Purpose: A one-day international symposium hosted by the Marine Corps University (MCU) and the Marine Corps University Foundation to enhance the overall understanding of Iran, exploring its internal dynamics, regional perspectives, and extra-regional factors and examining its near-term political and strategic options and their potential impact on the course of action of the United States and the USMC.
Religion, nationalism, ethnicity, economics, and geopolitics all are important in explaining Iran's goals and tactics in its relationship with the outside world, as are the agendas of key security institutions and the ambitions of their leaders. This report assesses Iran's security policy in light of these factors. It examines broad drivers of Iran's security policy, describes important security institutions, explores decisionmaking, and reviews Iran's relations with key countries. The authors conclude that Iraq is widely recognized as the leading threat to Iran's Islamic regime and Afghanistan is seen as an emerging threat. In contrast, Iran has solid, if not necessarily warm, relations with Syria and established working ties to Pakistan and Russia. Iran's policies toward its neighbors are increasingly prudent: It is trying to calm regional tension and end its isolation, although its policies toward Israel and the United States are often an exception to this policy. Iran's security forces, particularly the regular military, are often voices of restraint, preferring shows of force to overactive confrontations. Finally, Iran's security forces generally respect and follow the wishes of Iran's civilian leadership; conducting rogue operations is rare to nonexistent.
The greater Middle East region is beset by a crescent of crises, stretching from Pakistan through Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Together, these five crises pose the most pressing security challenges faced by the United States and its European allies —ranging from terrorism and weapons proliferation to the rise of fundamentalism and the lack of democracy. Until now, Europe and the United States have approached these issues (indeed, the Middle East as a whole) in differing ways, with little effective coordination of policy. In fact, how best to deal with the greater Middle East has emerged as one of the most contentious issues in U.S.-European relations. The need for a common approach to the region is more evident than ever.This book brings together some of Europe and America's leading scholars and practitioners in an effort to develop a common approach to resolving the five major crises in the region. European and American authors provide succinct and fact-filled overviews of the different crises, describe U.S. and European perspectives on the way forward, and suggest ways in which the United States and Europe can better cooperate. In the conclusion, the editors synthesize the different suggestions into a roadmap for U.S.-European cooperation for addressing the challenges of the Greater Middle East in the years ahead.Contributors include Stephen Cohen (Brookings Institution), James Dobbins (RAND), Toby Dodge (University of London), Martin Indyk (Saban Center at Brookings), Kenneth Pollack (Saban Center at Brookings), Jean-Luc Racine (Center for the Study of India and South Asia), Barnett Rubin (New York University), Yezid Sayigh (University of Cambridge), and Bruno Tertrais (Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique).
This volume focusses on non-state actors and political conflicts but also attends to the broader themes of the series. The research emphases the roles and motivations of non-state actors in conflicts or post-conflict situations in the post-Cold War era; as well outlining the dynamics of social movements, conflicts, or change.
Crafting a new policy toward Iran is a complicated, uncertain, and perilous challenge. Since it is an extremely complex society, with an opaque political system, it is no wonder that the United States has not yet figured out the puzzle that is Iran. With the clock ticking on Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities, solving this puzzle is more urgent than ever. In Which Path to Persia? a group of experts with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings lays out the courses of action available to the United States. What are the benefits and drawbacks of airstrikes? Can engagement be successful? Is regime change possible? In answering such questions, the authors do not argue for one approach over another. Instead, they present the details of the policies so that readers can understand the complexity of the challenge and decide for themselves which course the United States should take.
In This Flame Within Manijeh Moradian revises conventional histories of Iranian migration to the United States as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of pro-Shah Iranians from the Islamic Republic and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on archival evidence and in-depth interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, Moradian traces what she calls “revolutionary affects”—the embodied force of affect generated by experiences of repression and resistance—from encounters with empire and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other student activists in the United States. Moradian theorizes “affects of solidarity” that facilitated Iranian student participation in a wide range of antiracist and anticolonial movements and analyzes gendered manifestations of revolutionary affects within the emergence of Third World feminism. Arguing for a transnational feminist interpretation of the Iranian Student Association’s legacy, Moradian demonstrates how the recognition of multiple sources of oppression in the West and in Iran can reorient Iranian diasporic politics today.
This collection focuses on non-kinetic warfare, including cyber, media, and economic warfare, as well as non-violent resistance, 'lawfare', and hostage-taking.
The Iranian People's Fada'i Guerrillas have received little dedicated scholarly investigation in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution. This unique collection combines scholarly analysis of the movement, with first-hand accounts from those within the movement, in order to shed light on the experiences, organisation and history of this group during the 1970's. The volume is partly composed of eyewitness accounts from veteran Fada'i members on themes such as everyday life in safehouses, the activities of the small but active Fada'i representation abroad, the experience of Fada'i men and women who were subject to long imprisonment in the 1970s or perspectives on military organisation. Alongside these accounts are scholarly investigations into the various aspects in the history of the organisation, which cover elements such as its ideological foundations and political orientation, the importance of the Iranian labour movement in Fada'i thought and praxis and the impact of guerrilla activism in the arts.
Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans. Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“A tale of victory for peace, for freedom, and for the CIA— a trifecta rare enough to make for required reading.” —Steve Donoghue, Spectator USA In 1981, the Soviet-backed Polish government declared martial law to crush a budding democratic opposition movement. Moscow and Washington were on a collision course. It was the most significant crisis of Ronald Reagan’s fledgling presidency. Reagan authorized a covert CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL to support dissident groups, particularly the trade union Solidarity. The CIA provided money that helped Solidarity print newspapers, broadcast radio programs, and conduct an information campaign against the government. This gripping narrative reveals the little-known history of one of America’s most successful covert operations through its most important characters—spymaster Bill Casey, CIA officer Richard Malzahn, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, and the Polish patriots who were instrumental to the success of the program. Based on in- depth interviews and recently declassified evidence, A Covert Action celebrates a decisive victory over tyranny for US intelligence behind the Iron Curtain, one that prefigured the Soviet collapse.
