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Reinventing Iran's foreign policy - -

By Kaveh L. Afrasiabi

Oct 7, 2005
Reinventing Iran's foreign policy
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has opposed the description of his country's nuclear issue as a crisis. Yet there are strong indications that this is indeed an apt word to describe an increasingly volatile situation engulfing all sides of Iran's foreign policy, including that toward Iraq and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The situation warrants a serious review of the course of action adopted by the new administration in Tehran.

Indeed, in addition to the nuclear problem portending a showdown at the UN Security Council in the near future, there are alarming signs of trouble nearly everywhere: Iran's relations with the United Kingdom have hit a low, with London's accusation of Iranian complicity in the spate of attacks on British soldiers in southern Iraq; the European Union going along with Washington's march for UN action on Iran; India casting votes against Iran at the UN

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atomic agency; Turkey and Pakistan, two critical neighbors of Iran, openly embracing Israel, a country daily threatening Iran with military strikes at its nuclear facilities; and, as if things were not bad enough, Saudi Arabia leveling serious charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq.

In terms of Iran's regional policy, the new tumult in Iran-Saudi relations is unsettling, and untimely, and the announced postponement of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Motaki's visit to Saudi Arabia only reinforces the suspicion that the recent anti-Iran pronouncements by key Saudi officials have not been aberrations but, rather, ominous signs of a growing rift in what has been a pillar of stability in the turbulent Persian Gulf region.

Closer ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the post Islamic revolution days had resulted in part from the 1999 landmark visit by then president, Mohammad Khatami, paving the way to an agreement on low security cooperation with the Saudis in 2000.

The roots of this rapprochement were hatched in the early 1990s during the presidency of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani who, in 1991, advocated the notion of collective security in the Persian Gulf, that as part-and-parcel of a new "pragmatic turn" in revolutionary Iran's foreign policy.

But it would take several more years of reciprocal confidence-building, punctuated by the Kuwait crisis of 1990-91, when Iran opposed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, yet remained neutral during the conflict, ie, a "tilted neutrality" by all indications, before the two countries could actually normalize their relations.

These two "pillars of stability" in the oil-rich region have much in common - within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Organization of Islamic Conference, the threat of al-Qaeda, etc - to risk a sour return to past patterns of tension-f


    
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