Decoding Iran’s Foreign Policy

Decoding Iran’s Foreign Policy: Strategic Interests, Power and Influence, by Ross Harrison. London/ New York: I.B. Tauris, 2025, 270pp. ISBN: 978-0755646050.

Reviewed by: Zeeshan Mahmood, Nottingham, UK                   

Amidst the birth of a supposed multipolar world succeeding the previous US-dominated unipolar world order that began with the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Iran has regularly been grouped alongside Russia and China as a major revisionist power seeking to alter world order and rolling back asymmetric Western hegemony in the process. Heavily sanctioned and stigmatised since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has successfully defied odds and expectations time and again. Today, it appears a key regional player in West Asia with expansive influence across that region. It is the main bastion of Twelver Shi’ism in the Islamicate and, alongside an indigenous industrial base, it is blessed with an abundance of oil and natural gas reserves, ensuring it can never be ignored by friends and foes alike. Needless to say, then, that an informed and nuanced understanding of contemporary Iran is becoming increasingly vital in order to grasp how the world works and why certain events are unfolding in the way they are.