulet. Without their help, the inevitable but unfortunate bureaucratic resistance could very well have blocked my dream of pursuing a path combining academia and the civil service. In fact, to be able to have a foot in both the government and academic worlds for all those years was as gratifying an experience as it was fruitful. It is a balance I hope to pursue, in one form or another, in the coming decades.

I also want to thank all of my former colleagues, in Defence and elsewhere in the security and intelligence community, for innumerable arguments over the years on whether Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb or whether the U.S. or Israel, or both, will attack Iran. These have been invaluable in helping me refine my views on Iran and its role and ambitions in the Middle East. It is partly thanks to those discussions that I steadily evolved toward the conclusion of this book—that Iran has broadly failed to achieve its foreign policy goals since 2001.

I particularly wish to thank Sam Razavi, a former colleague with whom I co-edited a book on Iran in 2013 (Iranian Foreign Policy since 2001: Alone in the World, 2013). The extensive work that went into preparing this book, as well as our many discussions around shawarma, have been essential in shaping my thinking on Iranian foreign policy.

Even though I joined the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa only three weeks before submitting the final manuscript for this book, I strongly wish to thank the school for having welcomed me in its family. I especially want to thank Peter Jones for his invaluable advice and encouragement over the years. Never again will he pay for coffee in my company.

As I move on to my new career at the University of Ottawa, a special thought goes to professors Gérard Hervouet and Jean-Sébastien Rioux, whose advice and support during my masters studies at Laval University in Québec City—and ever since—have been invaluable.

At Stanford University Press, I wish to thank James Holt, editorial assistant, and Geoffrey Burn, executive editor (security studies, international relations, and politics), for their support, advice, and exemplary professionalism throughout the process of transforming the manuscript into a book. I also thank John Feneron, Martin Hanft, and Mary Mortensen for their help at various stages of the production process.

Finally, I wish to thank Marie-Hélène Chayer, my lovely wife, for her encouragement and patience (and exceptional editorial skills). As usual, the responsibility for any mistake or omission is mine.

T.J.

Introduction

The Islamic Republic of Iran faced a highly favorable strategic environment after 2001. A combination of regional and international factors, especially the removal of hostile regimes in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the inflow of hard currency resulting from high oil prices, improved the country’s regional standing and led Tehran to assertively expand its interests abroad. Iran, moreover, possesses the necessary assets to position itself as one of the Middle East’s most powerful and influential states by dint of its geography, natural resources, and population. Yet despite these favorable dynamics, Iran failed to seize the opportunity to establish itself as the dominant regional power in the Persian Gulf and as an indispensable player in the Middle East, as its ambition.

How can one account for Iran’s underwhelming performance? How can one explain that faced with this advantageous set of circumstances, Iran failed to fulfill its ambition to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and a leading power in the Middle East? This book develops and applies a new variant of neoclassical realism to shed light on the causes and consequences of Iran’s suboptimal performance between 2001 and 2009.¹ It will show that rising power drove Iranian assertiveness, as most variants of realism would predict, but that because of the intervention of key domestic pathologies, Iran’s foreign policy deviated from structurally induced, optimal outcomes. This led to important, negative consequences.

ENTER THEORY

How can different theoretical approaches account for Iran’s suboptimal foreign policy between 2001 and 2009?

Offensive realism argues that security in the anarchic international system is scarce. States live in uncertainty, as they can never be certain about their neighbors’ intentions; they must assume that these intentions are, or could become, aggressive. As a result, states—especially great powers—are driven by the system to maximize their power: achieving regional hegemony is the best way to guarantee survival (Mearsheimer, 1990, 2001). States are not reckless expansionists, however. Rather, they are opportunistic aggressors seeking to increase their power at acceptable cost and risk (Walt, 2002, p. 207). Offensive realism rightly emphasizes that Iran, with its power rising, sought to expand its interests abroad. It cannot, however, account for specific choices. Moreover, its sweeping emphasis on power maximization misses out on other aspects of Iranian behavior.

