Shahram Chubin

After describing the various formal organs and rules of government in Iran, this short study suggests that Iranian governance is best understood as an informal balance of contending forces under the aegis of a powerful, "but not omnipotent," supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Four years after the Iranian Revolution, three years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Carter Doctrine, the Persian Gulf is no longer so much in the news. Many dire predictions were made in the wake of the double crisis of 1979. Some, looking at the collapse of the local security system and the vulnerability of the West's oil supplies to interference, saw in the Soviet military action an imminent military threat to the Gulf and a pattern for future Soviet involvement in this region. Many also doubted that the regime in Iran would last and foresaw a growing Soviet influence in its revolutionary politics.