Mahmood Monshipouri's "In the Shadow of Mistrust"

Mahmood Monshipouri is Professor and Chair of International Relations at San Francisco State University; he also teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include the edited volume Inside the Islamic Republic: Social Change in Post-Khomeini Iran.

Monshipouri applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, In the Shadow of Mistrust: The Geopolitics and Diplomacy of US-Iran Relations, and reported the following:

Yes, the book’s page 99 has an appropriate title for this book’s central gist. Iran has continuously navigated between ideological and geopolitical spheres. The following quotation from page 99 is appropriate:

The 1980s saw the formation of an elite revolutionary military force. Iraq’s invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, not only failed to dissuade the Iranians from pursuing their revolutionary goals but also led them to double down on these efforts. Ironically, it was in the midst of that war that the Iranian revolutionaries came up with the idea of forming the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and tasking it with “liberating” Palestine and exporting the revolution beyond Iran’s borders.

Although page 99 is one of the book’s most relevant pages, signifying to some extent the essence of the book, other pages, such as 189 and 247, also best reflect the book’s main thrust.

The test works somewhat (not entirely) accurately for the book’s central theme. But focusing largely on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and its support of proxies in the region (such as Hezbollah) might not provide the most accurate picture of Iran’s foreign policy toward such regions as the South Caucasus or the so-called “Look to the East” foreign policy that relates to Iran’s long-term investment in its relations with China.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Mistrust at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue