The Role of National Culture in the Islamic Republic of Iran's Foreign Policy

The foreign policy of each country is the outcome of the dialectical interaction between environmental and material factors on the one hand and the cultural and historical factors on the other. Among these, national culture is one of the major effective elements in the formation of national identity, elite's mental pictures, national interests and role, and foreign policy strategies and orientations. This is due to the inseparability of foreign policy from social, cultural and identity – related considerations. On this basis and in regard to the importance of recognizing identity and cultural elements for understanding the foreign policy of a country, the author has surveyed the cultural roots of the Islamic Republic of Iran's foreign policy and has evaluated the effect of major indices in each of Iranian cultural layers on foreign policy by adopting a theoretical/ operational approach. The author believes that despite the numerousness of identity discourses in Iran, it is possible to define the foreign policy or even the probable behavior of Iran by recognizing the Iranian, Islamic and modern discourse elements.