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Left, right: Iran
and Venezuela in lockstep
By M K Bhadrakumar
Among the world
leaders felicitating Iran's president-elect,
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, one head of state
conspicuously set aside protocol norms - President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Though Ahmadinejad will
only be formally sworn in on August 4 - and a
congratulatory message through diplomatic channels
at this stage was all that was required - Chavez
telephoned Ahmadinejad.
Chavez was being
deliberate in making an extraordinary gesture of
warmth and camaraderie. He wished to personally
convey to Ahmadinejad that the latter's election
had enhanced the "legitimacy" of Iran
internationally, a country that Venezuela would
regard as a "friend and brotherly nation" on the
world stage. He said he would depute a high-level
delegation from Caracas to visit Tehran specially
to be present at Ahmadinejad's swearing-in
ceremony, and that he would visit Tehran in the
near future, aiming at a "comprehensive expansion"
of cooperation between the two countries.
By the conventional labeling of dogmas and
ideology, with Ahmadinejad's election, Iran is
supposed to have taken a turn to the "right",
turning its back on "reform-minded" forces - only
to be empathized by one of the few genuinely
"leftist" statesmen remaining on the world stage.
Nothing would appear more incongruous.
But
Chavez knew he was doing the right thing at the
right time. In a way, he was carrying forward the
impulses of the recent summit meeting of Arab
countries and the countries of the Latin
hemisphere, an extraordinary event in itself,
hosted by Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da
Silva, another prominent figure in "progressive"
Latin politics. (Asia is yet to have a comparable
forum with the Middle East.) Chavez's gesture was
full of political symbolism, drawing attention to
the close similarities in the aspirations of
countries like Iran and Venezuela in the world
order.
There are interesting parallels
between the Iranian and Venezuelan situations.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela quite fits into the
political vocabulary of a bygone era - in terms of
the politics of "right" and "left". The fact
remains, to begin with, that the progressive
politics that Chavez embodies do not pass the test
of militant secularism. Their roots lie in the
Latin Catholic Church. Where Che Guevara and a
host of other leftist revolutionaries had failed,
the Latin Church kept the flame of "liberation"
going till the advent of democracy in the
hemisphere. Like in Latin American countries,
Iran, too, has had its fair share of political
movements based on Marxist and non-Marxist
socialism. Yet, in both contexts, the "pious poor"
chose to follow the mosque or the church. This
does not make the revolutions in Iran or Venezuela
any less democratic.
Chavez made an
important point. He chose to overlook the outward
form of the Iranian people's democratic way of
life. He wouldn't be prescriptive that countries
like Iran (or India, for that matter, after almost
six decades of independence) should conform to
Western-style democracy, or be critical that the
performance of their democratic institutions does
not measure up. What mattered to him was that
these were defining moments in the 21st century
world order.
As a follower of Simon
Bolivar, the 19th-century liberator of South
America from Spanish rule, Chavez is attracted to
the platform on which Ahmadinejad has been
elected. We may dismiss both figures as
"populists". There is indeed no certainty that
either of them will succeed. Indeed, the odds are
stacked against them in many ways. But what brings
them together is that their respective platforms,
despite their apparent mutual ideological
divergence, in fact have a curious affinity.
Both leaders have pledged themselves to
consummate a social revolution based on a model of
development that is at great variance with
mainstream market democracy. They are advocates of
a "new socialism" aimed at responding in their own
way to the imperatives arising from their
countries' acute underdevelopment and social
divisions. The programs of both reflect eclectic
tendencies - both are ardent nationalists on the
one hand, while being "continentalists" at the
same time. Both have pledged to take recourse to
selective state intervention in the economy, while
being tolerant of the private, independent
business sector ("bazaari" interests). In
political terms, both emphasize their concern for
the welfare of the "pious poor"; and, both play on
intense nationalism, invoking patience and
sacrifice for reconciling interest groups. Both
intend to mobilize the people by penetrating
society through their respective variants of
"revolutionary" parties.
