Iran and the Arab Spring: Ascendancy Frustrated

Source: Gulf Research Center

Over the past decade, no region of the world has been more important or more conflictual than the Middle East. At the center of this region is the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), feeding on its instabilities, while pursuing an ambitious, if ambiguous, nuclear program. Iran’s revolutionary behavior, combined with these ambitions, has added to its neighbors’ anxieties about its goals.

Iran’s regional policy cannot be divorced from Tehran’s approach to the United States. Confronting the US and the US-sponsored regional order has been a core interest of the IRI since its inception. In the past decade, the goal came tantalizingly close, only to be swept away by the advent of the Arab Spring in 2011. Since then the IRI has confronted a less tractable regional environment, with allies weakened and adversaries emboldened. Iran’s power and influence – always exaggerated – has since taken a nosedive.  

Middle East politics are now increasingly national and local, resistant to transnational and trans-regional appeals to ‘resistance’ and to external influence.      

How has Iran reacted to the tightening of the noose of international sanctions and the adverse trends noted in the region: the increased sectarian cleavage which is not in Iran’s favor; the new-found unity and determination of the GCC to confront Iran,if necessary; the defection of Hamas from the ‘resistance front’, the erosion of Iran’s regional appeal; and the weakening if not actual reversal of Assad’s Syria? In theory, Iran has three alternative responses:

• To show flexibility in negotiations and seek to dilute and deflect the sanctions. This includes attempts to find new oil customers, imaginatively circumvent sanctions and find new allies


• To ‘push back’ against these new constraints in the region ‘ by raising the ante’;


• To hunker down and live with the new reality, stressing the benefits of selfreliance and the determination not to be deflected from its principles.

In practice, Iran has done a little of all three, using nuclear negotiations to suggest at flexibility and seeking to divide the P5+1, with some receptivity in Russia and China. Iran has taken to selling its oil privately (i.e., through traders) rather than through governments. Nonetheless, sales have dipped and prices have been discounted, so the cost of sanctions is being felt.

Iran has often threatened desperate action if cornered, quoting the proposition that “either all are safe or no one is” an adage it sought to operationalize during the ‘tanker war’ with Iraq, in the 1980s. That episode ended badly for Iran, despite selective memory. As we have seen, Iran is already “pushing back” regionally in Yemen, Syria and possibly Iraq as well as in its ‘shadow war’ with Israel. It may continue to do this but is unlikely to “lash out”, as this would invite responses from US forces positioned nearby and at an all-time peak.

Finally, there is the domestic front where Iran calls sanctions a blessing and a test of the revolution’s principles, especially steadfastness. It will make sure that despite inflation, its core constituency is not adversely affected and will try and blame the discomfort on outside forces, while appealing for internal unity rather than factional rivalry or self-criticism.