No Conquest, No Defeat: Iran’s National Security Strategy. Ariane Tabatabai. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Western scholars are often befuddled by Iran. An opaque state that espouses a unique brand of Islamic revolutionary ideology, the Islamic Republic has spent the last twenty years equipping and backing regional proxies through which it exercises influence far beyond its own borders. While some scholars emphasize the inherent danger presented by Iran’s recent rise, a growing number of analysts and scholars have examined the Islamic Republic in greater detail, drawing on new sources to dissect, explain, and rationalize its internal politics and national security policies.[1]

No Conquest, No Defeat: Iran’s National Security Strategy by political scientist Ariane Tabatabai is an ambitious study that situates the security policies and practices of the Islamic Republic in the context of Iranian history. The book’s central claim is that important lines of continuity connect Iran’s current approach to security to  the policies of past regimes. This refutes the oft-made claim that the Islamic Revolution of 1978-1979 constituted a major break in Iran’s foreign policy. “Much of the new regime’s thinking and policies,” Tabatabai argues, “become reminiscent of those embraced and pursued” by pre-revolutionary governments.[2]

Tabatabai does not attempt a comprehensive review of Iran’s foreign policy, a topic that has been covered exhaustively by existing scholarship. Instead, she focuses on the more restricted issue of why Iran purses certain policies and what connects the strategies of the Islamic Republic with those of previous governments. Tabatabai argues that historical memory, rather than ideology or rational self-interest, shapes Iran’s foreign policy. “Past is present in Iran,” she writes, “and extends not just to the immediate pre-revolution years, but hundreds of years before, to the genesis of the modern state.”[3]

According to Tabatabai, ideas formed out of historical experience—such as hedging against future threats, coup-proofing institutions, and forming links to external non-state actors—guide Iranian national security strategy in the twenty-first century, despite the immense political changes that have occurred since the Qajar and Pahlavi periods. Viewed from this perspective, what other states perceive as “aggressive, expansionist, and revisionist” behavior by the Iranian state is in fact a quest for survival within “a deeply anarchic international system…in which the nation must go it alone” or risk losing control to rival powers that shape that system “to suit their own needs.”[4]

Iran’s status as a weak power surrounded by powerful rivals was born in the nineteenth century. Tabtabai notes how the Qajar monarchy (1789-1925) struggled with internal reforms even as great powers, specifically Russia and Britain, vied for influence within its borders. Disastrous wars against Russia in 1804-1813 and 1826-1828 ended with Iran losing large swathes of territory. The Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979) emphasized a strong military and central state apparatus capable of maintaining Iran’s territorial integrity. Like the Qajars, however, the Pahlavi shahs struggled to maintain Iran’s security against powerful rivals. Iran’s occupation during World War II, a postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union, and the 1953 Anglo-American coup d’etat were traumatic moments. According to Tabatabai, these events inculcated in Iranian leaders, as well as the nation at large, an obsession with protecting the nation’s territorial integrity, coup-proofing institutions, and pursuing self-reliance to avoid dependence on foreign powers.

Tabatabai finds strong continuity between the policies of Mohammed Reza Shah (r. 1941-1979) and  those of the post-revolutionary regime. The Shah expanded Iranian power regionally, cultivating ties to groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, and developing trans-regional power projection capabilities.[5] The government that emerged from the Islamic Revolution (1978-1979) sought to transform Iranian society by rejecting what they perceived as the excesses and pro-Western policies of the Pahlavi period. Despite these claims, Iran’s new rulers adopted many of the strategies developed by the Shah. Tabatabai emphasizes the importance of the Iraqi invasion of 1980 and subsequent eight-year war in bringing elements of continuity back into Iranian security thinking. The experience produced in Iranian security thinking a sense of isolation and mistrust of an international community that largely sided with Iraq, as well as philosophies of victimhood that continue to dominate the Iranian national security psyche. This in turn encouraged Iran’s leaders to cultivate self-reliance while simultaneously expanding Iran’s power in the region, mirroring the Shah’s strategies. “For Iran’s armed forces, the notion that their country did not seek conquest, but strove to avoid defeat, was primordial,” Tabatabai writes.[6]

Detailed and closely researched, No Conquest, No Defeat occasionally strays beyond the narrow limits established in Tabatabai’s introduction. Though ostensibly concerned only with the development of Iran’s national security strategy, the book indulges in tangential discussions ranging from the Shah’s social and economic reforms to the development of Islamic revolutionary dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. Tabatabai argues that including such detail is important for establishing context, but at times the narrative sprawls. These diversions add to the book’s occasionally confusing organization, which leapfrogs through chronological events before going back to provide analysis. For a reader who lacks a pre-existing knowledge of Iran’s historical trajectory, the structure may be disorienting.