According to defensive realism, anarchy drives states to compete for security, with the intensity of this competition shaped by the offense-defense balance, or the relative ease or difficulty of conquest (Van Evera, 1999). Because this balance often favors defense, states can usually maximize their security by adopting defensive postures. Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat theory (1987, 1996) is often recognized as one of defensive realism’s main applications. According to Walt, states do not balance against power, as structural realism predicts, but against threat, which he defines as a composite of capabilities, geography, and perception of intentions. Defensive realism correctly claims that Iran, perceiving an acute threat from the United States and its allies, seeks to maximize its security by counterbalancing: internally, by pursuing the development of asymmetric military capabilities and its nuclear program, and externally, by developing ties with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, and groups in Iraq. Defensive realism, however, neglects the importance of Iran’s power; if Iran’s power had not risen after 2001, its predictions would not be significantly different, since its explanatory emphasis rests on Iran’s threat perception. Its focus on security explains certain dimensions of Iranian foreign policy but misses out on revisionist and power-maximizing aspects.

Constructivists argue that international pressures are indeterminate: because politics are a social construction, structure acquires meaning through shared understandings among states. The social dimensions of international politics matter: norms, rules, and language, in particular, are neglected by realists. A key insight of constructivism is that identity, or collectively held values, beliefs, and assumptions, shape preferences and interests (Katzenstein, 1996; Wendt, 1999). A constructivist reading of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy emphasizes the development of its identity through its interaction with others. In particular, the United States—the Great Satan—has shaped what the clerical regime has become through catalytic events such as the embassy hostage crisis of 1979–81 and American support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88. For constructivists, opposition to the United States is ingrained in the Islamic Republic’s identity; it is the prism through which its leaders view the world. This explains why, for example, Iran supports like-minded groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. This explanation is beset by a crucial flaw, however: Iran’s identity did not measurably change between 2001 and 2009, yet its assertiveness did. Identity is therefore not the key driver of its changing foreign policy.²

Liberalism consists of a broad family of theories, most of which agree that to understand foreign policy, one must peer inside the black-box of the state. For some, notably proponents of the democratic peace hypothesis, regime type is the key variable (Russett and Oneal, 2001). For others, the preferences of domestic actors and the institutional settings in which they operate are essential (Moravcsik, 1997). Domestic politics have long been recognized as having an impact on Iran’s foreign policy. In recent years, as hard-liners associated with former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13) gained influence to the detriment of reformist and pragmatic factions, foreign policy tilted in a hard-line direction. The problem with this approach, however, is that it cannot account for the divergent implications of tilts in the balance of factional power in the 1990s and 2000s. In the late 1990s, the country’s power stagnated, while reformist fortunes were on the rise; foreign policy tilted but did not decisively shift in their preferred direction. In the 2000s, as hard-liner fortunes waxed and reformists were marginalized and as Iran’s power rose, Iran’s foreign policy took on a much more assertive form. Changes in the balance of factional power, in other words, account for tilts in foreign policy; changes in the international balance of power can cause major shifts.

Overall, constructivism, liberalism, and offensive and defensive realism account for important trends in Iranian foreign policy. Each, however, has flaws that prevent it from developing a comprehensive explanation. Most important, they cannot account for the suboptimality of Iran’s foreign policy; they have no explanation for its failure to seize the opportunity it faced or for the consequences it suffers as a result.

NEOCLASSICAL REALISM AND ITS STRATEGIC ANALYSIS VARIANT: A WAY AHEAD

For neoclassical realists, power is the chief determinant of foreign policy; it shapes the incentives and constraints imposed on states. A framework relying solely on structural factors is underspecified, however; it explains the international context in which a state operates but says little about the content of its foreign policy. Neoclassical realists thus posit that to better understand foreign policy, one must take domestic factors into consideration. These intervening variables act as transmission belts, filtering systemic pressures and converting them into actual foreign policy choices. In addition, neoclassical realism, in some of its applications, is a theory of mistakes: it provides a framework differentiating between ideal, optimal foreign policy—which responds solely to structural pressures and incentives—and actual, suboptimal choices, which arise following the filtering effect of domestic pathologies.

Structural realism, in other words, rightly predicts that states faced with a window of opportunity are subjected to strong incentives to expand their interests abroad. Structural realism, however, broadly explains why states jump through the window (power is a permissive cause) but lacks the tools to explain how and with what consequences. Neoclassical realism thus provides a comprehensive framework combining the permissive cause, power, with proximate causes (domestic factors).

Neoclassical realism has contributed significant advancements to the realist paradigm, but it is beset by two weaknesses. First, there have been few efforts to develop its internal logic, as the literature is dominated by case studies.³ Second, despite its professed emphasis on richness, neoclassical realism has focused on sweeping historical cases, often covering decades, leading it to neglect important day-to-day aspects of state behavior. The strategic analysis variant introduced here builds on the strengths of neoclassical realism while remedying these weaknesses. It seeks to develop case studies that are more relevant to consumers of academic research: comprehensive, detailed explanations of the causes of foreign policy (the why), the conduct (the what and the how), and the consequences of choices (the so what).

