Despite rigorous selection criteria and vetting of entrants to politics, Iran’s political landscape is not homogenous but highly factionalized, and marked by ardent struggles for political power where social, political and economic issues are highly contested. Approached through the theory of the sociology of power, where elites constitute actors and ideology constitutes a resource in the elites’ competition for power, this paper contends that ideology serves the political elite to internally enable or disable certain foreign policy actions, exemplified by the nuclear issue. It inquires into how the strategic discursive employment of the official Islamic revolutionary ideology paved the way for negotiations and eventually the nuclear deal, while at the same time facing, as the paper argues, on the one hand dependency on the path that had been established through this very same ideological discourse and, on the other hand, a highly fragmented and factionalized political landscape with diverging opinions on the contested nuclear issue. It is therefore further contended that it is not only material interests that drive competition, but also the control over and appropriation of symbols and meaning. The paper argues that ideology is not a key determinant of foreign policy, but an important power resource, and as such provides the Islamic Republic with continuity and a discursive raison d’être, in upholding the narrative and values of the Revolution, and discursively constructing the Islamic Republic. It also serves as important source for legitimizing and building a coherent narrative around political decisions, including those that otherwise seem to counter the established narrative, such as the engagement with Western nations for the nuclear deal. Interrogating the creation of meaning for political ends, the paper investigates the relationship between domestic circumstances, ideological discourse, and foreign policy action. This is carried out through analyzing and comparing the discursive practices of the Iranian political elite, pertaining to different factions, over the course of Ahmadinejad’s, and Rouhani’s presidencies. The analysis pays special attention to Ayatollah Khamenei as the leader of the official ideological discourse and simultaneously centers on the nuclear issue to place discourse and action into context to understand the specific circumstances that shape ideological discourse and foreign policy at a certain point in time. The analysis is approached through CDA and based on Persian primary material, such as official statements, interviews and pronouncements and adds to larger debates on the instrumentalization of ideology in politics and to studies of political elites.