Contemporary Politics

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Stuck on a hostile path? US policy towards Iran since the

revolution

Louise Fawcett & Andrew Payne

To cite this article: Louise Fawcett & Andrew Payne (2023) Stuck on a hostile path?
US policy towards Iran since the revolution, Contemporary Politics, 29:1, 1-21, DOI:
10.1080/13569775.2022.2029239

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CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
2023, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 1–21
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2022.2029239

Stuck on a hostile path? US policy towards Iran since the

revolution
Louise Fawcett and Andrew Payne
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Since Iran’s revolution in 1979, relations between Washington and US-Iran relations; US foreign
Tehran have been invariably fraught. The Trump presidency saw policy; elections;
escalating tensions which the Biden administration has sought to international politics;
domestic politics
moderate with uncertain results. This article locates contemporary
events within a broader analysis of US policy towards Iran, which
for over four decades has oscillated between attempted
rapprochement and hostility short-of-war. Seeking to explain the
fluctuation and failures of US policy, it shows how two
intersecting logics have shaped and constrained the decision-
making environment – path dependent at the international level,
cyclical at the domestic level. Going beyond accounts which treat
domestic constraints in an ad hoc manner, the article explores
how the electoral cycle systematically shapes decision-makers’
ability to respond to geopolitical conditions. Shedding light on
contemporary policy debates, it concludes that any lasting
departure from the default posture of hostility will require a
favourable alignment of conditions on both levels.

Introduction
Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, relations between Washington and Tehran have
been fraught, characterised by cycles of hostility and misunderstanding. The tensions
generated by Iran’s so-called ‘rogue state’ behaviour, including hostage taking, proxy
warfare, association with terrorist activities and its nuclear programme have provided
multiple flash points, but arguably peaked during the Trump administration. This saw
the US exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, followed by
renewed sanctions, and finally, in 2020, the assassination of prominent Iranian general,
Qasem Soleimani, bringing the situation close to war. On assuming office, Joe Biden sig-
nalled a willingness to re-join the JCPOA subject to Iranian compliance. With negotiations
ongoing, these recent events fit into a broader pattern of policy, oscillating between
paths of military and diplomatic escalation on one hand and attempts at rapprochement
on the other. So far, Washington’s enduring preoccupation with Tehran has yielded little

CONTACT Andrew Payne [email protected] Department of Politics and International Relations,

Manor Road, University of Oxford, OX1 3UQ
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2022.2029239.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
2 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

other than fleeting attempts to take one step forwards, only for long-standing grievances
and a legacy of mistrust to reassert themselves and block efforts to place US-Iran relations
on a more normal path.
In seeking to understand both the fluctuation in US policy towards Iran and its failure
to achieve meaningful progress, this article highlights the close interdependence of inter-
national and domestic political explanations. Specifically, it argues that two distinct logics
have shaped the decision-making environment in ways which make any lasting departure
from the default posture of hostility difficult. At the international level, realist-style geo-
political considerations, combining the effects of geography, material resources and
power politics (Dalby, 1990) have introduced a degree of path dependency into the
rivalry. Building on these, powerful and ideologically charged narratives have taken
hold on both sides, depicting Iran as a persistent threat to US interests in the Middle
East and vice versa (Haas, 2012). Such narratives reflect deep US frustration at the Cold
War ‘loss’ of Iran, the two states’ competitive visions of regional order in the Middle
East, and their wider ramifications. This international context, while fraught, has not
been entirely without opportunities for a relaxation of tensions, nor has the hostile rheto-
ric necessarily matched the reality of the material threat posed by Iran. Indeed, scholars
have long puzzled over Washington’s ‘obsession’ with Tehran, which recent observers
have characterised as increasingly ‘absurd’ in balance of power terms (Benjamin &
Simon, 2019, p. 57). The sense of threat is real, however (Walt, 1987), and this paper
demonstrates how the perceptions of Tehran’s capabilities and intentions have tended
to reproduce and sustain generally unfavourable conditions for lasting rapprochement.
These perceptions translate into specific policy outcomes at the domestic level, and it
is here where a cross-cutting cyclical logic operates, at times reinforcing the path depen-
dent hostility, at others opening more room for manoeuvre. Public opinion and interest
groups closely constrain the political space in which successive US administrations
have approached policy towards Iran, yet do so in a non-linear manner broadly corre-
sponding with three phases of the American domestic political calendar. During the
post-electoral ‘honeymoon’ phase, an initially permissive political environment creates
space for tentative attempts at rapprochement, only for such hopes to be extinguished
as congressional patience ebbs. Over time, and into an incumbent’s third year in office,
re-election concerns tend to fuel a rush toward tougher measures and threat inflation,
reflecting remarkably durable public enmity and a perception of Iran as a graveyard for
presidential ambition. During a second term, safely re-elected administrations benefit
from reduced sensitivity to political pressures, often leading the incumbent to revisit
the possibility of pursuing a thaw. However, legacy concerns and the erosion of presiden-
tial influence following the second off-year elections cool any residual appetite for
engagement, leaving little time for meaningful progress.
This article is sensitive to the reality that policy outcomes are not reducible to electoral
cycles alone – indeed, such pressures vary across presidencies and are necessarily depen-
dent on other contextual issues. These include not only factors at the international level,
but also those which go beyond the two levels of analysis emphasised in this paper. The
‘goals, abilities, and foibles’ of individual actors (Byman & Pollack 2001, p. 109) are vital
elements to consider in any analysis of specific foreign policy outcomes, for instance.
Both the idiosyncrasies of each US president, the agency of their Iranian counterparts,
and those of third-party intermediaries between the two – here European actors in
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 3

