İRAN İSLAM CUMHURİYETİ'NİN ORTADOĞU'DAKİ DIŞ POLİTİKASINDA VEKİL GRUPLARIN ROLÜ

The main source of resorting to proxy groups and proxy warsin the international arena is the competition betweensuperpowers during the Cold War. With the end of the bipolarsystem, major actors in West Asia have increasingly preferredto use proxy groups rather than direct military conflict. Thisapproach aimed to avoid the serious material and moral damage that direct and face-to-face wars could bring, and ledrival powers to adopt proxy wars as a tool to advance theirgoals. Many Western experts, especially American analysts, havediscussed Iran's foreign policy from the perspective of offensive realism. According to this perspective, Iran is tryingto maximize its power in line with its aim of regionalhegemony and shapes its foreign policy in a very sectarian andaggressive manner. However, some analysts argue that Iran'sforeign policy is actually aimed at eliminating security anddefense threats. In this context, examining the goals that theIslamic Republic of Iran aims to achieve through proxy warsin the region constitutes the main focus of this study. Themain question of the research is what is Iran's purpose in proxy wars in the Middle East and what part of these proxygroups are Iran's foreign policy strategy. The hypothesis of the study is that Iran's controversial foreignpolicy of proxy wars aims to expand its influence in theregion, become a hegemonic power, ensure security andprevent threats. For this reason, this thesis is based on Neorealism, which divides its theoretical framework into twomain branches: attack and defense. The descriptive-analyticalresearch method was adopted as the methodology in the study, and existing literature and digital resources were used as data collection tools.