The fourth chapter gives a succinct historical description of the secular nationalist ideologies in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel and compares the secular political movements in these countries as they have different regime types and political cultures. The chapter also provides brief biographical accounts of the three top executive leaders from each country: Bashar al-Assad, Saad al-Hariri, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors also present and compare the operational code results of the leaders and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from secular nationalist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics and for the international relations discipline.

Chapter five focuses on the leadership of armed nonstate actors in the MENA, with an emphasis on the foreign policy conceptualizations of leaders. The chapter starts by accounting for the genesis of ANSAs in the region, and their emergence and increasing significance for MENA politics is stressed. The authors also give the psycho-biographies of the top executive leaders of ANSAs: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS, Abdullah Öcalan of PKK, Salih Muslim of PYD, and Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. Lastly, the chapter discusses the operational code results of the studied ANSA leaders and elaborates on their implications for MENA and world politics. The discussion focuses on what kind of leadership ANSAs produce and what it means for states that are trying to contain or negotiate with them. The chapter also addresses the question of what these results mean in terms of FPA’s actor-specific approach as opposed to IR theories’ actor-general explanations of world politics

The Islamic Republic relies on a number of distinct but related institutional clusters to maintain power. This include the institutional means through which the state politically incorporates social groups into its orbit; institutional mechanisms of control; a number of “veto players”; those institutions that help maintain the system; the deep state; intra-elite competition; and, patronage and clientelism.

Far from undermining it, factionalism actually keeps the Islamic Republic state flexible and dynamic, therefore helping its resilience. States, authoritarian or otherwise, preside over societies in which a majority of the population is politically ambivalent. Among those who are politically aware, and even among those only tangentially interested in politics, factionalism allows the state to expand the scope of its ideological appeal. It also prevents political elites from taking for granted their hold on power, forcing them to forge and maintain bonds with intended constituents. In Iran, political power is held among a relatively small group of elites. But this elite is far from static. It circulates from office to office, and groups within it often change their doctrinal inflections, factional positions, and coalition partners. The ensuing dynamism helps the system endure.

In Chapter 7, the authors home in on the policy implications and avenues for future research, which build upon the empirical and theoretical findings that are explicated in Chapters 3–6. The discussion herein revolves around the following questions: What do the empirical operational code results mean for the day-to-day conduct of the politics of the MENA region? How do these at-a-distance leadership analysis findings and inferences help us to make sense of MENA’s international relations today? How does the actor-specific analysis in this book cue regional and international policymakers on understanding and engaging with certain political leaders in the MENA region? This chapter addresses these questions through utilizing a case study approach. These four salient cases are: 1) Iran’s nuclear program and the diplomatic crisis with the United States (2010–2022); 2) the Egyptian crisis in the wake of the Arab uprisings (2011–2014); 3) the Syrian civil war (2011–2022); and 4) the rise and fall of the Islamic State and its top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Iraq and Syria (2013–2019). This chapter briefly introduces these cases and discusses how individual-level leadership analyses can be used to make sense of these crises.

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments and discusses four interrelated developments as the primary causes ofL6:L8 the resilience of the Islamic Republic. They are: the institutional makeup and legitimacy of the state; the state’s underlying and not always obvious underbelly – the so-called deep state; the dynamics that allow for the management and resolution of intra-elite tensions and conflict, even if only partially, and facilitate intra-elite circulation and rotation; and, the state as an institutional venue for and a profitable source of rent-seeking.

The Islamic Republic system has relied on a whole host of dynamics – political, institutional, and economic – to sustain itself in power. Despite significant changes to much of its leadership cadre and constitution since its establishment, the Islamic Republic remains remarkably consistent in its core identity and its structures. Moreover, the fundamental nature of these dynamics is unlikely to change anytime soon.

There is a direct and important relationship between elections, clientelism, and the system’s legitimacy. Urban Iranians may be skeptical toward the efficacy of their vote. But rural Iranians seem to view their electoral rights differently. The fact that participation levels in remote and comparatively underdeveloped provinces has been consistently high shows that at least among the less privileged, the system enjoys continued legitimacy. Local elections help further enhance the system’s legitimacy. This is particularly the case in voting districts outside of the major metropolitan areas, in places where the local elites who get elected to the city council or the Majles serve as critical links between the system, the nezam, and the local population. In the smaller cities and towns, elections tend to be more vigorously contested because the rewards are more immediate. Legitimacy and system effectiveness are different matters altogether. One of the biggest consequences of electing clan and tribal leaders has been the apolitical marginalization of technocrats and other professionals and their diminished chance of getting into elected office.