particular come to mind – cannot be overlooked. For example, a full account of the causal
path leading to the JCPOA must acknowledge the significance of the more conciliatory
approach of Iran’s reformist President Hassan Rouhani and his Western-educated
foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, compared to that of President Mahmoud Ahma-
dinejad, whose fiery rhetoric and combative style only added to the technical obstacles to
a deal. European leaders, notably including Catherine Ashton as the inaugural High Repre-
sentative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, also played a crucial role in
facilitating dialogue between each side of those talks. Similarly, while this paper empha-
sises the significance of US domestic politics, we recognise that multiple, albeit rather
different constraints also operate at the level of Iranian domestic politics, with decision
makers navigating a complex terrain informed by diverse political factions and pressure
groups (Adib-Moghaddam, 2007, pp. 66–67; Tabatabai, 2020; Vatanka, 2021). Indeed,
some of the best recent work has explored Iranian decision-making through an explicitly
multilevel approach (Juneau, 2015).
Nevertheless, we contend that considerable heuristic value can be gained by adopting
a two-level approach. It is true that some existing accounts of US-Iran relations feature
domestic political explanations of certain policy outcomes (Ansari, 2006; Bill, 1988;
Murray, 2010; Parsi, 2017). However, in bringing this literature up to date by including cov-
erage of the policies of more recent administrations, this paper offers an important
empirical contribution of its own. Drawing on recently declassified documents,
memoirs and the secondary literature, it places this highly salient contemporary issue
into its historical context, thereby extending our understanding of a turbulent bilateral
relationship which is now in its fifth decade. Moreover, by presenting the false starts
and missed opportunities in terms of its international and domestic dimensions, and iden-
tifying the distinct logics that drive decision-making at each level, it also provides a con-
ceptual contribution, revealing more regular patterns than may be apparent in purely
historical accounts which tend to treat political pressures in an ad hoc way. Recent
work depicting US-Iran nuclear negotiations as a two-level game (Hurst, 2016) has
already shown the value of applying this conceptual lens to a single issue. In this
paper, we seek to widen the aperture to reveal how US-Iran relations more broadly
have been buffeted along a hostile path by forces at both the international and domestic
levels. In doing so, we combine the explanatory depth of historical accounts with the con-
ceptual clarity of employing a levels of analysis framework (Putnam, 1988; Waltz, 1959).
By emphasising the role of the US electoral cycle in particular, this article also makes an
important contribution to the study of the domestic determinants of US foreign policy.
The notion that elections somehow ‘matter’ in the development and execution of
policy is of course somewhat intuitive. Yet exactly how and when they do so is poorly
understood. Though there is renewed scholarly interest in presidential elections and
foreign policy among historians (Johnstone & Priest, 2017), the way in which electoral
pressures wax and wane across the US domestic political calendar has received less sus-
tained analysis. This gap is particularly apparent among scholars of international relations,
perhaps due to the fact that contemporary theories of international politics remain ill-
equipped to capture the nuance of domestic political processes (Kaarbo, 2015), an argu-
ment that can readily be applied to IR approaches to the Middle East (Darwich & Kaarbo,
2020). To be sure, former policymakers have reflected on how the four-year electoral cycle
comprises different phases which generate a recurring set of constraints on decision-
4 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

makers – from the temptation for a newly elected president to act boldly at the outset of
their term to the tendency to avoid politically controversial issues during the general elec-
tion campaign (Armacost, 2015; Quandt, 1986a). In the past, the domestic political calen-
dar has been cited as an obstacle to the kind of patient diplomacy and long-term strategic
thinking required to resolve certain intractable policy dilemmas. William Quandt (1986b),
for instance, lamented how the electoral cycle inhibited progress in mediating the Arab-
Israeli conflict by gearing decision-making in Washington to short-term considerations.
Miroslav Nincic (1990) documented how efforts to stabilise the bilateral competition
between the US and the Soviet Union through arms control agreements, summit meet-
ings and defence spending fluctuated with different phases of the US political calendar.
Yet while the track record of false hopes and missed opportunities for rapprochement
between Washington and Tehran stands out as ripe for analysis through a similar
prism, to date we lack such an account. In seeking to fill this gap, then, this study contrib-
utes to a nascent resurgence of scholarly interest in electoral cycles and periodicity in US
foreign policy, moving beyond issues of conflict initiation (Gaubatz, 1999) and wartime
decision-making (Payne, 2020).
The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. First, it examines the geopolitical
roots of US-Iranian tension and how events at the international level have often reinforced
this deep-seated hostility. Second, it explores how these pressures are refracted through a
domestic political lens in Washington, tracing both the historical foundations and cyclical
manifestation of the powerful constraints that have shaped the development of US policy
towards Iran across the ‘honeymoon’, ‘re-election’, and ‘second term’ phases of the Amer-
ican political calendar. In the conclusion, the article draws on the analytical frame pro-
vided to reflect on the possibilities for a lasting rapprochement or ‘reset’ in US-Iranian
relations. While the Biden presidency, alongside the election of Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s
new president, could prove to be a key inflection point, history shows that for any
short-term thaw in tensions to translate into a lasting modus vivendi, a positive and
durable alignment of geopolitical and domestic conditions will be required. These favour-
able conditions have so far proven elusive and short-lived, however, due to the nature of
the underlying sources of tension between Washington and Iran and the often-incompa-
tible logics which drive decision-making at each level.

Unpacking the geopolitical sources of US-Iran tensions

Since its Revolution in 1979, which led to the departure of Mohammed Reza Shah, and the
establishment of an Islamic Republic, successive US administrations have portrayed Iran
as a significant strategic threat. Despite popular impressions, the prior relationship
between Iran and the US was not tensions-free – Iran’s desire for self-sufficiency and inde-
pendence of action had at times led the Shah to pursue alternative alignments. Ulti-
mately, however, the Shah, who owed his very throne to the US following a coup in
1953, in which Britain and the US supported action to remove the nationalist premier
Mohammed Mossadeq and thereby consolidate the position of the monarchy (Allen-
Abrahamian, 2017), remained a close ally, and a vital element in the US security equation,
making the rupture as dramatic as it was unanticipated.
The above point is central to understanding the origins of US-Iran tensions, and the
deep-rooted and mutual hostility of both sides. From a simple geopolitical perspective,
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 5

the revolution, in a continuing Cold War climate, lost the US an important partner in a stra-
tegically and economically important region when allies mattered greatly in the global
balance of power. Not only did Iran share a border with the USSR – placing it on the per-
iphery of the Eurasian ‘heartland’ (Mackinder, 1904), it was also an important supplier of
oil to Western markets through its Gulf ports. Friendship with Iran, reaching a peak under
President Nixon, provided the US with security in the Persian Gulf and, by extension, in the
wider Middle East (Alvandi, 2014, p. 29). Interestingly, the revolution did not produce any
immediate tilt to the USSR: its slogan was ‘neither East nor West but the Islamic Republic’,
yet it was perceived as a Soviet foreign policy gain (Asinovsky, 2018, p. 195). As the US
vacillated, still seeking openings with the new regime, this wider Cold War element, com-
pounded by the damaging effects of the hostage crisis, and Iran’s own hostile rhetoric and
actions, fed by narratives of US betrayal, explain how the US was seriously unnerved, and
felt strategically compromised, by the ‘loss’ of Iran. ‘For Washington’, one observer
remarks (Maloney, 2019), ‘the revolution represented a devastating strategic loss. Since
the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Iran had become the cornerstone
of America’s security architecture for protecting Western interests across the region’.
The extent of that loss, and the US response to it, was demonstrated by President
Reagan’s military support to former US rival Iraq in the ensuing Iran-Iraq War (1980–
1988). Some partial openings to Iran, notably the infamous arms deal or ‘Iran-Contra’
affair, in part to discourage closer Soviet alignment, failed to disguise the fact that this
move represented a transparent attempt to unseat or contain the newly established
and, for the US and its allies, hostile and regionally threatening Islamic Republic. Right
through to the later stages of the war, and at the cost of considerable Iranian resentment,
the US and its allies in Europe and the Gulf, now joined by the USSR, offered material
support to Iraq, helping to prolong the war until the final (and reluctant) acceptance
by Iran in 1988 of UN resolution 598 (Amanat, 2017, pp. 840–848). If the ending of the
war was a mini-victory for East–West relations, it did not mend US relations with either
Iran or Iraq.
This background set the pace for the subsequent relationship between the US and Iran,
aptly described using the Cold War term of ‘containment’ (Ansari, 2006, p. 3). That
relationship was never immovable, as different efforts at détente showed, but beyond
the revolution, hostage crisis, and Iran-Iraq War, it assumed some highly path dependent
characteristics: where ‘self-reinforcing processes make reversals very difficult’ (Pierson,
2004, p. 10). Here we can understand the revolution as providing the ‘critical juncture’
(Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 348) in radically reshaping what had been a stable partner-
ship. Once established, this new relationship proved durable and resistant to change, with
subsequent events often reinforcing the hostile default setting. Even as the Cold War
became history, and Iran’s international position was overtly less threatening, the
rivalry continued apace. Patterns of engagement shifted onto new regional axes with
Iran aligning with more radical Arab states and political actors, and the US drawing
closer to Israel and the conservative states of Arab Gulf. Though punctuated by intermit-
tent attempts at cooperation, none, so far, have provided the necessary conditions for a
permanent change.
There were many reasons for this continuing hostility. Beyond the legacy problems of
the revolution and the hostage crisis, the prolonged war with Iraq, itself a test for the
legitimacy of the new republic (Takeyh, 2008, p. 16), left Iran resilient and poised to
6 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

