Strategic Loneliness

The depth and extension of Iran’s controversial connections with its proxies have caught eyes and thoughts. While much ink has been spilled to Iran's regional policy, the majority of these analyses, either intuitively or deliberately, build their explanation on the so-called ‘Persian-Shia offensive intentions’. Conversely, the present paper seeks the roots of Iran's regional policy in its specific geography and history. From this perspective, Iran’s regional policy is inseparable from its geopolitical strategies. To shed light on these strategies, the paper begins with the rise of the Persian Achaemenes until the establishment of the Islamic Republic, focusing on major driving forces behind Iran’s regional policy and strategies. The paper elaborates on a foundational concept of ‘strategic loneliness’, as Iran’s permanent feature, by highlighting the country’s curse of geography and its long-standing historical insecurity. In following, it shows the consequential impact of Iran’s strategic loneliness for the country’s non-state foreign policymaking strategic connections with military non-state actors—in the containment of its regional enemies. The paper ultimately argues that while this policy has kept Iran’s national integrity and security while entrapped the country in a durable ‘geopolitical predicament’ and deepened regional crisis in the Middle East.

This paper pays particular attention to three critical junctures in Iran’s contemporary history: The Russo-Persian wars of the 19th century, Iran’s occupation by the Allies in 1941, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Combining a constructivist approach to geopolitics with the theory of Social Reality Construction, this article argues that these series of wars in the past two centuries have created an intersubjectivity, making Iranians feel “lonely” when the very survival of their state was at the stake. While Iran’s geographical situation has brought the country to the core of the great powers’ attention, repeated foreign invasions or interventions seem to have reproduced a sense of vulnerability for the Iranians. This paper is constructed around the following question: Is there something embedded in Iran’s geography that betrays this land’s sovereignty and imposes loneliness? The conclusion is that there is no natural or geographical reason to justify Iran's loneliness in the international arena, but rather, a perceptual construct reproduced by the historical context of events. The imposition of great political powers to contain Iran in its geography and to make it a buffer zone constitute a spatial reality; however, the feeling of loneliness derives from the social construction of reality.