Chapter 6 focuses on the theoretical conclusions of the book. The chapter discusses the utility of operational code analysis in explaining individual-level foreign policy decisions, and how different competing ideologies translate into different foreign policy tendencies mediated by individual MENA leaders. The comparative analysis of individual leaders’ operational codes is broken down into in-group, out-group, regional, and world leadership norming-sample comparisons. A specific reference to the usefulness of FPA as a subfield of IR literature is made and ideas for future research are discussed. The chapter synthesizes insights drawn from the analyses and case studies, followed by an expanded discussion of the implications of this research for policy-oriented studies.

The first chapter introduces the background and current developments in the MENA region in the past decade and MENA’s current transformation to an ongoing clash of competing blocs of Sunni and Shia political Islamists, secularists, and ANSAs leaderships. The chapter briefly discusses the four prominent ideological categories in the MENA region and their implications for foreign policymaking. Next, the authors elaborate on the methodological approach of the book, introduce the operational code analysis, and discuss classical examples as well as more recent works of the opcode literature. Contributions of the operational code approach and where exactly this study fits in the literature are at the heart of this chapter.

Elections for the presidency, the Majles, and the city councils perpetuate the politics of hybridity, which in turn has left each of these institutions with conflicting legacies. Hybridity has left them neither democratic nor authoritarian, neither paragons of the people’s political will nor symbols and symptoms of an unresponsive and repressive state. Hybridity perpetuates the politics of ambivalence. It renders presidents and parliamentarians and city councilors ineffective if they cross amorphous, undefined redlines. But it also makes them exciting symbols of the popular will if they speak the people’s language, voice their complaints about prices, and promise to better their lives. Hybridity makes normal a neither-here-nor-there routine of the politics of voting and going along with the system, and, on occasion, breaking into protest out of frustration that rituals like voting matter little. Hybridity and ambivalence go hand in hand, reduce the costs of conformity, increase the price of rebellion, and make possible occasional bouts of protest and violence. Like elections, institutions such as the presidency and the parliament entail risks for the authoritarian core of the state, affording potential wildcards institutional platforms and resources to further their own agendas.

Consistent with the broader institutional makeup of the system, Iran’s deep state is complex and has several components. The velayat-e faqih stands as the central critical core of the Iranian deep state. As such, the leader provides the institutional and doctrinal organizing principles around which the other components of the deep state rally. These include the state’s praetorian guards, namely the IRGC and the Basij, those institutions specifically designed for system maintenance – that is, the Guarding Council, the Expediency Council and the judiciary – and a series of other formal and informal institutions that also ensure the protection of the system’s interests as defined by them, and the continuity of those interests regardless of the changes that may occur through popular elections. These latter set of institutions include the country’s various intelligence agencies, the Qom-centered clerical establishment, the Friday Prayer Imams, the Special Court for the Clergy, and the state radio and television broadcaster – the IRIB. Impervious to outside demands and influences, each of these institutions report only to the velayat-e faqih, operating mostly outside of and independent from the formal institutions and procedures of the state.

The velayat-e faqih has steadily come to occupy the apex of the political system in its day-to-day functions, in the process overwhelming and overshadowing elected institutions such as the presidency and the Majles. The Assembly of Experts, which is meant to select and then supervise the velayat-e faqih, has become a shadow of its constitutional self. Especially after Refsanjani was elbowed out of the institution, it has moved to become more of an auxiliary of the leadership. The presidency and the Majles have also come increasingly under the leader’s overpowering influence. The system continues to remain hybrid. But that hybridity is being steadily chipped away at. Khamenei is the most important element of the deep state, the critical connective tissue that binds all the other institutions together. The other elements of the deep state are its praetorians – the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij – its gatekeepers such as the Expediency and the Guardian Councils, and Khamenei representatives and the Friday Prayers Imams, along with the rest of the Qom theological establishment, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Special Court for the Clergy, and the state radio and television broadcaster, the IRIB.