JACK GOLDSTONE: “CONTAINING TEHRAN”

SPP Prof. Jack Goldstone

The Washington Post ran a January 20, 2006 story entitled "Containing Tehran" which prominently mentioned Jack A. Goldstone, the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor of Public Policy and an SPP Eminent Scholar. "An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who is an expert on revolutions," wrote Post op-ed columnist David Ignatius, who writes on international affairs and business. "He argued that Iran wasn't conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton's famous study, ‘The Anatomy of Revolution,’ which argued that initial upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. Instead, [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called ‘the return of the radicals.’ Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the Russian and Chinese revolutions—with Stalin's purges in the late 1930s and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict. The gist of Goldstone's analysis gradually percolated up to [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice, [national security adviser Stephen] Hadley, and others."

Goldstone’s work on issues such as social movements, revolutions, and international politics has won him global acclaim and significant research grants. The author or co-author of 9 books, he is a leading authority on regional conflicts and a consultant to the U.S. State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In March and April of this year, he will be presenting papers to the British Ministry of Defence and the Military Center for Strategic Studies in Rome.