The Relationship between Foreign Policy and National Development: A Case Study of Iran and Turkey

Foreign policy as a collection of a country's approaches to interacting with the international environment has always had a tremendous impact on the national development of countries. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey, as two regional powers that have great common potentials, have always gone through a unique foreign policy trend to date. This trend has led to differences in the priority given to the development of certain types of power according to the amount of resources and the level of threats for the two countries. In view of the above, the present article seeks to answer the question that to what extent the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey have affected their national development comparatively? The hypothesis considered in this article states that to date, Turkey has benefited far more from its development-oriented foreign policy capacity than the Islamic Republic of Iran. The general method in this paper is descriptive-analytical, and the data collection method is based on the study of library and statistical data. Finally, while confirming the initial hypothesis, the results of the research state that the foreign policy approaches of the two countries have given them different positions, and in the meantime, Turkey has faced far fewer challenges in balanced national development than the Islamic Republic of Iran.