Imagining Iran

Imagining Iran constructs and assembles American foreign policy through critical security studies discourse analysis and Orientalist descriptions of key actors within the presidential administrations of Lyndon Baines Johnson through Ronald Reagan (1965–1989). This book is essential reading for those who are interested in learning about how foreign policy making is conducted, how theories directly affect the process of foreign policy making, and how the shah and Iran served US interests. It also discusses the larger question of why the US uses autocratic proxies to pursue its nominally human rights and democracy-based goals.

Students of foreign policy, Middle East studies, and critical security studies, as well as Iran experts, can benefit from this historical deep dive on policy making. The internal conversations, diary entries, and previously classified documents and briefings tell the story of how the US imagined Iran, and why that ideational construction proved to be such a dominant and pernicious image for 26 years, the reverberations of which are still felt today in our modern conception of what Iran is and what Iranians can do through the lens of American foreign policy.

Jonathon Whooley is a full-time lecturer at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, where he teaches human rights, strategy and war, American foreign policy, gender, critical security studies, and global politics. His research interests include the historical construction of American foreign policy as related to the Middle East, identity, gender, human rights, and security. Dr. Whooley earned his PhD from the University of Florida in 2015 with a successful dissertation on the securitization and construction of American foreign policy toward Iran from the administrations of Lyndon Baines Johnson through Ronald Reagan. He has also co-authored book chapters with Laura Sjoberg in The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw (2013) and with Mahmood Monshipouri in Human Rights in the Middle East (2011).