Political argumentation, and presumably the art of persuasion also, plays a crucial role in the making of foreign policy. As Robert Axelrod has put it, ‘argumentation is a vital part of the policy process when power is shared and when problems are so complex that the participants are not sure that their own initial positions are necessarily the best ones’. What, then, does the Iran case tell us about the capacity of analogies to persuade others? This question really contains two matters of interest rolled into one: how persuasive are analogies in general, and what determines the persuasiveness of a particular analogy? Generally speaking, since analogies play such a powerful role in comprehension, the persuasiveness of arguments might be thought to be heavily influenced – and perhaps even fundamentally rooted – in analogy and metaphor. Since these devices govern the manner in which we learn and the way we understand the world around us, if we can get others to accept our analogies then we have gone a long way towards convincing them that the world is in fact as we see it. So analogizing seems vital both to the persuasion of the self, as well as to persuade others.

We can readily observe the persuasive power of analogical and metaphorical reasoning within political science itself.