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Analysis: Reading Ahmadinejad in Tehran

Council on Foreign Relations

April 25, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

Based on recent comments by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran will not likely give up its nuclear activities by the April 28 deadline set by the UN Security Council (FT). Nor will Iran promote peaceful coexistence with Israel, which Ahmadinejad calls a "fake regime that cannot logically continue to live (Independent)." But Ahmadinejad is just one piece in the multilayered puzzle that makes up Iranian foreign policy. Not every senior leader within Iran's foreign policy elite agrees with the president's demands to "wipe [ Israel] off the map." Within Iran's conservative leadership class, cleavages are reported to exist on a wide range of foreign policy issues, from nuclear arms to Iranian relations with Hezbollah to its influence over Iraq (Asia Times). "This rivalry will intensify with the approach of fall elections for an 86-member clerical body—the Assembly of Experts—and for municipal councils," writes RFE/RL's William Samii. These internal divisions lead to a foreign policy that often comes across as muddled and far from monolithic, as this CFR Background Q&A explains.

CFR Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh, writing in the National Interest, says "an ascetic 'war generation' is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished." Matthias Kuntzel writes in the New Republic about the lingering influence of the basij—the military movement created by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979—on Iran's foreign outlook. "A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors," he writes. "The children of the Revolution are now its leaders."

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.