The strategic analysis variant is positioned at one end of a continuum marking the degree of specificity and accuracy sought in the study of foreign policy. This continuum is built around a core tenet of realism, that capabilities shape intentions (see Figure I.1). At the other extreme—where generalizability and parsimony are favored—a sparse structural realist framework predicts that faced with a power vacuum, a state will seize opportunities to expand its interests abroad. To attain greater accuracy, it is possible to add layers of complexity by integrating domestic factors as intervening variables; this is what neoclassical realism offers. At this point, around the middle of the continuum, the analyst has the tools to study the big picture: how power shapes the parameters of foreign policy and how domestic factors specify choices.

FIG. I.1: Capabilities Shape Intentions

Some may still be left wanting by the broad level of generalizability offered by structural realism and conventional versions of neoclassical realism. To satisfy their needs, at the other end of the continuum, the strategic analysis variant thus increases specificity and accuracy while remaining within the confines of realism by proposing the following innovations:

• Fragmenting state power in its component parts to better understand how subtle shifts in specific elements of power affect particular aspects of foreign policy;

• Defining power broadly, with less focus on territory and conquest;

• Increasing the number and specificity of intervening variables to better reflect their filtering impact on foreign policy;

• Better systematizing foreign policy by conceptually separating it into four parts: power, security, and influence-maximization; actual and ideal national interests; foreign policy strategies; and the consequences of suboptimal behavior;

• Rejecting the debate about whether states seek to maximize power, security, or influence. Rather, at any given time, a state seeks to maximize all three; on a day-to-day basis, in a complex world, the pursuit of these ends cannot be neatly disaggregated;

• Better systematizing actual and ideal foreign policy and clarifying why and how states suffer consequences as a result of gaps between ideal and actual versions;

• Taking into consideration the dynamism and path-dependency of the causal chain.

The result, a rich but theoretically informed explanation of foreign policy, accounts for the different ends pursued by a state through a combination of strategies and tools, while also providing a framework to analyze the consequences of those actions. The objective is to increase its relevance to consumers of academic products, be they diplomats or statesmen, members of the media or the business community, NGOs, or the general public.

SQUANDERED OPPORTUNITY: IRAN’S SUBOPTIMAL FOREIGN POLICY

Iran’s foreign policy since 2001 has been suboptimal: Tehran has made mistakes that are proving increasingly costly. Yet the assessment that a state’s foreign policy has been suboptimal must be based on a comparison between actual behavior and an ideal or optimal baseline. Structural realism provides such a toolset to define a state’s ideal interests. Indeed, there is a growing tendency to view structural realism as a normative theory, prescribing how states should behave, as opposed to explaining how they actually behave (Glaser, 2010).

The national interest thus exists in two variants: the ideal, explaining which combination of ends a state should pursue, and the actual, what it actually pursues. The ideal version is a prescriptive or normative baseline derived from Waltzian structural realism. Neoclassical realism is based on the recognition that in practice, states often do not pursue their ideal interests. The actual interests they pursue, though broadly shaped by their position in the international system, arise from the distorting effect of domestic political processes that lead them to deviate from ideal outcomes. This distinction between ideal and actual interests positions neoclassical realism as a theory of mistakes, explaining how states should behave and how they actually behave, and with what implications.

Yet structural realism incorporates different variants with sometimes contradictory prescriptions of ideal behavior. The challenge is therefore to identify which strand offers the best prescriptions of optimal behavior. The strategic analysis variant rejects the notion that theories have sweeping explanatory power. Rather, competing theories have different strengths and weaknesses, making them more or less useful depending on context. According to this cookie-cutter approach, theories should be chosen on the basis of the optimal complementarity between their strengths and the research problem at hand.

As a rising power faced with a window of opportunity and surrounded by hostile states—especially, in Tehran’s view, the hegemony-seeking United States—Iran should behave like an offensive realist. That is, the scope conditions of offensive realism—a world of scarce security and of revisionist, hegemony-seeking powers—are more consistent with Iran’s circumstances. Defensive realism is less applicable: Iran does not perceive that security is plentiful, and neither can it be labeled as having a status quo bias. Iran’s ideal foreign policy should therefore follow the prescriptions of offensive realism: to maximize its security, it should aim to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and an indispensable player in the Middle East. By dint of its location, its large and well-educated population, and its abundant hydrocarbon resources, Iran can aspire to such a regional role. This is necessary to ensure the survival of the regime and protect the country’s territorial integrity.

