Iran’s New Patrons

Excerpt

Upon assuming power in 1979, Iran’s revolutionaries prided themselves on rejecting the global order. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country’s first supreme leader, declared that his state would be “neither East nor West.” Khomeini viewed the United States as “the Great Satan”—the preeminent, spiritually corrupting imperial power that supported Westernizing despots in the Muslim world. But in his eyes, godless communism and the Soviet Union were just as baleful. “My dear friends, you should know that the danger from communist powers is not less than America,” he said in 1980.

By rejecting partners, the Islamic Republic showed it would not be an ordinary country that sought to maximize its advantages by forging alliances. Instead, the revolutionary regime saw itself as a vanguard charged with leading the world’s subjugated masses toward freedom and justice. After Iranian soldiers ejected the Iraqi army from Iranian territory in 1982, the Islamic Republic’s war against Iraq became a liberation movement aimed at freeing Muslims all the way to the Mediterranean. The government plotted to overthrow other neighboring governments, as well, and sponsored a variety of Islamic terrorist organizations across the Middle East. In fact, the clerical leadership responded sympathetically to anti-American left-wing secular radicals wherever it encountered them.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow Reuel on X @ReuelMGerecht. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.