Reflections on Foreign Policy Orientation in Quotations and Writings of Ayatollah Khamenei (1989-2009)

Foreign policy orientation is the attitudes and general commitments of a state towards its foreign environment, its main strategy for implementing external and internal objectives, and for countering permanent threats. This study aims to determine the foreign policy orientation of a revolutionary leader. Therefore, the main question is to find the frequency of foreign policy orientations in the works of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The primary hypothesis was upon some speculations about the superiority or the inferiority of one of the three orientations in a comparison among them. Considering three orientation indexes of “isolationism”, “non-alignment”, and “alliance”, which are derived from Holsti’s theoretical models of foreign policy, and emphasizing on the first ring of Hilsman’s institutional analysis model, which corresponds to the Supreme Leader in Iran, the authors have attempted to prove this conclusion that the abundance of these indexes indicates the precedence of the two orientations of non-alignment and alliance in a religion-based foreign policy. This conclusion is gained through counting the contents, which are associated with the orientation indexes in the quotations and the writings of Ayatollah Khamenei in the period of 1989-2009. The research method is a combination of quantitative analysis (counting the frequencies of those indexes which are related to triple orientations in foreign policy) and qualitative analysis (interpreting the findings). The interpretive finding of this literature indicates that a kind of realism is dominant on quotations and writings of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the aim of keeping the revolutionary foreign policy away from isolationism.