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Russia doggedly at Tehran's side
By Stephen Blank
It should
come as no surprise that President Vladimir Putin
refused to curtail Russia's assistance to Iran's nuclear
reactor at his recent summit with President George W
Bush. Indeed, it would have been surprising if he had
agreed to do so. Russia's unwillingness to foreclose on
Iran's nuclear project is what philosophers might call
overdetermined. That is, Russia, which is assisting with
the construction of a light-water nuclear reactor near
Bushehr, derives so many benefits from the Iranian
project that it would be strange for it to forego those
merely to please America.
After all, it is
eminently arguable from a Russian standpoint that Russia
received very little for supporting America after
September 11. Not only did the US and then North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops appear in
Central Asia, Georgia and Azerbaijan invited US forces
to their countries to help them defend against threats,
not the least of which are from Moscow.
These
moves clearly contravened the Russian elite's ingrained
belief in an imperial state where the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) are wayward children who,
unable to govern themselves, will soon return, whether
they want to or not, to the Russian fold. Likewise, NATO
enlarged to the Baltic states, another reminder of the
end of empire. And since then American emissaries
throughout the CIS have more or less overtly used their
influence to retard Russian attempts at reintegrating
those states under its auspices. The US also went ahead
and withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty to
build missile defenses, and to add final insult to
injury, it disregarded Russian offers of assistance in
Iraq in return for guarantees of Iraq's debt payment to
Russia and a share in future oil contracts. Meanwhile,
few contracts with US oil firms have materialized since
2001, despite ongoing negotiations in some cases.
Presently, Washington wants Russian assistance
in Iraq, and while Putin will supposedly support sending
Russian troops there pending an authoritative UN
resolution, one can be sure that there is a larger
payoff, presumably connected to that Iraqi debt and
energy supplies. Therefore, there are few quid pro quos
that Washington can offer Moscow in return for cessation
of its support for Iran, Putin's rhetoric to the
contrary notwithstanding.
To understand this
fact in its full context one must remember that nuclear
and other forms of proliferation are an issue that
brings together domestic and foreign policy issues. Key
domestic lobbies stand to benefit considerably from
aiding Iran. In this case, Russia's Ministry of Atomic
Energy, Minatom, is a prime example. It makes a fortune
from sales abroad, including Iran, and has steadily
refused to even consider not selling nuclear reactors to
Iran and other potentially proliferating states like
India and China. Although not a rogue elephant, as it
may have been in the 1990s, it still remains a
formidable bureaucratic player.
The same may
also be said for Russian weapons producers. The defense
industry is a shadow of what it was under communism, but
on issues of direct relevance to it it has shown
considerable power and ability to get its way, including
major state subsidies for key projects. It, too, has
large and vested interests in arms sales to Iran.
Indeed, it views Iran as being potentially, if not
actually, the third largest foreign market for Russian
arms sales. So it will certainly oppose any Russian
policy that imposes limits on Iran's ability to acquire
Russian weapons and technology.
Thus these two
elite blocs, and many members of the government, have
habitually taken refuge in the endlessly reiterated
their belief that America simply wants to take away a
Russian market for itself, as it supposedly did with
North Korea. Putin, too, has baldly restated this story
and publicly pretended that he has no idea of the extent
of Russian nuclear assistance to Iran. When one
considers that in 1997-98 Russian journalist Evgenia
Albats published a detailed institution-by-institution
account of who was helping Iran and how, it is clear
that Putin's and his acolytes' story is wrong.
But even if key domestic lobbies were silent on
this issue, there are strong foreign and defense policy
reasons for continuing to support Iran. Iran remains the
only true friend of Moscow in the Persian Gulf and
Middle East as well as a state dependent on Russian
diplomatic support and arms transfers. Both of them
share a common determination to keep Washington out of
the Gulf and the CIS. Their leaders have at times talked
in public about the virtues of a bloc with China against
America in support of a "multipolar world". Therefore,
Iran is a major foreign policy investment for Russia's
ministries of foreign affairs and of defense.
Likewise, despite a lot of official rhetoric,
major sections of Russia's foreign policy makers clearly
do not take the threat of proliferation very seriously.
Otherwise they would not have been proliferating to
Iran, Iraq, China, India, and North Korea during the
past decade. As all those cases are pretty well
documented, it is hard to square protestations about the
danger of proliferation with the actual policies
involved.
Finally, despite many pubic fears to
the contrary, Iran has, since 1991, followed an
extremely circumspect policy towards the Caucasus and
Central Asia. It decided when the Soviet Union was
collapsing that it made no sense for it to antagonize
Russia with regard to these areas, which Iran rightly
appreciated would come to be seen as Russian vital
interests, given America's unremitting hostility to it.
Moreover, it clearly calculated correctly that Russia
would be a source of diplomatic support, collaboration
and arms sales to it. Moscow, for its part, had decided
by February, 1992 that Iran, if it did not get arms
sales, could make a lot of trouble for Russia in the
Caucasus and Central Asia, which Moscow did not need.
Thus these sales are a way of paying off Iran
not to make trouble, a bargain that Iran has faithfully
kept and which works very well for Russia. Ending that
bargain gains nothing for Moscow, except American good
will, which it has already clearly discounted.
This analysis also shows that once again
Washington has fallen for one of the oldest mistakes in
relations with Russia, namely the belief that good
personal relations with Russia's leader overrides
anything else in the bilateral equation. While such
relations are vital, they go nowhere if bureaucratic
support and elite support are not forthcoming.
As Nikolai Gvosdev forcefully pointed out in the
Moscow Times, that is precisely the case in US-Russian
relations, neither side's domestic and bureaucratic
elites has any compelling interest in making
presidential agreements a reality, at least as far as
Iran is concerned. Thus Washington cajoles Moscow, which
pretends to listen. And when Moscow shows its true
colors on this issue, nothing much happens, except for
some meaningless sanctions of a few small fry.
Unfortunately, Iran advances ever closer to a
nuclear capability that will constitute a global threat,
given its support for terrorism on a global scale, as in
Argentina and Western Europe. Russian authorities know
what is at stake, but clearly do not care very much. The
hour of decision on Iran is fast approaching, and if
Iran does succeed in going nuclear, Moscow will hardly
be able to escape the ensuing threats to its position in
Central Asia and the Caucasus. But by then it will be
too late for both it and for America, not to mention
other states.
Meanwhile, the experience of the
20th century and of current world politics tells us that
if we really want to prevent someone from going nuclear,
it is necessary either to physically destroy the weapons
by preemptive strike, as Israel did to Iraq in 1981, or
to occupy the country, as the post-1945 history of Japan
and Germany tell us.
Do Moscow and Washington
really want to leave themselves only these options to
prevent a conclusion that they both profess to want? If
so, this is a very strange way to form the strategic
partnership that they both claim to want. On the other
hand, as the summit in Camp David suggests, rhetoric
aside, that there is probably less to this partnership
than meets the eye.
Stephen Blank is
an analyst of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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