Lubricating
relationships
Oil is the trump card for
both Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Chavez is an
unabashed admirer of the slogan "oil belongs to
the people" - a clarion call first sounded by
Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1951. Depletion of
developed oil fields; lack of investment in
developing new ones; the criticality of oil
revenues for the national economy; diversion of
oil revenues to social programs and social
empowerment; the political need of aggressive
diversification of the market for oil exports,
away from the traditional dependence on the US;
the search for cooperative regional energy grids -
in all these respects Venezuela and Iran have
similar orientations.
What binds Chavez
and Ahmadinejad particularly close in the
present-day world is the American policy of
"containment" toward them. For President George W
Bush, Iran belongs to the "axis of evil"; for
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Chavez
regime is a "negative influence" on the entire
Western hemisphere. Both these "Bolivarists" -
Chavez and Ahmadinejad - can be expected to pose a
grave challenge to American hegemony by offering
an alternative model to any US-driven market
democracy in their regions. Their vision of a "new
socialist society" with primacy on eliminating
poverty and subordinating private (or
transnational) business to broader social
objectives puts them on a collision course with
the US. Their audacious counter-agenda to the
dominant tendency of "reforms" in developing
countries (conformity with the demands of
globalization), becomes particularly disconcerting
for Washington since it comes at a time when the
US's traditional hegemony in the two strategically
important regions - South America and Middle East
- is becoming increasingly shaky.
South
America's transition from authoritarian rule to
democracy is more or less nearing completion. In
the Middle East the stirrings of transition are
just beginning. But in South America, the
democracies are already moving away from the
traditional US dominance of the Western
hemisphere. Soon after taking office in 2000, Bush
announced a new era in US-Latin relations. The new
era began with Bush holding a summit meeting with
Mexican President Vicente Fox as his first
engagement with a foreign dignitary.
But
South America has since refused to support the
"war on terror" or the invasion of Iraq; it has
become lukewarm about entering into free-trade
deals with the US; the Organization of American
States (OAS) rebuffed Washington twice in recent
months. The OAS turned down for the first time in
over five decades since its inception a US-backed
candidate for the post of OAS secretary general.
And secondly, the OAS refused to endorse a US
proposal at the OAS general assembly meeting in
Florida on June 7 that the "OAS has to have a
valid instrument to help the countries of America
whose democracies are in peril" (as Rice put it),
and that it was not enough that governments were
democratically elected, they must also govern in a
democratic manner. For Washington, the "Chavez
problem" or the "Cuban-Venezuelan axis" is
becoming more and more an "urgent necessity" (to
quote US State Department officials) to deal with.
Meanwhile, the countries of South America are
becoming votaries of a multipolar world order.
What would happen if, once the genie of
democracy got out of the bottle, the Middle East,
too, were to take to the path of the "Bolivarian"
vision? The fact remains that the confrontation
between Iran and the US is also a test of their
relative influence in the region. For a variety of
reasons, Iran's neighboring countries in the Gulf
and the Middle East (or Turkey for that matter)
would not play ball any more if the US were to
raise the specter of a "threat perception"
emanating from the "theocracy" in Tehran. On the
nuclear issue, none of the Gulf countries has
chosen to identify with the US campaign against
Iran over its nuclear development program. In
comparison, in the early 1990s, the US could
easily raise dust in the region over Iran's
routine arms purchases to replace its depleted
stocks.
The call that Chavez put through,
across many thousand leagues and several time
zones, to Tehran was a stark reminder that the
US's quarrel with Iran began 50 years ago with
Mossadeq's rise to power in 1950, and the
"Bolivarian" challenge that he posed. For
Washington, what a successful Iran means to the
geopolitics of the Gulf and the Middle East is a
profound issue. After all, it took hardly any time
for South America, a region utterly used to
Washington's bullying, to start to rebel.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former
Indian career diplomat who has served in
Islamabad, Kabul, Tashkent and Moscow.
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