The Geoeconomics of French Foreign Policy in the Context of West Asian Geopolitical Rivalry and its Implication for Franco-Iranian Relationship.

Subject Areas : International Relations

Ali Sabbaghian ¹ , Mohsen JALALI ²

1 - Department of Regional Studies Faculty of Law and Political Science University of Tehran
2 - کاندیدای دکتری مطالعات اروپا، دانشکده حقوق و علوم سیاسی دانشگاه تهران

Received: 2020-04-26 Accepted : 2021-06-07 Published : 2021-05-22

Keywords: Foreign policy, Geopolitics, Geo-economics, West Asia, Franco-Iranian relations,

Abstract :

As IR scholars have long recognized, the alignment with foreign actors has been particularly relevant for regional balance in the West Asian power relations and in the same way, France is among the powers that has always been taken into consideration in the West Asian extra-regional alliance strategies. Besides that, over the past two decades, economic leverages has gained momentum in IR including in cross-regional Geostrategic alignments and are employed as an important foreign policy tool. So the main question of this article is how the Geo-economics have shaped French foreign policy within the context of West Asian geopolitical rivalry and what have been the consequences for Iran? Supposing that the region's vast commercial, financial and arms market have been evolved into Geo-economic leverages, ready to influence the foreign policy behavior of major trans-regional powers, this paper examines the use of these leverages in the context of Saudi-Iranian cold war and demonstrates that how this trend has paved the way for Franco-Iranian foreign policy confrontation on multiple regional issues.Current studies suggest that, in addition to the bipolar atmosphere surged from Saudi- Iranian conflicts, the Spillover of the region's crises into Europe and the US “Pivot to Asia” strategy, among others, are major contextual components determining France interventions in West Asia. The results of this study indicate that the aggregation of economic levers in the camp of Iran's regional rivals has conferred certain competitive geopolitical advantages and has affected French foreign policy options while adding to the fragility of Franco-Iranian relations.