Iran Calling Wider World to Its Side

Tehran Looks Beyond Muslim Nations as It Faces Off With West

TEHRAN -- On the afternoon of Jan. 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached for the phone and got Latin America on the line. In quick succession, he chatted with President Fidel Castro of Cuba, rang up President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and, sensing yet another kindred spirit, reached out to Evo Morales, the young firebrand who had just been elected president of Bolivia.

Person-to-person and peer-to-peer, the transatlantic calls described on Ahmadinejad's presidential Web site linked self-styled populists who glory in defying the West. But for Iran, the exchanges carried significance reaching well beyond Ahmadinejad and the controversy enveloping him personally after questioning the Holocaust and saying Israel should be "wiped off the map."

In its bid to proceed with a nuclear program opposed by Washington and Western Europe, Iran's leadership appears settled on a revived policy of confrontation with "global arrogance," as the country's rulers have referred to the foreign policy of United States for almost three decades. But the contest is now being framed as a David-vs.-Goliath battle, and Iran is seeking to attract relatively poor, disempowered nonaligned nations to its side, not simply the Muslim world it once saw itself as leading, Iranian officials and analysts say.

"With our knowledge of the present world, we can use the power of weakness. The weak people also have power," said Emad Afrough, an Iranian lawmaker. "We can have more political bargaining power, and instead of just us confronting the dominant powers, the world can confront them."

The strategy came into sharper focus last week with the announcement that the speaker of Iran's parliament would travel to Cuba and Venezuela next month. The itinerary carried particular weight because, in the indirect way of politics here, it implied the endorsement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the unelected cleric who holds ultimate power in Iran.

Khamenei is the parliamentary leader's father- in-law and holds the formal title of supreme leader of the revolution. He has final say over Iran's nuclear strategy and approved -- grudgingly, diplomats say -- the bargain with Europe that froze Iran's nuclear program in 2003 when its existence came to light after 18 years of secrecy. And he authorized the reactivation of the same program last month, when Iran took the seals off equipment at its main uranium enrichment plant, which led the United States and other foreign powers to decide this week to haul Iran before the U.N. Security Council.

Khamenei prefers to remain in the background, however, leaving nuclear diplomacy to the mild-mannered loyalist he named head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani.

"Larijani is very much in charge of major defense and foreign policy questions," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a political scientist at Tehran University. "He is the one who would represent the consensus of various factions more than Ahmadinejad."

Yet Ahmadinejad has come to embody Iran's new defiance, attracting international attention -- and, from the West, opprobrium -- out of proportion to the powers of the office he assumed in August. Under the theocratic constitution written after the popular revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the powers of the executive were so tightly limited that Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, argued that the typical Iranian citizen had more power than the president.

What the president does have is a bully pulpit. Khatami used his eight years in office to nudge Iran out of isolation, encouraging a "dialogue between civilizations" aimed at rapprochement with Europe and even Washington, which severed diplomatic relations in 1980.

But the approach was viewed as largely futile, especially after President Bush lumped Iran with North Korea and Iraq in an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address. The speech strengthened Iranian hard-liners who argued that the country must define itself in opposition to the United States.

"Especially after Iran was branded in the axis of evil, these guys turned to the leader and said, 'What has Khatami gotten us?' " said an Iranian political analyst who asked not to be named because his employer had not authorized public comment.