Iran’s Other Leader

As Iran continues to develop its nuclear facilities and to demonstrate its missile capabilities, foreign policy analysts are scrambling to determine the best American response to the rogue nation’s militaristic threats. None seem to agree on how to best approach the hostile Islamic state because its leaders prove difficult to predict on the escalating nuclear crisis.

Karim Sadjadpour, author of the report “Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran’s Most Powerful Leader,” stated in a lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s approach to foreign policy was “neither confrontation nor accommodation with the West.”

He stated that “[Khamenei’s] basic worldview has always been that when the West, particularly the United States, or the Israelis are trying to pressure you, you should never show that pressure is going to moderate your behavior. You should never compromise as a result of pressure, because if you compromise, it projects weakness and is going to invite even more pressure.”

Khamenei’s staunchly anti-Western viewpoint dictates the policies he endorses towards the U.S., yet Sadjadpour asserts that “U.S. military strikes on Iran are perhaps less of a concern for him than what he calls some type of a soft revolution,” referring to the Ayatollah’s concern of America’s secular society invading and perverting Iranian religious culture.

Despite Khamenei prioritizing a subtle attack on cultural values over a military attack on the country itself, Sadjadpour, previously the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, asserted that he believed “that military option is more of a carrot than a stick for President Ahmadinejad; meaning it’s truly one of the few things that could really rehabilitate his presidency, if U.S. bombs were to drop on Iran, because it would allow him a pretext to truly clamp down, and a pretext for an excuse for the economic failings of the country.” Also, Sadjadpour noted that military action against Iran would be “quite disastrous” due to the possibility of a backlash sparking an extremist fervor certain to benefit the religious radicals and terrorist groups housed in and supported by the Islamic nation.

Sadjadpour also stated that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “believes that essentially the hands of the American politicians are tied” regarding military action, with a variety of factors—Iraq, Afghanistan—prohibiting serious military action in yet another intensifying conflict in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad’s accurate assessment has led to Iran’s increasingly aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons, with the U.S. forced to watch on the sidelines as Iran dodges U.N. sanctions and rejects incentive packages from an international community committed to diplomacy.

Rachel Paulk is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.