extend the foreign policy ambitions of the Shah: to promote Iran’s status as a major
regional power – one now hostile to US interests. That ambition has remained remarkably
constant, as the dogged pursuit of its nuclear programme and activist regional politics
show. It is true that despite widespread fears, Iran’s early attempts to export its revolution
to neighbouring states mostly failed, yet it was still widely viewed as a revolutionary state
(Fawcett, 2015). Among its early partners were states and non-state actors viewed with
suspicion by the US and its allies – in Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen, but
also further afield, in Venezuela and Cuba, for example, earning it a reputation as a
radical ‘southern’ or Third World state (Adib-Moghaddam, 2007, pp. 67–68, 71). China
and Russia also moved closer over time, becoming increasingly important strategic and
trading partners respectively. With the benefit of hindsight, the loss of Iran to the US
was an economic, political and strategic gain for both China and Russia helping to
reinforce the hostile default setting. It also represented a gain for that group of states
called ‘regional powers’ who actively sought to renegotiate the prevailing terms of inter-
national order (Fawcett & Jagtiani, 2022).
The revolution and its aftermath therefore heralded what for the Western powers, but
notably the US, were unwelcome changes in the regional and even global balance of
power, prompting adjustments to alliance behaviour and reinforcing strategies of con-
tainment. The effects of these may have been overstated: European powers for
example, frequently diverged from US in their perception of the ‘Iran threat’, preferring
negotiation to confrontation. Nor did these changes only concern Iran, but Iran was invari-
ably a reference point in any new power equation. The brief US turn to Iraq was reversed
when the ending of the Iran-Iraq war saw Iraqi troops mobilise on border with Kuwait,
soon to embark on another military adventure – triggering the Gulf War of 1990–91 –
one duly crushed by the US-led coalition. And, when opportunities for rapprochement
with Iran arose, under both the presidencies of Rafsanjani (1989–1997) and Khatami
(1997–2005) the US failed to capitalise on these, instead advocating ‘dual containment’
while prioritising commitment to the flagship Middle East Peace Process (MEPP).
Indeed, Iran was isolated in President Bush’s ‘New World Order’ as US relations with
Israel grew closer. Rafsanjani and Khatami’s cautious attempts to improve relations,
whether over the ending of the Gulf War and release of US hostages in Lebanon, in the
former case, or through the ‘dialogue of civilisations’ and talk of ‘democratic peace’, in
the latter, failed to persuade the US to change track (Ramazani 1988). Instead, following
the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Iran, though not directly implicated in these,
joined Iraq and North Korea as part of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’, and any window of
opportunity to reset relations was lost (Heradstveit & Bonham, 2007, p. 422). Whether
the Iran threat was grounded in any rational strategic basis, or subject to similar
inflation as was the threat posed by Iraq at that time (Kaufmann, 2004), Iran became ident-
ified with the new global security threats of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction. Its perceived status as a ‘rogue state’ secure, the underlying features of
the early, hostile relationship reasserted themselves more forcefully with important dom-
estic repercussions as discussed below.
These hardening lines, amid growing regional instability, following the failure of the
MEPP, the effects of 9/11 and the Afghan War, became particularly visible over the
course of the 2003 Iraq War and its regional fall-out, which strengthened Iran’s position
(Fawcett, 2013). Its regional position was reinforced after the Arab uprisings when both
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 7

its longstanding rival Iraq, alongside key Arab states were weakened, and even fragmen-
ted, by civil conflicts, international interventions and regime changes. This relative
strengthening of Iran and deteriorating relations with the US also roughly coincided
with the presidency of the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13) which further
hampered possibilities for cooperation, showing how individual agency, in this case,
could play an aggravating role. The reconstitution of Iraq, albeit under US auspices,
worked in Iran’s favour. Iraq was a much-weakened state, but its new power sharing
arrangements elevated the position of the country’s formerly suppressed Shi’i majority
permitting greatly improved relations with mainly Shi’i Iran, particularly under Prime Min-
ister Nouri al-Maliki (2006–14). The Arab uprisings, which started late in 2010 in Tunisia,
but quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab states, though not a direct
result of the Iraq War, were influenced by its fall-out, and afforded Iran a relatively privi-
leged position within a deeply unsettled regional order.
The uprisings did not, as Iran’s leaders predicted, and many Western powers feared,
mark the start of a wave of sympathetic Islamic revolutions, but they did present Iran
with further opportunities for influence and limited possibilities for further engagement
(Chubin, 2012, pp. 16–19). First, because Iran, having secured its own place in the
pantheon of ‘great revolutions’, mostly escaped their fallout (Arjomand, 1988, p. 6).
Iran’s Green Movement, a response to the contested presidential 2009 elections, was
an important expression of political unrest, but had been contained, securing Ahmadine-
jad’s re-election for a second term. The Iranian state, despite rumours to the contrary, was
not in real danger of implosion, assuring its standing in the changing regional order.
Second, Iran was able to consolidate its position and exercise influence among local
states and actors – and here the cases of Iraq, and Syria, one of the few states that sup-
ported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (Ahmadian & Mohseni, 2019), and its support for Hezbol-
lah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, are exemplary. Sectarian allegiances across the
Shi’i-Sunni divide, though not at the root of regional tensions, became more important
as Shi’i-led Iran, and Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, used these instrumentally to promote their
respective regional positions (Wehrey, 2014, pp. xii, xiv). Talk of a ‘Shi’i axis’ and Iran’s
influence over regional clients may be overstated, but the Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alli-
ance strengthened Iran’s regional position while heightening threat perceptions. Its later
intervention in the Yemen conflict saw Iran offering support to the (Zaydi) Shi-i Houthis
against the Saudi-backed Sunni regime. Iran’s regional posture and alliances, coupled
with its repeated association with terrorist-related activities, use of regional proxies and
asymmetrical methods of warfare linked to the operations of the powerful Iranian Revolu-
tionary Guard Corps, all contributed to heightened tensions, consolidating the view of
Iran as a major strategic threat to the US and its allies. Third, Iran’s regional status and
the prevailing insecurity encouraged it to progress its longstanding nuclear ambitions.
Pursued by the Shah, with intermittent US encouragement, these remained quiescent
in the immediate post-revolutionary period, but Majlis Speaker Rafsanjani who became
President in 1989, was a consistent advocate. Though considerable opacity has sur-
rounded the origins, nature and intentions of the programme, Iran’s leadership circles
have consistently viewed a nuclear capability as an essential means of building greater
self-sufficiency, security and prestige. Progress towards that goal has not been linear
and has resulted in protracted negotiations and punitive international sanctions, some-
times distancing the US from its European allies, who on the nuclear and other matters
8 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

