The Implications of “Strategic Loneliness” for Iran’s Geopolitics: Inevitable or Constructed?

This paper pays particular attention to three critical junctures in Iran’s contemporary history: The Russo-Persian wars of the 19th century, Iran’s occupation by the Allies in 1941, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Combining a constructivist approach to geopolitics with the theory of Social Reality Construction, this article argues that these series of wars in the past two centuries have created an intersubjectivity, making Iranians feel “lonely” when the very survival of their state was at the stake. While Iran’s geographical situation has brought the country to the core of the great powers’ attention, repeated foreign invasions or interventions seem to have reproduced a sense of vulnerability for the Iranians. This paper is constructed around the following question: Is there something embedded in Iran’s geography that betrays this land’s sovereignty and imposes loneliness? The conclusion is that there is no natural or geographical reason to justify Iran's loneliness in the international arena, but rather, a perceptual construct reproduced by the historical context of events. The imposition of great political powers to contain Iran in its geography and to make it a buffer zone constitute a spatial reality; however, the feeling of loneliness derives from the social construction of reality.