When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old. More significant, it knew its antiquity. A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire [1948]
It is common practice when composing these end of year epistles to provide a round-up of the year’s main events, to try to identify some trend or other as though, contra Ecclesiastes, there is ever anything new under the sun. And indeed, in this holiday season, there are no signs that humanity has learned anything new over the past year since the Preacher’s writing some 2500 years ago–around the time Cyrus entered Babylon. We will therefore take a more philosophical approach as we reflect on the past year, particularly the recent outbreaks of violence that brought an abrupt end to–or at least a serious delay for–what many heralded as the dawn of the new Middle East. You know, the Abraham Accords and all that.
The year has indeed been one that stripped bare the foundations of regional politics to reveal recurring Hobbesian patterns of inter-state and non-state behavior that should have been no surprise to anyone. There was a bright spot. The March rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered by China was an event long in the making and evidence that both Riyadh and Tehran saw much to gain by cooling tensions and retiring to their corners for a breather, and recognition that continued good relations with Beijing depended on their good behavior. Even the most authoritarian of states believe there is a better way to live than in a state of nature where naked power reigns.
But Hobbesian realities are never very far from the surface and when they emerge, states tend to respond according to Hobbesian instincts.
As noted, the October attack by Hamas against Israel upset the trend towards regional rapprochement with Israel, and whether Iran was complicit in the attack, merely informed, or totally caught off guard, Tehran felt it pragmatically necessary to distance itself and avoid entering the fray with Hamas, not to invite potential retaliation by Israel and the US. There was even the Nezam’s apparent volte face regarding the existence of Israel, and denial that Iran ever intended to push Israelis into the sea. But now it appears that–pragmatically?–Tehran cannot sit idly by as outrage in the region and internationally grows over alleged Israeli indiscriminate bombing and disregard for civilian lives in Gaza, and domestic Iranian voices question what happened to the long-stated bold policy of the eradication of the Zionist State. So we wake up to find Iran supporting Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and perhaps Iranian direct attacks on shipping tied to Israel in the Indian Ocean. And, at home, even as protests over the murder of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 subsided, the Nezam appeared divided over how to deal with the hijab issue, for many, a defining aspect of Iran’s identity, but for others, no longer the “red line” it once was. There is leniency one day, then the next the morality police are back on the streets roughing up those hussies in loose hijab.
Thus, the perennial question arises again over the pragmatic or ideological nature of Iran’s foreign and domestic policy.
In a 2009 Middle East Institute essay, “Iran’s International Relations: Pragmatism in a Revolutionary Bottle,” professor Anoush Ehteshami might have gotten it exactly backward. What he describes since 1979, and what we have witnessed recently, resembles more the revolutionary trapped inside a pragmatic bottle. Or, more accurately, what we see is pragmatism and ideology thrown together in one of those mixed martial arts cage matches, with no escape, doomed to perpetually and inconclusively duke it out.
But he gets many things exactly right. He argues, “Iran’s international relations have evolved into a series of pragmatic decisions alongside ideological stand-offs.” And then he suggests that “‘zigzagging’ appears to be the hallmark of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy” before adding quite astutely, “Then again, what country’s foreign policy cannot be thus described? Nonetheless, given Iran’s location and revolutionary-religious-based political regime, its erratic foreign policy has been particularly troubling to many, especially to the United States.”
In other words, Iran would be much easier to deal with if it just made up its mind and chose either pragmatism or ideology as a guide to policy.
But even if the Nezam were to unwaveringly choose ideology, we might still find ourselves in a wilderness of mirrors, chasing clues for what’s next. In fact, Ehteshami intriguingly observes that the Islamic Republic is “a regime whose stated goals in the international arena, as enshrined in its constitution, are either too abstract or too prescriptive to add any value to understanding its actual conduct.”
Resilient ideologies are characterized by their adaptability to circumstances, allowing the ideologue room for tactical maneuver. This is not hypocrisy or a sign of confusion but of political sophistication.
So it’s exceedingly difficult to discern something as subjective, malleable, and conditional as ideology by objective actions, just as it is difficult to predict action based on ideology. When does a shift from policy A to policy B signal not a shift from ideology to pragmatism but rather a tactical move that is rationalized within the conceptual framework of the original ideology itself? In the Islamic context, the concept of maslaha is apropos, where tactical adjustments for the interest of the community and, by extension, the Islamic state are accepted for the sake of expediency? And then there is the Latin maxim, “Necessitas non habet legem”–Necessity knows no law. And when do such shifts and adjustments suggest not a progression from ideology to pragmatism but a transformation to a new ideology?
