Beyond Orientalism: The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Strategic Preferences Regarding Nuclear Weapons

When studying the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation, Iran is often presented as a rogue state driven by a volatile Islamic belief system. Such accounts present Iran as perpetually seeking nuclear weapons due to its foreign and defense policy, which is conceived by irrational Muslim clerics. This article deconstructs such consistent Orientalist discourses across Western academia, think-tanks, lobbying, and governments concerning the rogue and irrational pursuit of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Departing from them, the article moves to peruse a range of views held by some prominent Iranian clerics about nuclear weapons and demonstrates the rationales that bring Iran's clerics to socially construct external threats, dangers, and other strategic concerns from within the Islamic Republic. In doing so, a new framework for understanding Iran's strategic preferences—unbridled by the limitations of Orientalist discourse, as well as the biases of secular and state-based realist thinking—is offered.