Yet despite the favorable strategic environment it faced after 2001, Iran did not fulfill its ambition: there was a gap between this ideal interest and what it actually achieved. That is the central puzzle of this book: to explain why, how, and with what consequences Iran’s foreign policy has been suboptimal.

The starting point to any realist account is power. Power refers to the possession and control by a state of usable assets that it can bring to bear upon its foreign policy. Those capabilities—both tangible and intangible and viewed in relative terms—represent incentives and constraints that push and pull states in certain directions and not others. Between 2001 and 2009, Iran’s power increased: it faced a window of opportunity.⁴ This sudden advantage was largely created by factors exogenous to Iran: the collapse of rival regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, primarily, and the large decline in U.S. regional legitimacy that followed. Other factors, especially the rise in oil prices and the success of allies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, also helped. However, this power advantage suffers from critical flaws and is unlikely to be sustainable. A significant proportion of the growth in Iranian power was accounted for by unconventional elements: asymmetric military capabilities, the regional attractiveness of Iran’s rejectionist model, and alliances with nonstate actors. At the same time, hard aspects of Iran’s power—wealth and conventional military capabilities—stagnated, and in some cases declined. In addition, many factors that caused the window to open will evolve in a manner unlikely to be so advantageous to Iran. This is the peculiar condition of Iranian power: rising unconventional elements and stagnating conventional ones, and questionable sustainability in the longer term.

Such is the structural context driving Iranian foreign policy. These systemic pressures are then filtered through domestic processes acting as transmission belts between the international distribution of power and the foreign policy outcome. Intervening variables explain the conversion from the possible—the range of feasible outcomes shaped by power—to the actual, the foreign policy choices. Iranian foreign policy is shaped by three intervening variables: status, regime identity, and factional politics. Each, on its own, explains specific aspects; taken together and in combination with power, they provide a comprehensive account.

The status intervening variable is premised on the relationship between a state’s status aspiration and its perception of the status ascribed to it by the international community. In Iran’s case, there is an important discrepancy between its aspiration to regional power status and its perception that the status ascribed to it is unbecoming of what it believes is its rightful place in the regional order. Iran, as a result, suffers from a status discrepancy. Status discrepancy is a source of revisionism. Revisionism, however, is indeterminate; to argue that a state is revisionist does not explain specific choices. To achieve greater specificity, two more intervening variables are introduced. The second consists of the Iranian regime’s rejectionist identity, whereby the Islamic Republic opposes the U.S.-dominated regional order, but as a limited aims revisionist that works mostly from within the system. Identity, in this sense, specifies state interests by narrowing the range of feasible options, ranking alternatives and shaping the implementation of decisions. The third intervening variable further specifies choices by positing that policy outcomes broadly reflect the balance of power among the regime’s main factions. This balance constantly evolves but remains within the bounds of the Islamic Republic’s dominant discourse. As the balance of factional power steadily tilted in favor of conservatives and hard-liners after 2001, so did foreign policy tilt in their preferred direction. Power, aspirations, and regime identity, in sum, shape a set of options for the country’s foreign policy; to determine which are selected, factions fight it out among themselves.

This causal chain—power, status, identity, and factional politics—explains how the framework shifts from analyzing the possible to the actual, from available courses of action to choices. Power shapes the parameters in which foreign policy operates. Iran’s power increased after 2001, but the peculiar nature of this increase made certain options more likely while eliminating others. Status discrepancy then shifts the parameters toward revisionism. Regime identity narrows the band in which choice is possible, specifying the rejectionist nature of Iran’s revisionism. As the factional balance increasingly favored conservatives and hard-liners, foreign policy further tilted toward their preferences.

This framework explains the causes and consequences of Iran’s suboptimal foreign policy—the dependent variable—in three areas: Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and nuclear policy.

