World Conquest or Defeat
Khomeini viewed the Third World as an arena for confronting Western influence. Before the revolution, Iranian activists, namely Ali Shariati and Mustapha Chamran, advocated for their theories of universal social justice. Today, the Guards try to outflank American, European, and Israeli diplomatic and economic efforts in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Latin America, and elsewhere. Iran declares itself at war with Western states, and the Third World provides many venues and opportunities for unconventional and non-kinetic warfare.
The Guards pursue three primary foreign policy goals. The first is to use international initiatives to build Iranian regional dominance across the greater Middle East and western Afghanistan. The second is to export the revolution. Since the early days of the Republic, the Guards have sought to disseminate Khomeini’s ideas, particularly to states with significant Shia populations. The third is to support states that attack Iran's enemies. As in Hitler’s Germany and Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Iran’s rulers are ideologically driven to pursue vast conquest. In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined steps to forge a racial German empire reaching the Ural Mountains. Lenin’s Red Army drove west in 1920 to master Europe but was halted at the Battle of Warsaw. After the Soviet Union captured Berlin, Stalin established satellite states. Iran, too, has global goals and uses the Guards to achieve them.
Mullahs express a nostalgic lament when they speak of a Greater Iran. The ancient Persian Empire spanned the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan. Since 1979, Iranian leaders have sought to reestablish “Greater Iran,” stretching from Israel to Afghanistan and loosely based on the pre-Islamic Persian Empire. Such an effort is expected to advance Iran’s strategic position and prepare for the Mahdi's arrival, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Jordan’s King Abdullah is credited with coining the phrase Shia Crescent to describe Iran’s mounting threat to the region after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Qods Force can move personnel and material, including weapons and military equipment, through this corridor. It also maintains an air bridge to Damascus International Airport and other Syrian airfields.
Global Peace and Enemies
As noted, the second goal of the Guards is to export the revolution worldwide. Like the first goal of generating regional mastery, this objective promotes Iran’s prestige and political power; however, it emphasizes the global mandate to spread Twelver Shia Islam and Khomeini’s religious, spiritual, and political views. Large Shia minorities also exist in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen.
Iranian leaders view them as pools of recruits for their revolutionary causes. In Latin America, Iran has established a base for exporting revolutionary ideas and seeks to project its influence throughout the Western Hemisphere. Iran has vast energy, money, and materiel to develop links to Shia communities around the world. In terms of the third goal, combating Iran’s declared enemies, the most reviled opponents are the toxic “triangle” of the United States, Israel, and world Jewry; they also include the Saudi royal family. A leading Guards-controlled media outlet claims that “these three countries (including the Saudi royal family) finance terrorists and provide them with weapons.”
Iranian hatred of the United States is deep and enduring. Early in his adulthood, Ayatollah Khomeini named the United States the Great Satan, and his moniker stands. Historical disputes still grate. Often and loudly, Iranian leaders and Iranian media clamor that the United States has dominated weaker countries for centuries. They proclaim that the United States intends to destroy Islam and the Islamic Republic. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said Americans use soft warfare and hard power to project its unwanted influence in the Middle East. An unforgiving Ayatollah Khamenei demands that Iran must defeat the United States. Broadcasts, television shows, films, songs, and video games that depict the destruction of America proliferate in Iran.
Similarly, Iranian leaders have repeatedly pledged to annihilate the “Little Satan,” Israel. Iran’s Guards’ army commander has declared the destruction of Israel a central national goal. Ayatollah Khomeini coined the phrase, “The path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala,” meaning that the struggle for the ultimate Islamic goal (Jerusalem) passes through Iranian control of areas historically part of Sunni hegemony. The annihilation of Israel is a recurring meme among the mullahs and their devotees. Parliament speaker Ali Larijani called Israel the “mother of terrorism” and its creation the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.
In 2015, Khamenei predicted that in twenty-five years Israel would no longer exist.30 Interactive video games allow players to obliterate Tel Aviv with rocket fire. Iranian intelligence operatives—Mois and Guards—tried to kill senior Saudi statesman Adel al-Jubeir, a career Saudi diplomat, in 2011. With impeccable English and well-tailored suits, al-Jubeir was long a fixture on the diplomatic circuit. But for Iran, he represented both the Saudi royal family and Muslim collaboration with the United States. An Iranian-born Texas man was charged in the plot to kill al-Jubeir. In October 2018, Belgium charged an Iranian diplomat and three other individuals with planning to bomb a meeting of an exiled Iranian opposition group in France earlier in the year.
All three of Iran’s main enemies—the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—take Tehran’s threats seriously. Leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel disagree on many issues. However, they dread the prospect of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and fear its burgeoning conventional capability.
Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid bin Salman has called on the international community to meet the Iranian threat and to take the rhetoric of its leaders seriously. He urged the world “not to approach Iran with the sort of appeasement policies that failed so miserably to halt Nazi Germany’s rise to power,” such as the Munich agreement of 1938.
Echoing these sentiments, then–U.S. national security advisor John Bolton opined that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement that released Western-controlled Iranian funds in exchange for promises to delay nuclear weapons development, was an act of appeasement. Israeli statesman and historian Michael Oren has also drawn parallels to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Western powers appeased Germany as the Nazis built a vast arsenal of advanced weaponry to conquer neighboring countries. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed in 2018 that Iran is persistently and aggressively developing a nuclear weapons program.