regarding Iran have favoured more conciliatory roles, but Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technol-
ogy in the face of considerable obstacles has been remarkably consistent – with the right
to enrichment becoming a ‘red line’ for the regime (Parsi, 2017, pp. 75–77).
Arguably, it was exposure of Iran’s nuclear programme that became the cause célèbre,
particularly in a volatile region where efforts to establish a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone
have been frustrated. For Israel, a nuclear state outside the NPT, Iran’s nuclear ambitions,
particularly across the Netanyahu administrations, became all consuming, such that
fearing Iran was ‘like a religion’ (Kaye & Efron, 2020, p. 7). Arab Gulf states too, led by
Saudi Arabia, repeatedly warned of the spill-over consequences of any regional prolifer-
ation and moved closer to Israel. Recognising these dangers, newly elected President
Obama, set out, in 2009, to explore a new relationship, characterised, finally, by a move
from containment to engagement, one that resulted in the protracted multilateral nego-
tiations leading to the JCPOA in 2015. This attempt at reset, which arguably met some of
the conditions necessary for providing a critical juncture – and reflecting a changed dom-
estic and international context – ultimately failed to secure any new regime of
cooperation. The JCPOA had many opponents in the US, the Middle East and among
Iranian hardliners, and the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2018, together with
the reimposition of sanctions, was popular among those who supported a ‘maximum
pressure’ approach. By 2020, not only had the default hostile setting returned – but ten-
sions had heightened considerably with the killing of Soleimani and Iran’s retaliatory acts
against US sanctions. Time will tell whether or not the Biden administration can restore a
JCPOA-type equilibrium.
This geopolitical story, in which international and regional level explanations, together
with powerfully grounded threat perceptions, are closely entangled, remains compelling,
yet insufficient. It helps to explain why Iran is ‘too powerful to ignore and cannot be easily
contained’ (Takeyh, 2009, p. 7). As argued here, powerful path dependencies were estab-
lished post-revolution which have not been disrupted by fitful attempts at reconciliation;
indeed, the fall-out from the war on terror, Iraq War, Arab uprisings and the nuclear pro-
gramme have helped to reinforce the Iran threat and what scholars have called the per-
sistent ‘otherising’ of Iran as reflected in US political discourse (Kadkhodaee & Tari, 2019).
Yet, as the above account shows, there have been opportunities for engagement. Cold
War with Iran was not inevitable. Iran’s importance in the regional balance of power
and the evident challenges it poses to US interests, cannot disguise the fact that in real
power terms, with or without nuclear technology, it poses relatively little significant
threat, certainly to the United States and even, arguably, to its regional allies. Iran has a
large army and significant military capabilities in some areas, like air defences, but in
others they are aging and stretched. Arab Gulf states are spending more and modernising
faster (Cordesman, 2020). They disagree on the nature of the challenge from Iran and its
management, despite the disruption caused to shipping routes and oil supplies. Any
threat it poses is reduced by economic woes, worsened by US sanctions and the devas-
tating effects of the COVID pandemic which has hit Iran particularly hard. Despite Iran’s
enduring geopolitical significance, and technological capabilities, its oil is no longer so
vital to the Western world. The US, even in a period of relative decline, is vastly more
powerful across all major economic and military measures. And unlike its predecessor,
the Islamic Republic has had few opportunities to exercise direct influence over the US,
or to change its behaviour. It was only with the support of an international coalition –
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 9

the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council (including an amenable US pre-
sident and active European participation) that Iran was able to influence US handling of its
nuclear file, achieving a reasonably favourable settlement on nuclear enrichment in 2015.
But even here success was finite, as President Trump’s decision to exit the JCPOA in 2018
revealed. As argued below, if geopolitics helped to frame these issues, US handling of that
file had as much to do with the exigencies of the US political calendar as it did with Iran’s
negotiating capacity. It is, therefore, to US politics that we must turn to better understand
both the varied and uneven trajectory of bilateral relations and the opportunities and
constraints for engagement.

From open hands to clenched fists: the American electoral cycle and Iran
policy
In responding to geopolitical sources of tension, US policymakers are themselves bound
by a series of domestic political constraints which limit their ability to act upon rational
strategic assessments of the threat posed by Iran. These constraints do not independently
determine policy outcomes, but instead constrict the range of options available at an
acceptable political cost. In contrast to the path dependent logic operating at the inter-
national level, however, these pressures operate according to a cyclical logic, correspond-
ing with three phases of the domestic political calendar. While existing accounts
acknowledge the role played by public opinion and interest groups in disincentivising
rapprochement and reinforcing the default hostility described above, these are often
invoked in an ad hoc manner which fails to capture systematic patterns in US policy.
Only by accounting for the non-linear manifestation of these constraints is it possible
to understand the frequent oscillation in policy responses between engagement and hos-
tility short-of-war, often within a single administration. Before unpacking further how the
electoral cycle shapes each administration’s sensitivity to these pressures, however, it is
first necessary to explore the historical foundations of those hostile threat perceptions
which, drawing on the geopolitical framework above, have become deeply embedded
within the US political system.

