Iran's New Grand Strategy | Vali Nasr
About this episode
Demetri Kofinas interviews Vali Nasr about Iran's conduct being driven by national insecurity rather than religious ideology, and its implications for US policy and nuclear negotiations.
In Episode 487 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Vali Nasr — professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and author of Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History — about the argument that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by national insecurity and historical grievance, how that reframing bears on US and Western policy and the nuclear negotiations, the forces that forged the Islamic Republic into what it is today, and the range of likely outcomes for Iran, the region, and the global economy. The first hour examines the central argument of Vali's work—drawn from his book and a recent Foreign Affairs article co-authored with Narges Bajoghli—that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by a deeply entrenched sense of national insecurity and historical grievance rooted in Iran's long experience of foreign domination. They trace that experience through Iran's centuries of isolation and weakness, the imperial penetration of the nineteenth…
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