As Tabatabai notes, other scholars and pundits, including U.S. President Barack Obama, have argued that Iran’s leadership draws on past experiences to guide present policy.[7] Tabatabai draws on the concept of historical memory in order to reconcile the apparent contradictions in how Iran approaches national security, which is “neither exclusively reliant on ideology nor purely rational.”[8] At times, however, the concept of memory seems grafted onto a more straightforward approach emphasizing rational pursuit of self-interest. The role of memory in the arming of Shi’a militants in Iraq or the Houthi rebels in Yemen seems minor when compared to the potential gains derived from developing the capability of delivering strikes against Iran’s opponents, such as the attack on the Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq in 2019.[9] Another state facing Iran’s strategic dilemma might pursue a similar strategy, regardless of whether it had experienced Iran’s past traumas. Nevertheless, Tabatabai is convincing in the argument that analyzing Iranian history helps to understand contemporary Iranian security policy. The humiliations and defeats of the Qajar era, the forced modernization and centralization under the Pahlavis, and the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War all inform Iran’s current approaches to security and guide the decisions of the regime’s leaders.

Tabatabai is convincing in the argument that analyzing Iranian history helps to understand contemporary Iranian security policy.

The memory of such trauma may also explain why Iran’s internal politics are so resistant to change. As historians such as Homa Katouzian argue, Iran has historically struggled against the yoke of despotic governments that rule through arbitrary powers.[10] In 2021, regime hardliners fixed the presidential election in order to ensure the victory of Ebrahim Raisi, former head of the judiciary, suggesting a turn towards an even more repressive and authoritarian style of government.[11] Yet it also suggests that the greatest threat to Iran’s security—at least insofar as the regime is concerned—may come from within rather than without. While arming proxy groups, constructing ballistic missiles, and practicing cyber warfare assists Iran in warding off external threats, they do little to satisfy the demands of the Iranian people for inclusive government, economic opportunity, and an end to the repression imposed by an increasingly paranoid and defensive clerical regime. True security can come only through a political system based on legitimacy. And that is a struggle the Islamic Republic continues to wage with itself.

Gregory Brew is a Kissinger Visiting Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. He received his PhD in history from Georgetown University. His work focuses on oil as a feature of international relations, the Cold War, and U.S.-Iranian relations.

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Header Image: Painted tiles with design of birds, hunting and flowers from Qajar dynasty (David Collection/Wikimedia)

Notes:

[1] For an example of the former, see Matthew Kroenig, A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014). For the latter, see Narges Bajoghli, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Afshon Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, The Quest for Authority in Iran: A History of the Presidency from Revolution to Rouhani (London: Bloomsbury, I.B. Tauris, 2018), Suzanne Maloney, Iran’s Political Economy Since the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[2] Ariane Tabatabai, No Conquest, No Defeat: Iran’s National Security Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 146.

[3] Tabatabai, No Conquest, No Defeat, 3.

[4] Tabatabai, No Conquest, No Defeat, 21.

[5] She draws here from the work of historian Roham Alvandi. See Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (London: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[6] Tabatabai, No Conquest, No Defeat, 190.

[7] For a similar approach, see Arshin Adib-Moghadam, Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (London: Hurst & Co., 2007), R.K. Ramazani, Independence Without Freedom—Iran’s Foreign Policy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

[8] Tabatabai, No Conquest, No Defeat, 247.

[9] Ben Hubbard, Palko Karasz, and Stanley Reed, “Two Major Saudi Oil Installations Hit by Drone Strike, and U.S. Blames Iran,” New York Times, September 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-refineries-drone-attack.html.

[10] Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926-1979 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981).

[11] Bourzou Daragahi, “Khamenei is Dropping Iran’s Democratic Façade,” The Atlantic Council, May 28, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/khamenei-is-dropping-irans-democratic-facade/.