Jimmy Carter and the domestic political roots of hostility

If the Iranian Revolution represented a strategic setback for the US, it was also a deeply
political ‘loss’ for President Carter. For several months, a sprawling network of pro-Shah
figures spearheaded by prominent Republicans lambasted the president for his lack of
support for the Pahlavi regime and lobbied to have the deposed monarch admitted to
the United States. The electoral significance of this pressure was not lost on Carter,
who reluctantly agreed to permit the Shah’s entry, ostensibly for medical treatment, in
a move that triggered the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. In
turn, the ensuing hostage crisis was a major contributing factor behind Carter’s defeat
in 1980 and planted the seeds of enduring mistrust of Iran among policymakers and
public alike. ‘We never discuss it openly’, recalls one veteran of several administrations
(Pollack, 2004, p. 172), ‘but the residual anger that so many Americans feel toward Iran
for those 444 days has coloured every decision made about Iran ever since’.
10 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

In truth, electoral considerations shaped every phase of Washington’s response to the

crisis. As news of the seizure of the embassy reached Washington, one question kept crop-
ping up among top aides: ‘what would it do to the campaign?’ (Jordan, 1982, p. 19).
Leading the administration’s negotiating efforts in early 1980, Carter’s Chief of Staff
admitted that ‘the hostages and the election were woven together in my mind. When I
wasn’t thinking about [Democratic presidential candidate Ted] Kennedy, I was thinking
about Khomeini, and when I wasn’t thinking about Khomeini, I was thinking about
Kennedy’ (Jordan, 1982, p. 127). While the dramatic events initially generated a beneficial
‘rally ‘round the flag’ effect, as Carter himself would later acknowledge (Carter, 1982, p.
548), the safe return of hostages from Iran was among the most critical ‘prerequisites
for a successful campaign year’, and none of the nonmilitary instruments applied
through the spring of 1980 had worked.
It was precisely in the context of growing public dissatisfaction with the adminis-
tration’s policy of restraint that Carter decided to resort to more coercive measures.
Several advisers grew ‘increasingly frustrated and concerned about rising public pressure
for more direct action against Iran’ (Brzezinski, 1982), and it was to those aides that Carter
now turned. ‘We need to increase our pressure’, the president declared in March 1980,
since ‘the American people are getting sick of the situation’ (FRUS, 2020 Document
212). First came sanctions, a measure which one aide (Jordan, 1982, pp. 248–9) considered
unlikely to bring the hostages home any sooner, but which might ‘buy us a little more
time and patience from the public’. Shortly thereafter came a daring, and ultimately
doomed, rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw. In opting to resolve the crisis by force,
Carter was belatedly heeding the advice of hawkish advisers like Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who had castigated the earlier ‘litigational’ strategy as carrying a significant ‘risk of jeopar-
dizing our electoral chances’ (FRUS, 2020 Document 61). Another top NSC aide (Sick, 1985,
p. 295) later agreed that continued passivity would have ‘condemned the president to
self-immolation at the polls’. Even Jordan, who had long championed a diplomatic
approach to the crisis, had come to look favourably on a military option, frankly advising
Carter that ‘a measured punitive act is absolutely essential to your own re-election’ (FRUS,
2020 Document 56).
With neither diplomacy nor the use of force having dug Carter out of his electoral ditch,
the course of subsequent negotiations only further cemented the relationship between
electoral politics and dealings with the Iranian government. Tehran’s sudden appetite
for a deal in September 1980 apparently stemmed from an eagerness to capitalise on
Carter’s perceived willingness to grant concessions on the eve of the election (Sick,
1985, p. 309). Yet while the conditions offered would ultimately form the basis of a
final deal, Iran pushed a resolution beyond Election Day 1980, sealing Carter’s political
fate. Some have suggested that Khomeini held onto the hostages to undermine
Carter’s chances for re-election, demonstrating that Iran could shape political outcomes
in the United States (Pollack, 2004, p. 171). More infamous is the ‘October surprise’
theory. According to Gary Sick (1991), the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Iranian
officials, whereby Iran agreed to hand over the hostages under a Republican adminis-
tration in exchange for a supply of arms and the promise of improved relations. While
a congressional investigation found insufficient evidence to corroborate the claims, docu-
ments appearing to support elements of the allegations continue to surface (Eizenstat,
2020, pp. 828–829). Either way, it was not without good justification that Carter noted
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 11

that in deciding how to respond to Iranian negotiators, the administration was ‘walking
through a political minefield’ (DNSA, 1980).
That minefield became an enduring reality of US-Iranian relations. In the decades since
the hostage crisis, large and durable majorities of Americans have held unfavourable
views of Iran (Gallup, 2021a). Since Gallup (2021b) began asking the question in 2001,
Iran has topped the list of countries Americans consider to be the greatest enemy of
the US more frequently than any other. The peculiar salience and remarkable consistency
of the perceived Iranian threat among voters, real or imagined, gives elected officials
reasonable cause for concern. Four decades of crises and scandals have marked Iran
out as a graveyard of presidential ambition. This enmity has been further amplified by
interest groups seeking to leverage US policy for their own ends. While the Pahlavi
‘lobby’ has faded away, organisations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC) have since sought to refract US policy towards Iran through the lens of Israel’s
regional security concerns. Israeli objectives in the Persian Gulf have evolved over time,
often in ways which have not aligned with those of the incumbent US administration,
yet a drumbeat of anti-Iranian rhetoric has gained significant traction in the United
States, especially on Capitol Hill (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, pp. 280–305; Parsi, 2007).
With such consistent hostility etched into the national psyche and running through the
sinews of the American political system, elected officials have had plenty of political
incentives to engage in the relentless vilification of Iran and criticism of any policymaker
willing to advocate for a more pragmatic approach. In this sense, if the revolution was the
critical juncture that set US-Iranian relations upon a hostile path at the geopolitical level,
the events of 1979–80 intersected strongly with the domestic political level, embedding
mistrust and a baseline of animosity from which it is hard for policymakers to deviate. Yet
since these pressures tend to point in a similar direction – towards a more confrontational
posture – the puzzle of US policy fluctuation remains. It is here where a more nuanced
understanding of the differential effects of domestic constraints across the political calen-
dar is crucial. While the exact trajectory may differ based on contingent events and vari-
ation across and between different levels of analysis, successive administrations have
crafted policy bound by the exigencies of three broad phases of the electoral cycle.

The honeymoon phase: false starts and missed opportunities

In the first year of any new president’s term, each administration typically benefits from an
unusually permissive domestic political environment. With a fresh mandate and breathing
room before the next election, there is often sufficient political space to approach contro-
versial issues in a pragmatic manner. This freedom of action is not boundless. As the Biden
administration soon discovered, the cumulative effects of a predecessor’s actions can spill
over and make it difficult to embark on a new course. Moreover, adversaries recognise the
advent of a new administration to be a potentially fruitful moment to test the resolve of
the incoming team. Even if geopolitical conditions are favourable, moreover, domestic
room for manoeuvre during this ‘honeymoon’ phase is strictly time-limited. Congressional
appetite for the continued pursuit of unpopular, slow-burn diplomatic initiatives
diminishes quickly. While this is a challenge present across many policy domains, the
Iranian case is particularly notable, since the paucity of personal or institutional contacts
between Washington and Tehran since the severance of diplomatic relations in April 1980
12 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

