Iran’s Foreign Policy Beyond the Headlines – Is it Losing the South Caucasus?

Over the past few years, discussions of Iranian foreign policy have focused overwhelmingly on Tehran’s regional proxies, recurring escalation with Israel and the United States, the eventual outbreak of open conflict, and, to a lesser extent, Iran’s deepening relationship with Russia. Far less attention has been paid to another region of considerable strategic importance to Tehran: the South Caucasus. At the same time, debates over Iran’s foreign policy have often revolved around a familiar set of broader questions: how much military capacity does Tehran retain, how resilient is its economy, what remains of its regional network, and how much leverage can it still exercise through the Strait of Hormuz? Yet some of the most consequential changes to Iran’s strategic environment are not primarily security related, and are taking place not in the Persian Gulf or the Levant, but along its northern frontier.

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