Iran has major interests in Iraq; geography ensures that the security of each is dependent on the power and ambitions of the other, irrespective of the dominant ideology in Baghdad or Tehran. Thus when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iran’s security became acutely threatened; unlike in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which does not directly threaten its security, strong structural pressures shaped Iran’s responses. There was, as a result, less scope for Iranian agency: intervening variables have less explanatory power than in the other cases because structural pressures were more intense, pushing and shoving Iran more compellingly. Iran suffers from a status discrepancy in Iraq: it wants to play a role but is denied the opportunity. Iran is thus dissatisfied with the post-Saddam Iraqi order. Regime identity specifies the rejectionist nature of this revisionism by acting as a lens through which the world is interpreted, threats are evaluated, and options are assessed. As the factional balance within the regime increasingly favored hard-liners and conservatives, policy tilted toward their preferred outcomes.

Iran’s quest to maximize its influence in Iraq met with some successes; it reached its peak around 2006–7, after which it plateaued and initiated a gradual decline. When measured against its ideal interests, Iran partly accomplished many objectives. In the face of the threat arising from the U.S. military presence and the possible disintegration of Iraq, Iran partially succeeded in establishing itself as an indispensable player in Iraqi affairs and was instrumental in the establishment of a stable and relatively weak Iraqi government devoid of anti-Iranian biases. Nonetheless, Iran’s performance has been suboptimal, albeit to a lesser extent than in the other areas. This smaller discrepancy was due to the more limited role played by domestic pathologies in distorting Iranian policies; Iran benefited from less agency, as a result of which there was less deviation from optimal, structurally induced outcomes.

Iran’s rising power has pushed it toward greater assertiveness in the Arab-Israeli conflict, as predicted by structural realism. Iran’s peculiar power context represented strong but ambiguous circumstances, however, leaving significant scope for domestic pathologies to distort foreign policy. Iran’s status discrepancy, first, drives its revisionist impulse. Regime identity then narrows the band in which choice is possible, specifying the rejectionist nature of Iran’s revisionism: Iran, dissatisfied with the regional order, opposes the management of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Factional politics provides the third step explaining why Iranian foreign policy tilted toward assertiveness, revisionism, and rejectionism: as the factional balance increasingly favored hard-liners and conservatives, foreign policy further tilted toward their preferred outcomes.

There is, solely on the basis of structural pressures, limited security for Iran to maximize in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Given Iran’s actual interests, however, its penetration of the Arab-Israeli theater has been a fundamental pillar of its security-maximization. In particular, Iran’s ties to rejectionist groups have acted as strong deterrents against potential attack by Israel. Iran has gained some influence in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It chalked up some successes not in terms of changing the rules of the game to its benefit, but rather by preventing its adversaries from modifying those rules. There are, however, strong constraints limiting Iran’s influence. Tehran has a narrow set of tools, with its main assets being the appeal of its rejectionist model and its ties to other rejectionist actors. This limits the breadth of the impact it can have on the conflict and is insufficient to shape the regional order in the revisionist direction it prefers. Crucially, these constraints are growing, a trend that will continue into the future. Iran’s actions, moreover, have led to negative consequences: its rejectionism, in particular, has contributed significantly to its isolation.

Iran’s nuclear program leads to paradoxical results. Structural signals—rising power but continued weakness relative to the United States and its regional partners—have been strong but ambiguous. There was therefore scope for greater agency, since structural pressures did not push and shove Iran as compellingly as in the case of Iraq. Domestic pathologies have thus been able to exert a significant impact on nuclear policy. Iran again suffers from a status discrepancy: it wants to join the nuclear club and reap the prestige and power associated with that enhanced status but is denied the opportunity by the United States and its allies. Iran is, as a result, dissatisfied with the nuclear order. Rising power and status discrepancy explain why Iran is assertive and revisionist and aims to acquire the tools befitting a regional power. It does not say more, however; some regional powers have acquired nuclear weapons, while others have renounced their nuclear ambitions. The regime identity variable then explains how Iran’s range of feasible options was further narrowed toward rejectionism. Finally, as the factional balance within the regime increasingly favored hardliners and conservatives, policy tilted toward their preferred outcomes.

The Islamic Republic has been able to gain some influence thanks to its nuclear program, more than in the Arab-Israeli conflict but less than in Iraq. Most important, the program promises future benefit, in particular because of its value as a bargaining chip. Paradoxically, however, the Islamic Republic suffers significant—and mounting—consequences as a result of its nuclear choices. Primarily because of international opposition to the nuclear program, Iran’s economy is increasingly strangulated by a steadily harsher sanctions regime.

