The fourth chapter gives a succinct historical description of the secular nationalist ideologies in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel and compares the secular political movements in these countries as they have different regime types and political cultures. The chapter also provides brief biographical accounts of the three top executive leaders from each country: Bashar al-Assad, Saad al-Hariri, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors also present and compare the operational code results of the leaders and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from secular nationalist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics and for the international relations discipline.

Chapter five focuses on the leadership of armed nonstate actors in the MENA, with an emphasis on the foreign policy conceptualizations of leaders. The chapter starts by accounting for the genesis of ANSAs in the region, and their emergence and increasing significance for MENA politics is stressed. The authors also give the psycho-biographies of the top executive leaders of ANSAs: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS, Abdullah Öcalan of PKK, Salih Muslim of PYD, and Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. Lastly, the chapter discusses the operational code results of the studied ANSA leaders and elaborates on their implications for MENA and world politics. The discussion focuses on what kind of leadership ANSAs produce and what it means for states that are trying to contain or negotiate with them. The chapter also addresses the question of what these results mean in terms of FPA’s actor-specific approach as opposed to IR theories’ actor-general explanations of world politics

In Chapter 7, the authors home in on the policy implications and avenues for future research, which build upon the empirical and theoretical findings that are explicated in Chapters 3–6. The discussion herein revolves around the following questions: What do the empirical operational code results mean for the day-to-day conduct of the politics of the MENA region? How do these at-a-distance leadership analysis findings and inferences help us to make sense of MENA’s international relations today? How does the actor-specific analysis in this book cue regional and international policymakers on understanding and engaging with certain political leaders in the MENA region? This chapter addresses these questions through utilizing a case study approach. These four salient cases are: 1) Iran’s nuclear program and the diplomatic crisis with the United States (2010–2022); 2) the Egyptian crisis in the wake of the Arab uprisings (2011–2014); 3) the Syrian civil war (2011–2022); and 4) the rise and fall of the Islamic State and its top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Iraq and Syria (2013–2019). This chapter briefly introduces these cases and discusses how individual-level leadership analyses can be used to make sense of these crises.

Chapter 6 focuses on the theoretical conclusions of the book. The chapter discusses the utility of operational code analysis in explaining individual-level foreign policy decisions, and how different competing ideologies translate into different foreign policy tendencies mediated by individual MENA leaders. The comparative analysis of individual leaders’ operational codes is broken down into in-group, out-group, regional, and world leadership norming-sample comparisons. A specific reference to the usefulness of FPA as a subfield of IR literature is made and ideas for future research are discussed. The chapter synthesizes insights drawn from the analyses and case studies, followed by an expanded discussion of the implications of this research for policy-oriented studies.

The first chapter introduces the background and current developments in the MENA region in the past decade and MENA’s current transformation to an ongoing clash of competing blocs of Sunni and Shia political Islamists, secularists, and ANSAs leaderships. The chapter briefly discusses the four prominent ideological categories in the MENA region and their implications for foreign policymaking. Next, the authors elaborate on the methodological approach of the book, introduce the operational code analysis, and discuss classical examples as well as more recent works of the opcode literature. Contributions of the operational code approach and where exactly this study fits in the literature are at the heart of this chapter.

In the third chapter, the authors discuss the origins and evolution of the Shia political Islam with a focus on the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Ayatollahs’ revolutionary vision which aimed to export the Iranian political-religious model to other countries. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of influential Shia leaders: Ali Khamenei, Hassan Rouhani, Ali al-Sistani, and Nouri al-Maliki. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from Shia political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for the MENA politics and consider the implications of this analysis for Iran’s relations with the United States, the EU, and regional powers; Iraq’s foreign relations; and the future of Iraq as a viable power in regional politics. The authors conclude by discussing what these results mean for foreign policy decision-making and the international relations discipline.

The second chapter provides a brief description of the Sunni political Islam as an ideology with a focus on its historical provenances of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its diffusion to the broader MENA region. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders: Mohamed Morsi, Rashid Ghannouchi, and Khaled Mashal. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from the Sunni political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics. The chapter concludes that despite the conventional portrayal of Muslim Brotherhood leadership, these leaders resort to negotiation and cooperation to settle their differences, hence the best way to approach them is to engage in a Rousseauvian assurance game that emphasizes international social cooperation.