Chapter 10 Iran’s Foreign Diplomacy During the COVID-19 Pandemic Amir Mohammad Haji-Yousefi 10.1 Introduction Despite doubts about its ideological agenda, the Islamic Republic of Iran has adopted a realistic paradigm in its foreign policy in maintaining national security. In its tradi- tional sense, national security mainly encompasses the persistence of the political system and geographical borders; however in its modern implications, as human security, it also includes population survival. In other words, the main goals of a country’s foreign policy should be the survival of the state and society. In the geopo- litical competition arena, which is the traditional agenda of any foreign policy, Iran has been facing serious security threats in West Asia. Perhaps the most important rivalry is between Iran and Saudi Arabia over regional supremacy, but Iran’s regional threats can be traced back to its hostile relations with Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and with the United States and Israel, on the other. The outbreak of COVID-19 and its global spread since the beginning of 2020 has forced Iran’s security agenda to focus, in addition to traditional geopolitical rivalries, on a new security threat that has directly targeted the lives of its citizens. Accordingly, Iran’s foreign policymakers inevitably had to take measures in order to achieve national security in the new context. This study seeks to examine Iran’s foreign diplomacy after the COVID-19 outbreak, particularly since March 2020, when the first symptoms of it appeared in Iran. The question is, what steps has Iran taken to achieve its national security, i.e., the survival of its people? In other words, what are Iran’s diplomatic measures to protect its people against the Coronavirus and how are they evaluated? This study’s main claim is that Iran predominantly used “naming and shaming” diplomacy to show international sanctions, which were inhumane, more inhumane A. M. Haji-Yousefi (B ) Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran e-mail: am-yousefi@sbu.ac.ir © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 M. Rahmandoust and S.-O. Ranaei-Siadat (eds.), COVID-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3108-5_10 253