To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
The adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or what is more commonly known as the 2015-Iran nuclear deal, represents a milestone in the history of the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear program as well as the global nuclear non-proliferation efforts. Understanding how this major nuclear policy shift came about would give us insights into Iran’s nuclear decision-making processes and help put into perspective its current and future nuclear policies. By developing and applying a synthetic analytic framework, this seminar argues that the political empowerment of the “moderate-Islamic discourse,” reinforced by a multitude of systemic and domestic political, economic and institutional variables, played a key role in this process. By defining different cost conceptions and levels of sensitivity to costs for the majority Iranian political elites, this talk contends that the empowerment of the moderate-Islamic discourse created the necessary conditions under which US-led economic sanctions became politically salient to Iran’s nuclear policy and paved the way for the nuclear compromise.
Abolghasem Bayyenat
Abolghasem Bayyenat is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Syracuse University. His doctoral dissertation examined the political dynamics of Iran's nuclear policymaking.
Abolghasem's current research is focused on Iran's nuclear decision-making processes and Iranian political elites' national security and foreign policy thinking. He is currently developing his doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript and journal articles. More broadly, his research interests are grounded in scholarly and policy debates on the role of state identity in foreign policy and nuclear policymaking, economic sanctions in nuclear non-proliferation, and Middle Eastern international relations. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, he worked for several years in Iran researching Iran’s foreign trade regime and the multilateral trading system.
His writings on Iran's foreign policy developments can be accessed on his website at www.IranDiplomacyWatch.com.
