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Soft War: a New Episode in the Old Conflicts Between Iran and the United States

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Soft War: a New Episode in the Old Conflicts Between Iran and the United States University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Center for Global Communication Studies Iran Media Program (CGCS) 11-2013 Soft War: A New Episode in the Old Conflicts Between Iran and the United States Farzan Sabet Roozbeh Safshekan Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram Part of the Communication Commons, and the International and Area Studies Commons Recommended Citation Sabet, Farzan and Safshekan, Roozbeh. (2013). Soft War: A New Episode in the Old Conflicts Between Iran and the United States. Iran Media Program. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram/9 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram/9 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Soft War: A New Episode in the Old Conflicts Between Iran and the United States Abstract Soft war is ubiquitous today with the way the Islamic Republic of Iran characterizes its relationship with the West, and is a key concern of Iranian national security policy. Few, however, have seriously undertaken the task of defining what soft war is in concrete terms. This analysis proposes a definition of soft war grounded in Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’ and the history of Iran’s encounter with the West, particularly the United States. In this framework, soft war is the exercise of soft power by the United States on Iran, creating security challenges for the Islamic Republic and forcing the Republic to respond. This analysis not only explores the genealogy of this conflict and how it has unfolded under the Islamic Republic, but also attempts to assess the regime’s strategy in the soft war. This work can be an aid to policymakers, scholars, and others in better understanding soft war and its implications for Iran’s domestic politics and foreign affairs, in addition to U.S.-Iran relations. Disciplines Communication | International and Area Studies Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. This report is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram/9 SOFT WAR - A NEW EPISODE IN THE OLD CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES Soft War A new episode in the old conflict between Iran and the United States IRAN MEDIA PROGRAM SOFT WAR - A NEW EPISODE IN THE OLD CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES Farzan Sabet Farzan Sabet is a doctoral student in International History at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. His research interests include U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations and economic sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a political actor in Iran, and soft war. Roozbeh Safshekan Roozbeh Safshekan is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Alberta. His research interests include Iranian domestic and foreign politics, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, international relations theory, and comparative social movements. About the Iran Media Program The Iran Media Program is a collaborative network designed to enhance the understanding of Iran’s media ecology. Our goal is to strengthen a global network of Iranian media scholars and practitioners and to contribute to Iran’s civil society and the wider policy-making community by providing a more nuanced understanding of the role of media and the flow of information in Iran. Research supported by the Center for Global Communication Studies’ Iran Media Program. Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania 202 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104 Phone: (215) 898-9727 Fax: (215) 573-2609 [email protected] www.iranmediaresearch.org http://www.global.asc.upenn.edu Page 2 SOFT WAR - A NEW EPISODE IN THE OLD CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES NOVEMBER 2013 Contents INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................................4 I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK........................................................................................................................5 II. HISTORICAL GENEALOGY........................................................................................................................... 8 HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-WESTERNISM IN IRAn: 1813–1953.....................................................8 A BRIEF HISTORY OF U.S. SOFT POWER IN IRAN: 1853-1953...............................................................9 9 OPERATION AJAX AND THE RISE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM: 1953-1979...............................................10 ANTI-IMPERIALISM AND WESTOXIFICATION: 1953-1979......................................................................11 The Tudeh & anti-imperialism............................................................................................................... 11 Iranian nativist intellectuals & Westoxification.................................................................................... 12 THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION AND THE HEIGHT OF ANTI-AMERICANISM: 1979-1989..........................13 III. SOFT WAR IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN.......................................................................................15 SHIFT IN THE BALANCE OF SOFT POWER: 1989-PRESENT...................................................................115 IV. HARD & SOFT RESPONSES.........................................................................................................................17 THE CONDUITS OF U.S. SOFT POWER...............................................................................................17 HARD RESPONSES AND CONDUITS OF SOFT POWER........................................................................18 18 BUILDING THE SOURCES OF SOFT POWER.............................................................................................19 19 CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................................................. 24 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................................................25 Page 3 SOFT WAR - A NEW EPISODE IN THE OLD CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES INTRODUCTION For the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Holy Defense, war is that large segments of the Iranian population also known as the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), was are attracted to the United States, embracing key a titanic struggle pitting Iran’s revolutionary regime elements of its culture and political ideals, anathema and its Islamic values against not only Iraqi dictator for a regime founded on Islamic values and anti- Saddam Hussein, but more ominously the United Americanism. As the gulf between the culture and States and the forces of Western imperialism. From political ideals of the Islamic Republic versus large the Islamic Republic’s perspective, it won the war segments of its population has widened, the regime’s by marshaling its economic and military resources, power to influence Iranians has weakened and it repulsing the Western- and Gulf Arab-backed has come under pressure to change its policies in a Iraqi invader from its soil, and showing the world number of domains. Iran’s strategy to address this that its revolution and Islamic values could not be and other soft war challenges contains two main vanquished by economic pressure and force of arms. responses. The first is a hard response that seeks to As war veterans returned from the front, however, control the conduits through which U.S. sources of they soon found the very revolution and Islamic soft power, culture, political ideals, and policies, values they had fought for under attack. The enemy’s enter Iran. These conduits include the Internet, weapons were no longer economic sanctions and satellite television, and universities. The second is high-tech arms, but rather culture and political a soft response that attempts to create indigenous ideals. The enemy’s targets were no longer economic sources of soft power that are attractive to Iranians. or military, but the hearts and minds of the Iranian In practice, thus far Iran’s strategy has placed greater people, especially the youth. The Islamic Republic, emphasis on the hard response. Largely because the particularly the conservative political current who Iranian regime has failed to utilize the capacity of would come to control most elected and unelected Iranian civil society to create attractive indigenous centers of power in post-war Iran, struggled to find sources of soft power, the regime has been on the a language to articulate the nature of this ephemeral defensive in the soft war. threat, alternatively calling it a “cultural assault,” “cultural night-raid,” and “cultural NATO,” among Part I of this analysis gives a basic definition of other things. By the late 2000s, Iranian Supreme soft war and lays out a theoretical framework for Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian understanding it using international relations scholar conservatives had converged on a single term for this Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power. Part II discusses conflict: “soft war” jang-e( narm). the historical genealogy of soft war by tracing two distinct but interwoven threads: First, the rise of What is soft war? While the term is sometimes used Islamic nativism in Iran, and second, the rise and fall loosely and propagandistically by Iranian officials, of U.S. soft power in Iran from the mid-19th century it arguably
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