Guardians of the Revolution

Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs

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Read an excerpt of Guardians of the Revolution.

"The challenge of Iran has never been greater, and the ability of the United States to manage the surging power of the Islamist state will go a long way toward stabilizing the Middle East," says CFR Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh in Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs. Takeyh was recently senior adviser to the special adviser for the Gulf and Southwest Asia at the U.S. Department of State. In this book, he explains that the task at hand is to create a situation where Iran sees benefit in limiting its ambitions. "Dialogue, compromise, and commerce, as difficult as they may be, are a means of providing Tehran with a set of incentives to adhere to international norms and commit to regional stability."

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Tracing the course of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution, Takeyh explores four distinct periods in his book: the revolutionary era of the 1980s; the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1989; the "reformist" period from 1997 to 2002 under President Mohammad Khatami; and the policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei. From this account, Takeyh illustrates that Iran's policies are, in reality, a series of compromises between conservatives and moderates.

Looking ahead, Takeyh says that "Iran has entered the twenty-first century in an enviable position…[and] has now emerged as a leading power of the Middle East, whereby its preferences and predilections have to be taken into consideration as the region contemplates its future." He urges the United States to collaborate with Iran on preventing the civil war in Iraq from spilling outside its borders. "Resumed diplomatic and economic engagement between the two states and collaboration on Iraq may presage an arrangement for restraining Iran's nuclear program within the limits of its Nuclear Proliferation Treaty obligations."

Further, Takeyh posits that an engagement strategy with Iran need not jeopardize the United States' relationships with other nations. "Instead of militarizing the Persian Gulf and shoring up the shaky alliances on Iran's periphery, Washington can move toward a new regional security system that features all of the local actors. Such a framework can involve a treaty that pledges the inviolability of the borders, arms-control pacts that proscribe certain categories of weapons, a common market with free-trade zones, and a mechanism for adjudicating disputes."

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Reviews and Endorsements

Anyone who wants to understand what's going on in Iran must read the terrific ... Guardians of the Revolution ... a lucid, clear-headed explanation of Iran's perplexing foreign policy since 1979.

Daily Beast

An excellent way to take the measure of revolutionary Iran today is to read this up-to-date, well-researched, and perceptive history of its foreign policy since 1979.

Foreign Affairs

An excellent straightforward primer.

Jerusalem Post

Superb ... Anyone wishing to understand why restored American-Iranian ties are so elusive, but also so critical, should turn to this important work, a riveting and consistently insightful study of revolutionary Iran and its still troubled place in the world.

New York Times

An elegant anatomy of Iran's foreign policy since 1979.

Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books

Guardians of the Revolution is a 'must read' for policy makers in Iran, in the United States, and throughout the world. Thirty years after the revolution, this is the only comprehensive book in any language on the dynamics of change in Iranian domestic and foreign policy since the revolution. Timely and balanced, it should command the attention of the Obama administration in reviewing America's policy toward Iran.

R. K. Ramazani, Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Government, University of Virginia

Ray Takeyh is one of our country's most insightful observers of Iran. In this book, he offers an interesting portrait of how and why Iran's approach to the world has evolved since the revolution. His explanations of the interplay of different groups within the elite and the rise of the new right are thought provoking and raise important questions for policymakers. If one wants to understand the different forces affecting Iranian foreign policy, Takeyh's book is a good place to start.

Dennis Ross, author of Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World

Ray Takeyh has given us a succinct, well-written, and cool-headed analysis of Iran's foreign policy since the 1979 revolution. This book should be read by academics working on contemporary Iran as well as by foreign-policy experts in Washington grappling with the issue of how to deal with Tehran.

Ervand Abrahamian, author of A History of Modern Iran

A useful aid. ... [This book] provides a narrative background to the insights in his earlier Hidden Iran . Takeyh's two books together offer as instructive a portrait as one can find of politics in Tehran and why it generates sometimes maddening Iranian postures toward the outside world.

National Interest

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. In May, the Trump administration killed the diffusion rule, days before it would have been set into motion, in part to facilitate the export of these cutting-edge chips abroad to the Gulf powers. This represents a fundamental pivot for AI policy, but potentially also in the logic of U.S. grand strategy vis-à-vis China. The most recent era of great power competition, the Cold War, was fundamentally bipolar and the United States leaned heavily on the principle of non-proliferation, particularly in the nuclear domain, to limit the possibility of new entrants. We are now playing by a new set of rules where the diffusion of U.S. technology—and an effort to box out Chinese technology—is of paramount importance. Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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