has made it difficult to resolve any of the underlying sources of tension before this early
window of opportunity closes. From George H. W. Bush’s inaugural promise that ‘goodwill
begets goodwill’ to Barack Obama’s offer to ‘extend a hand’ if adversaries would
‘unclench’ their fist, diplomatic gestures remain about the best that can be achieved.
The early record of the Obama administration provides a compelling example of these
dynamics, with a series of moves explicitly designed to ‘take immediate advantage of the
window of opportunity’ and ‘test the waters with Iran’ (Burns, 2009). Intent on using
carrots before resorting to sticks, Obama issued a conciliatory statement to mark
Nowruz before following this public gesture up with a private exchange of letters with
Khamenei in which he expressed his interest in dialogue. Tehran did not exactly recipro-
cate in kind – in fact Obama (2020, p. 454) recently wrote that the Ayatollah’s response
was essentially to ‘give me the middle finger’. Yet before the year was out, officials
would agree to a confidence-building measure whereby Iran would commit to exchange
1200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium for fuel pads to be used in a research reactor.
Throughout Obama’s first year, the pace at which the new administration had sought
to engage Iran reflected a clear awareness that the president’s greatest strength – his
novelty and lack of baggage with Iran – would only erode over time. ‘Obama’, it was
said (Parsi, 2012, pp. 48–49), ‘could be a virgin only once’.
Obama was of course unusual in that he came into office intent on repairing the
decades of mistrust between Washington and Tehran as part of a broader effort to
shift the tone and nature of US policy in the Middle East. Yet it is important not to
read history backwards. Well before the JCPOA was agreed, Obama’s outreach during
his first year in office had come to a juddering halt as the window of political opportunity
swiftly closed. Under pressure from Netanyahu, with draft sanctions legislation gaining
traction on Capitol Hill, the White House understood that further attempts at engagement
would cost considerable capital which was better spent on other priorities such as health-
care in the run-up to the 2010 midterms. ‘Opposing sanctions might have been good
policy’, policymakers privately felt (Parsi, 2012, p. 110), ‘but it was bad politics’. The admin-
istration spent much of the remainder of its first term pursuing an open-ended policy of
economic coercion.
If Obama’s starting point was more conciliatory than that of his predecessors, even
those who ended up on the brink of war with Iran had started out with less hostile
relations. Under George W. Bush, Iran is remembered as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. Yet
before the president’s ill-advised rhetorical flourish, the 9/11 attacks created favourable
geopolitical conditions which inspired a degree of cooperation not seen since the days
of the Shah, showing that détente was possible when coupled with permissive electoral
conditions at home. Indeed, in a series of meetings in Europe, US and Iranian officials
developed ‘amicable and productive relations’ (Khalilzad, 2016, p. 119) and agreed to a
series of measures designed to support US military operations in Afghanistan. While
the breadth of support in Washington for a broader thaw must not be overstated,
Tehran’s role as mediator with the Northern Alliance during the post-war reconstruction
talks at Bonn was deemed so critical by senior US officials, including the Secretary of State,
that they came to see common interests in Afghanistan as ‘as an avenue for rapproche-
ment with Iran’ (in Solomon, 2016, p. 42).
The most frequent approach to Iran policy during the opening months of each new
administration, however, can be best characterised as benign neglect. For all the
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 13

melodrama of the hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan initially turned a blind eye towards Israeli
shipments of weapons into Iran, with some officials considering a direct arms supply
relationship as ‘the most significant policy tool in terms of re-establishing relations with
Iran’ (DNSA, 1981). George HW Bush took nine months before unveiling a policy review
setting out Washington’s willingness to embark on ‘a normal relationship with Iran on
the basis of strict reciprocity’ (DNSA, 1989). Even Trump took well over a year to fulfil
his pledge to withdraw from the JCPOA, and when the policy of ‘maximum pressure’
was finally announced it was initially applied at a pace which continually left advisers fru-
strated (Bolton, 2020, pp. 365–368). Collectively, then, this pattern of initial neglect, punc-
tuated with glimmers of cooperation, appears to suggest that the sabre-rattling about
Iran heard on the campaign trail is largely an exercise in instrumental threat inflation
driven by political motives, since few seemed to consider it so significant a geopolitical
problem as to warrant their immediate attention once elected. Presidents may appreciate
the limited strategic threat posed by Iran, but too often lack the political incentives or
time required to do much about it.

The re-election phase: ‘a political minefield’

After the ‘honeymoon’ window closes, anticipation of the incumbent’s re-election cam-
paign builds, accelerating quickly after the mid-terms and bringing with it a foreclosure
of any residual opportunity for progress on issues likely to prove politically thorny as
the presidential election season approaches. While the administration may have the
necessary experience to pursue meaningful diplomatic engagement with Tehran by
this stage, Iran has nearly always sat in the ‘thorny’ category of foreign policy issues
thanks to the remarkable consistency of public attitudes alongside the geopolitical con-
cerns dividing the two states. As a result, the political risk of failure is often deemed to
outweigh the potential upside of continued goodwill. Instead, the political incentives
behind punitive measures, such as sanctions or even the use of force, may prove irresis-
tible in an election year. Importantly, the extent of this recurrent trend towards hostility is
kept in check by the widespread fear among policymakers of the political cost associated
with putting large numbers of troops in harm’s way. Yet the disinclination of successive
administrations to pursue rapprochement in this increasingly sensitive electoral phase has
been a surprisingly persistent feature of US policy. Arguably, none of the presidents who
ran for re-election since the hostage crisis sought to make a serious attempt to engage
Iran in the months leading up to polling day.1
The timing and intensification of Reagan’s Iraq ‘tilt’ during the Iran-Iraq War is a good
example of these dynamics. It was only in spring 1982 that the US position began to
change from its posture of benign neglect, and while events on the battlefield partially
determined the shift, senior officials like James Baker – someone described by colleagues
as ‘political to his fingertips’ (Powell, 1995, p. 383) – admitted that ‘the decision to contain
Iran embodied emotional and political components as well’ (Baker, 1996, p. 262). Specifi-
cally, the electoral significance of the hostage crisis loomed large as ‘a metaphor for a
paralyzed presidency’, and a warning of the damage that anything less than a tough
posture towards Tehran could wreak in domestic political terms (Baker, 1996, p. 262).
Indeed, discussion papers of a senior interagency group in late 1983 listed congressional
and public opinion as one of four key considerations in weighing up the decision to push
14 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

