Week 3 Blog

Hello again fans and interested readers. This week has seen me continue my same previous focus on examining U.S. presidencies in chronological order, focusing on the two terms of the Regan administration for my analysis. Also, I have begun to examine the ways in which I can analyze and ultimately organize the results that I obtain from my research, looking at how the results that I acquire from each of my sources can be more generally applied to the duration of a presidency and how trends in Iran-U.S. relations can be tracked. With all of these goals in mind, it has been a busy week of researching and examination.

My first step this week was to begin to search the Congressional Research Service (CRS) for sources that detailed the major foreign policy decisions and Iranian policies of the Reagan administration. The first realization that I came to was that there was an immediate shift in Iran-U.S. relations when Reagan took office. One example of this shift was that the Iranian hostage crisis came to a swift end when Reagan was inaugurated. This end has been associated with Reagan’s campaign promises of a stern stance against Iranian aggression and hostage-taking, and his promise to take immediate action if the hostages were not released by the time of his inauguration.

From this example I began compiling sources that focused on Reagan’s first term in office. One source that I found on the CRS was titled “The Reagan Administration and Iran,” and this source placed a majority of its focus on how the Reagan era had some of the most direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. This confrontation was the direct result of a number of factors, including the pursuit of cold war interests, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. With the many conflicting foreign policy interests during his first term in office, it was no wonder that U.S.-Iran relations grew to be strained significantly.

My next step was to look specifically towards Reagan’s second term in office, and I quickly realized that this period of time was overshadowed by one major issue: the Iran-Contra affair. Examining a source from the CRS entitled “The Iran-Contra Affair,” it quickly became clear that Reagan’s actions in the affair were in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism to states in South America. This presented another shift in the Reagan administration’s stance with Iran, from stern to almost apathetic, willing to provide the Iranians with weapons to support other geo-political causes.  

From my week of work I believe I have gathered the larger political trends and stances of the Reagan administration on Iran. It is clear that there were a number of shifts in the administration’s stances on Iran, and that other global issues, such as the spread of communism and fighting the cold war, also greatly limited how much effort and funding Reagan could put towards specifically dealing with Iran. I plan to look at the state of Iran-U.S. relations under George H.W. Bush for my next week of work.

Regards,

Lazar Vukcevic