Iran puts its foreign policy under
scrutiny By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iran's foreign-policy establishment,
considered a "closed box" by certain pundits in
the West, has experienced dramatic changes since
the rise to the presidency of Mahmud Ahmadinejad
in August last year. The aim is to make the
country's decision-making more efficient and
successful, especially as the international row
over Tehran's nuclear program intensifies.
The first change occurred within weeks of
Ahmadinejad's victory, when Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a directive that
gave the quasi-legislative Expediency Council,
headed by
former president Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a new, expanded oversight role with
respect to overall foreign policy. This move was
considered a timely initiative aimed at preventing
radical changes in Iran's foreign policy, and to
ensure policy continuity instead of large-scale
discontinuity.
Khamenei's representative
on the Expediency Council is Hassan Rowhani, who
from February 2003 until August 2005 was Iran's
point man in the country's nuclear negotiations,
as well as the head of the powerful Supreme
National Security Council. The latter is an
inter-agency body in charge of formulating nuclear
and national-security policies in conjunction with
other apparatuses of the state, above all the
Foreign Ministry. Rowhani has occasionally aired
his criticisms of the new nuclear negotiation
team, counseling "less emotional and more
conciliatory" approaches.
The second
significant change involving Iran's foreign policy
deals with the Foreign Ministry itself. In
addition to replacing dozens of career diplomats
with fresh faces, the Ahmadinejad administration
has sought to restructure this important ministry,
long priding itself as one of the most efficient
bureaucracies of the state.
Accordingly, a
new "center for strategic planning" has been set
up in the Foreign Ministry, which has introduced
plans for a major overhaul of the decision-making
process within the ministry. This includes setting
up information banks on each country or region,
and creating a council of general managers, a
committee on nuclear diplomacy, and a committee on
the macro-, structural reform of the Foreign
Ministry.
Behind such reforms of the
Foreign Ministry is the expectation of making it
more than an executive arm implementing policies
and, instead, turning it into a fount of policies
as well. Maybe then the now-infrequent calls for
bringing the nuclear decision-making from the
Supreme National Security Council to the Foreign
Ministry will materialize. This is not likely in
the near future, however.
Recently,
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki defended his
ministry's role and input on the nuclear talks,
stating that the Foreign Ministry had been 100%
behind the new approach adopted since the end of
the Mohammad Khatami era, which was seen as less
rigid than it is now. This is important in view of
impending United Nations sanctions on Iran and
occasional criticism of Iran's nuclear diplomacy
by the likes of Rowhani and Rafsanjani. That is,
Ahmadinejad must be able to count on the full
support of this ministry, still populated by
career staff who do not have loyalty to any
particular faction.
According to Mostafa
Moslehzadeh, the foreign minister's special
assistant on strategic planning, one of the top
agendas of the Foreign Ministry is to consult more
organically with university professors and experts
in the field of international relations. As part
of this strategy, the ministry's research arm, the
Institute for Political and International Studies,
has been recently sharing some of its annual
international conferences, such as on the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization and the future of
security in the Persian Gulf, with Tehran
University.
The greater direct involvement
of Iran's academics with foreign-policy issues is
a positive development that is, unfortunately,
somewhat set back by the related news that the
College of International Relations, which has an
active curriculum for Iran's diplomats, is being
considered for closure by the president.
As a former lecturer at the college, this
author has no doubt that this is a negative
development that I hope will not transpire, in
light of the significant contributions of the
college in turning out a cadre of graduates well
versed in international relations and global and
public diplomacy.
In addition to this
college and the adjacent Institute for Political
and International Studies, there are a number of
think-tanks in Iran, including the Center for
Strategic Studies, the Institute for Strategic
Studies and the Institute for Caspian Studies,
which have input in the foreign-policy
decision-making directly or indirectly. Some of
these think-tanks are registered as
non-governmental organizations and, according to
reports from Iran, part of the restructuring is to
get the NGOs in Iran more involved in
foreign-policy issues, particularly with respect
to the "international public diplomacy" of Iran.
Yet another change is the creation of a
new Strategic Council for Foreign Relations, which
submits its reports directly to Khamenei. This is
an important development, given the weight and
depth of those involved: the leader has appointed,
for a five-year tenure, two former foreign
ministers, Kemal Kharrazi and Ali Akbar Velayati,
and a former defense minister, Ali Shamkahi, as
well as a former commerce minister, Mohammad
Shariatmadari, and a moderate cleric, Mohammad
Hussain Taremi.
In a recent interview,
Shamkahi shed some light on the role and purpose
of this new council, stating that it had
sub-institutionalized by forming four "specialized
committees" dealing with foreign-policy, economic,
cultural-scientific, and security issues. "It will
be up to the leader what action to take with
respect to the reports by the council," said
Shamkahi, adding that the council covered broad
strategic issues only.
It is too early to
reach even a tentative conclusion about the impact
of all these important developments aimed at
reshaping the nature of Iran's foreign-policy
establishment. What is clear, however, is that
commensurate with the exceedingly complex external
relations of Iran, the nuclear crisis, the
neighboring crises in Iran's vicinity and the
Middle East region, a more complex and
multi-faceted decision-making process is called
for in Iran. What is less clear, however, is
whether or not this process should promote less or
more centralized decision-making.
There
are pros and cons with respect to either path.
While greater centralization helps with speedy
decisions fitted to the requirements of crisis
situations, the downside is the potential failure
to make the right decision based on lengthy
deliberative processes garnering inputs from the
various relevant organs of state.
The
benefit of a more complex, multi-layered
decision-making process on foreign policy, on the
other hand, is that it minimizes the risks to
Iran's interests introduced by relatively novice
hands who owe their influence to election results
rather than evolution from within the
foreign-policy establishment.
A litmus
test of Iran's foreign policy is twofold: the
nuclear crisis and the deteriorating situation in
Iraq. These two issues are not unrelated, as
recently pointed out in the Christian Science
Monitor, which argued that one of the reasons for
Europe not lending a bigger hand to the US in Iraq
was the "fear that relieving some of the US burden
in Iraq may pave the way for an American
preemptive strike on Iran".
As former
White House aide Flynt Leverett has pointed out,
the United States must give Iran security
assurances - that it recognizes the Islamic
Republic as a legitimate regime - if it is
seriously looking for Iran's assistance with
respect to Iraq. Yet US President George W Bush in
his latest press conference once again called on
Iran to cooperate on Iraq without even bothering
to pose the question of why Tehran should bother
when it perceives Washington as bent on regime
change in Iran.
But before Iraq turns into
a greater point of tension between Iran and the
US, obviating their common interests in the region
plagued with Sunni insurgency, Iran's leaders must
also engage in certain soul-searching on their
long-term strategic priorities and interests,
above and beyond mere organizational reform.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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