harder on the scales in Iraq’s favour, reasoning that ‘while support for Iraq is quite limited
in the U.S., Iran enjoys an even less favorable image’ (DNSA, 1983).
Re-election concerns also played a role in blunting efforts to respond to changes in the
Iranian political landscape. They were a key factor, for instance, in explaining why Rafsan-
jani’s cooperation during the Gulf War and efforts to secure the release of US hostages in
Lebanon went unreciprocated. ‘One of the things I think you have to remember’,
explained former CIA Director Robert Gates (2000), ‘is all these players from the President
on down had been on the edges of Iran-Contra, and Iran essentially was the third rail of
foreign policy’. With questions also continuing to swirl around Bush’s involvement in the
alleged ‘October surprise’ of 1980, the administration understood the pitfalls that lay
before them. ‘As the electoral beneficiaries of this unhappy period in American diplomacy,
and having witnessed the unfortunate consequences of the Iran-contra scandal in 1986,
we were all too aware of the Ayatollah’s destructive capacities in terms of domestic poli-
tics’, recalls Baker (1996, p. 262). By the time all hostages were released it was December
1991, with a tough re-election fight against Bill Clinton on the horizon. As Ansari (2006, p.
132) notes, ‘Bush was unwilling to risk valuable political capital in an election year by
appearing to be soft on Iran’, so despite Rafsanjani’s best efforts to fulfil the pre-con-
ditions for dialogue set by the administration, ‘Bush unfortunately decided that it
would be wise to defer his response to Rafsanjani until after he had won the election’.
Bush, of course, never had the opportunity to go further. Instead, his electoral defeat at
the hands of Clinton in 1992 seemed only to press repeat on similar electoral dynamics
which further illustrate how the regional security concerns of allies can filter into US
policy with increased potency during this phase. Though pro-Israeli voices began lobby-
ing Clinton within days of his inauguration, the administration’s signature ‘dual contain-
ment’ policy would be unveiled two years later, and at first was largely declarative in
nature. Only after the 1994 midterms ushered in a potent alliance between a Republi-
can-controlled Congress and the Israel ‘lobby’ would Clinton go along with an uncompro-
mising programme of economic coercion, fearing misery at the polls in 1996 for
insufficient ‘toughness’ (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, pp. 286–291; Parsi, 2007, pp. 157–
189). ‘The right, AIPAC, the Israelis were all screaming for new sanctions’, recalls Pollack
(in Parsi, 2007, p. 186). It was in this context that the White House scrapped a lucrative
oil deal offered to the US firm Conoco and effectively banned all trade with Iran by execu-
tive order. Officials understood that the moves likely killed residual hopes of restoring
relations, yet, as Clinton’s Middle East envoy explained (in Parsi, 2007, p. 188), ‘from a pol-
itical standpoint, nobody pays a price to be tough on Iran’. The point was underscored the
following year, when Clinton reluctantly passed the draconian Iran-Libya Sanctions Act
into law just three months prior to Election Day 1996, under guidance from domestic
policy advisers who considered it ‘sheer stupidity’ not to endorse the bill (Pollack, 2004,
p. 287).
If electoral incentives thus contribute to escalatory moves in US-Iran relations, so too
do they ensure that the pressure has yet to spill over into war. The most recent near
misses illustrate the point well. By the summer of 2019, President Trump was apparently
receptive to arguments that he could ‘kiss his chances of re-election goodbye’ if he got
the United States embroiled in a war, calling off retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian
targets at the last minute (New York Times, 21 June 2019). The peak of US-Iranian
tension under Trump, however, came in January 2020, with the killing of Soleimani.
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 15

Some involved in the presidential campaign speculated that Trump’s decision was a
cynical ploy to generate a political boost ahead of his impeachment trial, the kind of
‘wag the dog’ behaviour of which the president had repeatedly accused his predecessor
(Guardian, 5 January 2020). Political confidants warned Trump before the attack that ‘with
the election coming’, he would do well to think through the implications before proceed-
ing (Woodward, 2020, p. 196). The president reportedly pushed back, arguing that the
attack would be politically popular, but his subsequent decision to de-escalate the
ensuing crisis after polling data revealed his political instincts to be off the mark is striking
(Kahn, 2020). In this sense, the Soleimani strike is the exception that proves the rule,
underlining how cyclical bouts of election-year hostility shown towards Iran by successive
presidents remain firmly bound by the public’s distaste for large-scale military operations
which might incur casualties. Hostility short-of-war instead remained the name of the
game, with hot rhetoric on the eve of polling day declaring Iran to be the ‘greatest
threat’ facing Americans simply further evidence of Iran’s utility as an electorally expedi-
ent bogeyman (Pompeo, 2020).

Second term dynamics: legacies and lame ducks

Such inflated rhetoric carries political utility only during electorally sensitive phases, of
course. At the outset of a second term, these pressures dissipate and a re-elected presi-
dent may finally have sufficient domestic political space to reassess the wisdom of con-
tinued competition at the international level. With four years of experience, a renewed
mandate and reduced sensitivity to political constraints, the second ‘honeymoon’ may
represent the best opportunity for the implementation of policy which prioritises the
national interest over political survival. This freedom of manoeuvre is not total, of
course. Given the absence of congressional term limits, political pressures remain far
more sustained in the legislative branch, limiting the executive’s ability to freely draw
on those instruments of power which depend on congressional support, such as sanctions
and formal treaties.
Consider the timing of the Obama administration’s concession on nuclear enrichment,
a breakthrough which led to the JCPOA. Tehran’s aforementioned red line was readily
apparent to negotiators. ‘That was the overriding message [the Iranians] were sending’,
recalled Jake Sullivan (in Parsi, 2017, p. 176). ‘We are not going to talk seriously about
any kind of nuclear deal that is a zero-enrichment nuclear deal. Period’. Crucially, the
Obama White House was willing to make this concession – the president had in fact
‘made this decision long ago’, according to Ben Rhodes (in Parsi, 2017, p. 174). And yet
he waited until after he was safely re-elected to signal that the US would be willing to
explore a limited civilian enrichment programme. Only in his second term could
Obama absorb the ferocious backlash from political opponents that inevitably followed.
However, if Obama’s second-term status eased the path towards the historic nuclear
accord, the JCPOA was on borrowed time. While Obama could protect the deal by repeat-
edly suspending congressional sanctions through presidential waivers, there was no guar-
antee that his successor would continue to do so, leaving his signature accomplishment
vulnerable to future electoral shifts.
Other presidents have simply left things too late, waiting until the twilight stage of
their presidency to engage Iran, preferring to expend political capital on domestic
16 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

