Thomas Juneau | Squandered Opportunity : Iran’s Failed Foreign Policy

Thomas Juneau is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses mostly on the Middle East, in particular on Iran, Yemen, Syria and US foreign policy in the region. He is also interested in Canadian foreign and defence policy and in analytical methods. He is the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical realism and Iranian foreign policy (Stanford University Press, 2015), co-editor of a forthcoming book on strategic analysis in support of international policy-making, and co-editor of Iranian Foreign Policy since 2001: Alone in the world (Routledge, 2013). Discussant: Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail The Islamic Republic of Iran faced a favorable regional environment after 2001, especially in the wake of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran attempted to exploit this window of opportunity by assertively seeking to expand its interests throughout the Middle East. It fell short, however, of fulfilling its longstanding ambition of becoming the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and a leading power in the broader Middle East. Today, Iran is not a fast-expanding regional hegemon, as one often hears, but is rather a mid-sized regional power frustrated at not reaching its ambitions. In this presentation, Juneau will discuss his recent book, Squandered Opportunity (Stanford University Press), in which explores the causes and consequences of Iran’s failed and costly policies. He argues that even though Iran has the potential to emerge as a dominant regional player, the brittle nature of its power and the intervention of specific domestic factors have caused its foreign policy to deviate, sometimes significantly, from optimal outcomes.