Relationship between Religious Attitude and Perceptive Foreign Policy: an Operational Code Analysis of the Characters of Bazargan and Ahmadinejad

Following the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is to be assumed that religious actors come to the top of the pyramid of power. It could be expected that as the beliefs and characters of individuals affect their perceptions, the religious beliefs of the I.R.I's leaders affect their perceptions as well. This article tries to answer the question that how the religious attitude of an individual affect his perception of foreign policy by applying content analysis method, operational code and religious attitude analyses. In other words, is it possible to make meaningful perceptions of politicians in foreign affairs through their religious attitude? To do this, among Iranian political actors, Mahdi Bazargan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were chosen because of their evident differences in terms of perceiving the international system. It was revealed that although both of them were pessimistic to the international system, Ahmadinejad was more pessimistic emphasizing the role of agent rather than structure and organization. The models represented by Bazargan and Ahmadinejad are respectively called "model of national independent man" and " model of placeless God-seeker man". These models provide an appropriate ground to explain why these two characters have different perception of foreign policy.