The analytic fallacy is to adopt the view that any state’s policy options are “either–or” pragmatic or ideological, when in fact, the pragmatic and the ideological are inextricably linked. In his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking [1907], William James devotes a whole lecture to “Pragmatism and Religion,” where he writes: “On pragmatic principles, we can not reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.” Therefore, views on hijab, Israel, and the Islamic identity of the Islamic Republic might be ideological in one sense, but they are also pragmatic to the extent that “consequences useful to life flow from it.” Consequences useful at least to the life of those in power in the Nezam.
The reason the idea that the ideological can be pragmatic and the pragmatic ideological is so difficult for us to accept is that we default to our common-sense notions of pragmatism and ideology. But as Karl Manheim explained in Ideology and Utopia [1936], there are what he called the general and the particular concepts of ideology. The general concept is the one which our culture has conditioned us to believe in and accept as “just the way life is.” According to Mannheim, the “particular” conception of ideology arises when “our” ideology comes into conflict with and is threatened by the ideology of the “Other,” or our adversary. Until then we are largely unaware that our own “pragmatic” worldview is, in fact, an ideology. Now, we are suddenly aware that our own beliefs and interests are threatened, and we are in turn “skeptical of the ideas and representations advanced by our opponent. They are regarded as more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of the situation.”
In other words, if our adversaries were to see it “our” way, they’d realize their ideology was not in their pragmatic interests.
This is not a retreat into political or moral relativism. Few of us would argue that the political anachronism that is the Islamic Republic is “just as good as any other system,” depending on your point of view. For all its faults and inequalities, what we generally call liberal democracy as practiced here and in most developed and developing nations appears to be by far a better approach to human welfare.
But as analysts, we must adopt a clinical, as opposed to judgmental perspective. The point of all this has been that we will always be caught off-guard if we expect the Iranian leadership to act according to simplistic binary choice frameworks, or to assume they are in either a pragmatic or ideological phase, rather than being both simultaneously. As yet, we have seen no evidence that the Nezam has abandoned ideology for pragmatism, only that it still maintains the flexibility, when necessary, to bend rather than break.
As the historian Olmstead noted at the top, when Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 BC, the world was already old. It’s older still now, and if we are aware of its antiquity and its history, we must surely be aware of the constant tension between pragmatism and ideology and not puzzle too much over the fact that humans individually or collectively are capable of wondrous and paradoxical things. Round and round they go, where they stop, nobody knows!
With that in mind, we hope you enjoy this week’s line-up of stories, which serve to remind us that without some theoretical framework or reflection, the politics in and among nations often follow not so much “systems” but appear as ad hoc improvisations in reaction to just one damn thing after another.
Our featured article, “Oil Industry Challenges: Sanctions, Management, Investment Shortfalls,” calls attention to Iran’s oil industry, which is increasingly hampered by deteriorating infrastructure and managerial inefficiencies, intensifying crises in the sector, and threatening national reserves and energy security. Related is “Energy Crisis: Industrial Struggle, Ripple Effect on National Economy,” that highlights how Iran’s severe electricity and gas shortages threaten the national economy and could necessitate increased household gas prices and gasoline imports, thus increasing the potential for popular discontent.
On the regional front, “‘Strategic’ Iran-Russia Relations in Limbo” reminds us that questions remain regarding President Ebrahim Ra’isi’s “look to the East” policy, given Russia’s latest position over Iran’s dispute with the UAE over ownership of three Persian Gulf islands has roiled Tehran-Moscow relations and called into question Russia’s role as a “strategic” partner.
And as the Israel-Hamas conflict intensifies, the Nezam is scoring points with its hardline constituency over support to Yemeni resistance forces actively targeting vessels affiliated with Israel as chronicled in “Expanding Influence through Yemeni Resistance,” and anti-Israel fervor is stoked over the alleged Israeli assassination of a top IRGC official in Damascus, a move Tehran insists will weaken Israel’s image and strengthen the “axis of resistance.”
All of us at PersuMedia wish all of our readers a prosperous and, we sincerely hope, a happier New Year.
