Ray Takeyh

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on Iran, the Persian Gulf, and US policy in the region. He is one of the most prominent hawkish voices among mainstream American Iran analysts.

In 2009, Takeyh served as a senior adviser on Iran in the State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the early Obama administration. His tenure coincided with initial US attempts at diplomatic outreach toward Iran and the eruption of the Green Movement protests following the disputed presidential election. He later became publicly critical of the Obama administration's Iran policy, arguing that the nuclear negotiations and the JCPOA insufficiently addressed Iran's regional behaviour and ballistic missile programme.

Takeyh's major scholarly works include Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (2009), which examined Iran's foreign policy doctrine since 1979, and The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (2021), which offered a revisionist account of the 1979 Revolution that emphasised Mohammad Reza Shah's own political failures and agency. An earlier work, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (2006), analysed the internal factional dynamics of the Islamic Republic.

Takeyh is known for arguing that the Islamic Republic is primarily a revolutionary state driven by ideology rather than strategic calculation — a position that leads him to advocate for more confrontational US policies toward Iran, including tougher sanctions and support for opposition movements.