The New Hegemon

I just read the article "The New Hegemon" by Vali R. Nasr, Adjunct Senior Fellow for MiddleEast Studies and author of The Shia Revival, Democracy in Iran, and The Islamic Leviathan. I definitely recommend everybody with interest in Middle East politics to read the entire article. Definitely one of the best analyses of the Iran' s role and ambitions in the region and in the current Iraq crisis and the relationship between Iran and USA.
Here is some interesting sections of the article.

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Ahmadinejad certainly has street smarts. Formally, his office is not even particularly powerful (its last occupant, the putatively reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami, found himself reduced to a cipher despite having handily won two elections), but Ahmadinejad has astutely made himself bigger than the office through his high profile. But the street is a narrow place, and street smarts are not the same as world smarts. He quite obviously lacks the wisdom and the foresight needed to navigate Iranian policy through the challenges that it faces today. Despite record-high oil prices, unemployment in Iran continues to fuel political unrest and social ills, and the resentments that helped to elect Ahmadinejad can also be his undoing.

After all, Iran has much to lose if its nuclear gambit galvanizes international support for economic sanctions—and even worse, military action—to scale back its nuclear program. Iran also has to walk a tightrope between asserting regional hegemony and maintaining cordial relations with its Arab neighbors. Iran supports the greater empowerment of Shias in the Middle East, but it stands to lose if the Sunni backlash coming out of Cairo and Riyadh were to capture popular attention. A still greater challenge for the inexperienced demagogue in Tehran is how to prevent the emergence of an anti-Iranian American-Israeli-Arab alliance, as Tehran’s policies continue to generate fear in Washington and in capitals across the region. There is little in Ahmadinejad’s behavior and rhetoric to suggest that he understands the complexity of the challenges facing Iran, or the delicate touch that is needed if Iran is to realize its interests. This may be good news, or not.

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It is difficult to fathom how quickly Iran has changed and how ambitious it has become, regionally and globally. It wants to claim nothing less than great-power status, and it sees nuclear weapons as the short road to that goal. Iran craves recognition from and engagement with the West, and above all the United States, but it wants these things on its own terms. Iranian officials no longer fear America’s wrath, and they often remark that America needs them more than they need America. Iran, they intimate, is not looking for security guarantees, but rather is willing to give them. Iran covets a sphere of economic and political influence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf. The economies of Dubai, Herat, and Najaf are already closely tied to that of Iran. Iran has invested in clients and allies across the region, expecting to exert influence through them. What Iran wants is for the United States to accept Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf as Iran’s “near abroad”—a zone of influence in which Iran’s interests would determine ebbs and flows of politics unencumbered by American interference—and to recognize Iranian presence in Syria and Lebanon. If Tehran’s current ambiguous stance on talks with the United States is any indication, the masters of the Islamic Republic believe that they can afford to wait until Washington comes around to their point of view.

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Iran’s opaque political scene includes different centers of power: the Supreme Leader’s office, the parliament, the presidency, the Revolutionary Guards, and the clerical elite, but also a constellation of formal and informal foundations, organizations, and councils. At the top of this labyrinthine structure sits the Supreme Leader, who under the Islamic Republic’s constitution holds all the strings. Unelected and unaccountable, Ayatollah Khamenei has the last word on where Iran stands on the nuclear issue and its posture toward the United States. But Khamenei is not a decisive leader; he prefers to consult and “build consensus,” which in practice means letting various points of view fight it out before he chooses whom to support.

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To solve the problem, in recent years more authority has been given to the Supreme Council for National Security in the hope that it would cut the Gordian knot of endless jockeying and deliberation. But the confusion has persisted. The Security Council’s chief, Ali Larijani, reports directly to the Supreme Leader and is officially in charge of the nuclear negotiations, but what he says is routinely at odds with Ahmadinejad’s statements. In August 2006, for instance, Larijani told Javier Solana, the chief European negotiator, that Iran was pondering a voluntary two-month suspension of uranium-enrichment activities, and promised to finalize the matter at a meeting in New York in September, when world leaders converged at the United Nations for the General Assembly session. The prospect of a deal even led Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to suggest that she would be willing to meet with her Iranian counterpart. But Ahmadinejad showed up in New York before Larijani, and he quickly denied that Iran had made any such offer, leaving the impression that either Solana had missed something in translation or that Larijani had spoken out of turn. Larijani never showed up, and Ahmadinejad dashed any hopes for a high-level U.S.-Iran meeting in New York.

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In recent months Larijani has done the negotiating, but Ahmadinejad has set the tone. It is an open question whether episodes such as this are signs of an intense power struggle between the Islamic Republic’s old guard and Ahmadinejad’s Young Turks, or an unintended result of a chaotic policymaking process, or a deliberate strategy of good cop, bad cop. In recent months Ahmadinejad has used rallies and interviews to put his own stamp on Iran’s foreign policy. He has also appointed close associates, most with no foreign-policy experience but plenty of ideological zeal, to key positions. Kazem Jalali, who helped write Ahmadinejad’s epistle to Bush, has been elevated to deputy foreign minister. Another senior adviser, Mojtaba Hashemi Samareh, was dispatched to Paris in late summer 2006 to discuss France’s troop deployment in Lebanon with President Chirac. Samareh was subsequently named deputy interior minister.

The Iranian president is clearly doing his best to get a tighter grip on power. But it is not at all clear how far he can go, or whether he has the Supreme Leader’s support, or whether he even needs it.

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Washington should not look for clues about Iran’s intentions in Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric alone. It must better understand what is at stake in the struggle for power in Tehran. Since Ahmadinejad has already brought Washington into that fight, perhaps Washington should figure out a way to have a greater say in how it will influence the outcome.