An Analysis of Islamic Republic of Iran's Foreign Policy Decisions according to James Rosenau's Pre-Theory Model

Considering that politics is not anything more than a set of decision-making, foreign policy and international politics can be viewed as crystallization of decision-making by the actors of the international system. At this level, decision-making theories evaluate foreign policy by examining the general milieu and parameters of decision-making. This paper draws upon Rosenau's pre-theory model for analyzing the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for it is a combination of micro- and macro-levels in studying foreign policy. Through this study, it became clear that in four significant decisions made in Iran's foreign policy the variable of international system has consistently played the major role in making of decisions and before the amendment of the constitution in 1989, the individual variable has been the second determining variable. After the constitution was amended, this variable was replaced with the variable of role. Furthermore, bureaucratic and community variables have been at next places.