Overall, Iran did have some success in maximizing its power. In all three cases, specific elements of its power increased between 2001 and 2009, in some cases significantly. Its performance, however, has been undeniably suboptimal: its power in 2009 remained well below its potential and certainly not at the level befitting a regional power. Similarly, Iran succeeded in maximizing aspects of its security, especially when viewed from a narrow, short-term perspective. Most important, Iran was not attacked by the United States or Israel, partly because of its development of an arsenal of deterrent assets. On many other fronts, however, Iran’s security deteriorated and, if current trends continue, the situation will worsen. Iran is more isolated and mistrusted by most of its neighbors than at any point since the early revolutionary years in the 1980s. Heightened tensions with the United States and its allies also make the risk of misperception and escalation high. Iran was able to increase its influence to some extent. The combination of the peculiar nature of its power, however, with the intervention of domestic pathologies intervening in its foreign policy-making process distorts its influence-maximization efforts and prevents Iran from reaching its potential. Iran has not developed the assets necessary to positively shape outcomes; it has primarily developed the means to negatively influence regional developments. When it has the assets to shape outcomes positively, it has only a superficial ability to do so.

These failures have had important negative consequences. In Iraq, strong structural pressures pushed Iran to maximize its influence in a more optimal manner; it suffered fewer consequences and reaped important gains. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, lower structural pressures allowed domestic processes to hijack policy-making, leading to a highly suboptimal outcome: major consequences and limited gains. The nuclear case situates itself in between: the consequences of its nuclear policy have been severe and are set to worsen, but the potential benefits are significant. The overall situation will worsen, not improve, for the Islamic Republic: its power is likely to decrease in coming years. As a result, the suboptimality of its foreign policy will deteriorate, while the consequences it suffers as a result will worsen.

QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

Neoclassical realist studies are based on two questions: an empirical question seeking to shed light on a specific foreign policy issue, and a nomothetic one developing a law of international politics. This can be illustrated by Fareed Zakaria’s study of U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Zakaria asks a specific question on the dominant cause that explains the course of late nineteenth century American foreign policy (1998, p. 8) and a generalizable one (Under what conditions do states expand their interests abroad?). Zakaria provides a detailed answer to the empirical question, while proposing insights but no firm answer to the nomothetic one.

In this context, this book seeks to answer the following questions:

Q1: How can the causes and consequences of the suboptimal performance of Iranian foreign policy between 2001 and 2009 be explained?

Q2: Under what conditions does foreign policy reach suboptimal outcomes, and what are the consequences of such suboptimal foreign policy choices?

The answer to these questions will be provided by exploring three hypotheses. These hypotheses are not specific propositions to be quantitatively tested, but proposals exploring the causes and consequences of suboptimal behavior and guidelines shaping the analysis:

H1: The stronger the structural pressures on a given state, the more its foreign policy will be shaped by structural constraints and incentives; conversely, the weaker the structural pressures, the more foreign policy will be exposed to deviations from optimal outcomes because of the intervention of domestic processes.

The first portion of this proposition corresponds to the condition described by structural realism: state behavior is, or should be, shaped by the international distribution of power, with domestic processes playing a limited role. The outcome is optimal behavior. There is an inherent tension, however: does this represent an ideal whereby structural realism, as a normative theory, describes how states should behave? If so, how to account for the fact that states sometimes do not behave in accordance with this prescription? There is, as such, a need for a theory of mistakes differentiating between ideal behavior, as prescribed by structural realism, and actual behavior, resulting from the mixed effect of structural and domestic forces. This corresponds to the second half of H1: the frequent conundrum, which structural realism often cannot explain, whereby a state’s foreign policy deviates from structurally induced, optimal outcomes because of the intervention of domestic pathologies. This was the case for Iran.

H2: Faced with a window of opportunity, a state benefits from an unusually high degree of agency.

A state faced with a window of opportunity is subjected to strong structural pressures and incentives to rapidly expand its interests abroad. But faced with a vacuum, a state faces strong but ambiguous signals. The message from systemic pressures is to jump through the window, without specifying how: in which issue-area to pursue which interests more assertively, using which strategies and tools. The state thus faces an unusual amount of choice. The paradox is that for states facing a window, power is an active driving force but is also highly permissive, given that there is much scope for domestic factors to shape foreign policy. Neoclassical realism is thus appropriate for the study of the behavior of a state confronted with a window, as it is well suited to examining situations in which both power and domestic factors have a large explanatory role.

H3: When a state faces a window of opportunity, there is likely to be a mismatch between its capabilities and intentions.

When a state faces a window of opportunity, pushed and