issues attracting greater public interest. Incumbents may be less sensitive to political
pressures after the second mid-terms, but a new set of constraints can still impede pro-
gress. Indeed, while ‘lame ducks’ may be surprisingly active in foreign affairs, hoping to
burnish their legacies through increased diplomatic engagement, international agree-
ments and even the use of force, these efforts rarely yield lasting success (Potter, 2016).
Though the incumbent’s name is no longer on the ballot, rhetorical commitments
made by rival candidates can undermine the existing administration’s policies. Moreover,
with presidents having limited time left in office, allies and adversaries become increas-
ingly wary of making agreements which risk being undone at the stroke of a pen by
their successor.
Take President Clinton, for instance. After winning re-election in 1996, he and Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright were ‘intrigued by the possibility of better relations with Iran’
from the earliest days of the second term (Albright, 2004, p. 319). As Ansari (2006, p. 176)
puts it, ‘with no electoral contest and in search of a foreign policy legacy, Iran appeared
ready and full of Eastern promise’. Yet since the principal impediment to improved
relations remained the congressional sanctions imposed during Clinton’s first term, the
administration’s response to Khatami’s call for a ‘dialogue of civilisations’ could extend
little further than a series of diplomatic gestures, as sanctions relief remained politically
radioactive during the 1998 midterms. By the time Clinton had sufficient political space
to embark on a more substantive, it was already too late. The modest US response to Kha-
tami’s olive branch had weakened the influence of moderate voices in Tehran, with the
result that Albright’s otherwise momentous speech in March 2000, in which she
announced a lifting of sanctions on critical Iranian exports, fell largely on deaf ears.
President Reagan offers another compelling example of the difficulty ‘lame duck’ pre-
sidents face in responding to geopolitical shifts as their time in office runs out. Amid a
broader de-escalation of tensions with the Soviet Union, the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq
War created favourable geopolitical conditions for a reset of relations with Tehran. Yet
at the time of the ceasefire in August 1988, the Reagan administration was in its final
months, with cabinet secretaries privately lamenting that ‘Ronald Reagan has had the
landing lights on and the flaps down for the last year’ (Carlucci, 2001). As such, recalled
James Baker (1996, p. 262), ‘President Reagan decided that any serious reappraisal of
Persian Gulf policy should be left to his successor’. In turn, the administration’s interest
in helping then-Vice President Bush become that successor introduced additional political
disincentives to rapprochement. ‘President [Reagan] was a conservative, and the country
was going into an election year’, Powell (1995, p. 374) noted, adding that, ‘the adminis-
tration was determined to hold on to its conservative base and hand it to the next Repub-
lican candidate’. Thus, while Reagan’s instincts were pro-engagement – Powell (1995, p.
338) felt he ‘would have gone for another hostage-freeing scheme at the drop of a
Hawk missile’ – his foreign policy team remained acutely aware of the need ensure
that no controversial policy moves jeopardised Bush’s chances. It is telling, in this
context, that George Schultz rejected a recommendation by mid-level officials for a relax-
ation of economic sanctions in a ‘tilt’ toward Iran, aiming to restore a balance of power
between Tehran and Baghdad. Upon receipt of the memorandum, the Secretary of
State grew red in the face, marking it with a big ‘NO’ across the first page. ‘This makes
great geopolitical sense’, said Schultz, ‘but no political sense!’ (in Khalilzad, 2016, pp.
69–70).
 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 17

Conclusion
Today, the broader US commitment to the Middle East remains a subject of debate. Yet
even allowing for the declining importance of the region to US interests, imminent aban-
donment seems unlikely, and any path out of the Middle East would still require construc-
tive engagement with allies and adversaries. Whether or not Iran’s foreign policy will still
command the same level of attention as in the past, its political, regional and international
repercussions will continue to impact on the different incumbents of the White House. As
this article has demonstrated, the ability of successive administrations to embark on a
new relationship with Iran has been powerfully constrained both by geopolitical press-
ures and the accompanying precedents and perceptions developed and hardened
during a forty-year relationship that has tended towards hostility and misunderstanding.
In turn, Washington’s capacity to take advantage of moments of opportunity for a thaw
has been hamstrung by domestic political pressures, which manifest in accordance with
the dictates of the US electoral cycle. Meaningful attempts to engage Tehran have come
only in the more permissive ‘honeymoon’ or ‘lame duck’ phases, but quickly return to a
more confrontational stance as time runs out and political pressures come back to bite.
For over four decades, US policy towards Iran has been developed with one eye on the
domestic political calendar, oscillating between attempts at rapprochement and unremit-
ting hostility.
To break the impasse, a favourable alignment of conditions at the international and
domestic levels will be required. As this paper reveals, such moments of opportunity
have been few and far between. For much of the past forty years, geopolitical and dom-
estic political considerations have served to perpetuate the tense relationship between
Washington and Tehran. In the rush to place sanctions on Iran during Clinton’s first
term, for instance, or in the ‘emotional and political components’ of the decision to
contain Iran under Reagan, there is strong evidence of mutually reinforcing pressures
to double down on the path of hostile competition. In these instances, the geopolitical
and electoral incentives behind a tough posture towards Tehran were fundamentally
aligned, overdetermining continued hostility.
At other times, favourable conditions on one level have been offset by obstacles at the
other, leaving a record of false hopes and missed opportunities. Schultz’s unwillingness to
consider a relaxation of economic pressure after the Iran-Iraq War is a prime example of
one such misalignment, yet there are others. George HW Bush’s failure to reciprocate for
Iran’s cooperation during the Gulf War may be seen as a possible geopolitical opportunity
dashed by the incumbent’s growing preoccupation with electoral politics at home. Barack
Obama’s forlorn efforts to engage Tehran in 2009 illustrate the reverse scenario of favour-
able domestic conditions in the US meeting a cold reception overseas.
Obama’s eventual success with the JCPOA was arguably the product of the most
favourable alignment of conditions to date. Notably, this permissive context was
shaped by electoral shifts not only in Washington in November 2012, which alleviated
constraints on a safely re-elected Obama, but also in Tehran in June 2013, with the
arrival of a new Iranian president more favourably inclined to deal with the United
States. Indeed, this episode highlights how future research might extend the framework
offered here by integrating analysis of the interplay between the domestic political calen-
dars of both states. Though the parallel cannot be pushed too far, the electoral cycles of
18 L. FAWCETT AND A. PAYNE

the United States and Iran are both four years long and share common term limits, and as
such generate a familiar sequencing of leadership turnover worthy of further study. These
complexities are not within the scope of this paper, but the fate of the JCPOA serves to
underline the difficulty of sustaining a partial rapprochement even without the Iranian
dimension. Ultimately, absent an exogenous shock sufficient to both force a critical junc-
ture at the geopolitical level and freeze the cyclical pattern of domestic constraints, it will
be difficult for the current administration to finally throw out the ‘carcass of dead policies’
(Murray, 2010) and set the US on a new path in its relationship with Iran. For Iran and its
leaders also, the baggage of past policies and domestic imperatives will similarly constrain
options making a reset difficult, though not impossible.

Note
1. One exception is the Obama administration’s back-channel talks in 2012, yet even here great
effort was made to keep this initiative secret (see Parsi, 2017, pp. 169–173, 176).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Louise Fawcett is Professor of International Relations and Wilfrid Knapp Fellow and Tutor in Politics
at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Middle East and inter-
national relations of developing countries. Publications include Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbai-
jan Crisis of 1946 (pbk 2009) and The International Relations of the Middle East (5th ed. 2019). Email:
[email protected].
Andrew Payne is the Hedley Bull Research Fellow in International Relations and a William Golding
Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. His recent publications include
articles published in International Security and Politics, and he is currently working on a book manu-
script exploring the impact of US electoral politics on presidential decision-making in war. Email:
[email protected].

ORCID
Andrew Payne http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1936-8062

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