Russia's special relationship with Iran
has experienced a sudden jolt that could herald a
sharp deterioration of relations between the two
countries over Tehran's nuclear program.
The current setback may have been
triggered by Iran's unilateral decision to halt
aspects of its self-imposed moratorium on uranium
enrichment-related activities, yet the root causes
run deeper and cover the span of Russian foreign
policy at a time of serious flux in Russia's
strategic environment.
A glance at the
Russian press makes it immediately evident that
Moscow's costs for maintaining
a "business as usual" position with Iran are
becoming intolerably high, forcing President
Vladimir Putin and his foreign policy team to send
strong signals that Iran can no longer count on
traditional Russian support in view of the
"unacceptable policy positions" of Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad regarding Israel,
among other things.
Keen on
cultivating its ties with Israel, Moscow wasted little time
in moving a critical distance from Ahmadinejad in
the months after he came to power, by sending
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Israel in late
October. Lavrov stated unequivocally: "Russia
understands the anxiety of Israel about the
Iranian nuclear program and will not let Iran
obtain weapons of mass destruction."
A
more recent statement by the Russian Foreign
Ministry regarding Iran's resumption of nuclear
research reads: "The moratorium is a substantially
needed measure to settle the questions which still
remain within frameworks of the Iranian nuclear
program."
Putin has said, however, that a
Russian compromise deal with Tehran, which
stipulates that uranium enrichment could be
carried out on Russian territory for Iran, is
still in play.
Nevertheless, the US and
European Union have at least gained Russia's
support in convening a special emergency meeting
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
on February 2, called by the US to discuss Iran's
"non-compliance with its international
obligations", to quote US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice.
The meeting will vote on
whether or not to send Iran's case to the United
Nations Security Council for the possible
implementation of sanctions. The 35-member IAEA
board of governors will decide on Iran through a
majority vote. Unconfirmed reports indicate that
Russia and China will oppose the Security Council
option, but there might still be sufficient
support among other members to follow this route.
High-level talks in London this week
brought together the five permanent members of the
Security Council - the US, Russia, China, France
and Britain - and Germany in an attempt to find
common ground on how to deal with Iran, but they
could not reach any agreement.
Russia's
dilemma All this raises serious questions
about the future of Russia-Iran relations,
recently bolstered by a billion-dollar Russian
arms sale to Iran, not to mention the official
Russian pronouncements regarding the sale of five
to seven nuclear power reactors to Iran in
addition to the US$840 million reactor nearing
completion at Bushehr. The latter was due to be
completed five years ago and Russia is supposed to
implement its agreement to supply nuclear fuel to
Iran during the first half of 2006. But in light
of the negative repercussions over Iran's latest
nuclear moves, there is growing concern inside
Iran that Russia may not keep to its obligations.
Any setback in Russia-Iran relations would
impact on these lucrative commercial contracts,
affecting both Russia's nuclear enterprises and
its sprawling military-industrial complex.
The
latter's movers and shakers have been wary
of any undue Russian appeasement of Washington
over Iran, which they considered an important
neighbor and regional power with influence
in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and the
Muslim world, including Russia's own Muslim
minority.
They successfully lobbied Putin
to set aside a 1995 US-Russia agreement for a
five-year moratorium on arms sales to Iran and
limiting Russia's nuclear cooperation to the
completion of Unit 1 of Bushehr power plant and
the supply of related fuel and training.
During the Mohammed Khatami presidential
era, there was a substantial convergence in
strategic perceptions and regional risk management
between Moscow and Tehran, driven by increased
cooperation and objective trans-regional factors.
Iran's small cadre of strategic analysts
were almost uniformly hopeful about the future of
Russia-Iran strategic cooperation in the new, post
September 11, 2001, geostrategic context. One of
them, Iran's special envoy on the Caspian Sea,
Mehdi Safari, was also in charge of the Office of
Commonwealth of Independent States at Iran's
Foreign Ministry, with a unique rapport with his
Russian counterparts. He was recently replaced by
another diplomat, hardly a timely move by Iran's
new president, who is still on the foreign-policy
learning curve.
Yet, irrespective of
Ahmadinejad's missteps, a legitimate question is
whether the Iranian decision to resume scientific
research on the enrichment process calls for such
dire reactions. It is worth noting the admission
of many nuclear experts, including Mike Levi of
King's College of London, that "it is impossible
to enrich uranium to weapons grade in bomb
quantities using the pilot facilities that the
Iranians have".
This aside, Putin must now
weigh very seriously the short and long-term
damage to Russia's national interests, both
economic and geopolitical, if he opts for a major
shift in Russia's Iran policy, signaling new
US-Russian cooperation vis-a-vis the perceived
threat of Iran's nuclear program.
Putin
and his subordinates have repeatedly gone on
record stating that Russia's nuclear cooperation
with Iran is fully within the international
obligations of Russia, and that there is no
evidence of Iran's diversion to military purposes.
That accent on Iran's peaceful nuclear program has
now changed to a tone of concern increasingly
echoing the sentiments of the US and the EU.
In one sense, this is hardly surprising in
light of the evolving Western orientation of
Putin's foreign policy, harking back to his
acquiescence to President George W Bush's "war on
terror". This despite misgivings about
Washington's unilateralism and misuse and abuse of
the anti-terror campaign.
With his eyes
set on Russia's economic modernization through
such measures as the alleviation of Russia's
foreign debt by the West and increasing Russia's
trade relations with its main economic partner,
the EU, Putin now has the added ideological
antipathy to Iran's new radicalism under
Ahmadinejad to steer Russian foreign policy more
organically in step with Europe and, to a lesser
extent, the US.
However, what might work
on a short-term basis may not endure in the long
term, and Putin must also reckon with the negative
implications of a policy shift on Iran that could
harm economic interests and shrink Russia's Middle
East influence without the benefit of equal
incentives offered by the West.
The
latter's "carrots", such as the US storage of
spent fuel, North Atlantic Treaty Organization
enlargement, and advanced nuclear reactors, may in
the end prove not to be carrots at all, ie, they
could come about regardless of a Moscow u-turn on
Iran, considering the growing role of Russia as a
premier world energy provider.
Not only
that; Iran could well retaliate by trying to
intensify its current energy efforts by
supplanting Russia as Ukraine's or Armenia's main
gas supplier, in light of the recent Russian gas
cut-off to Ukraine and complaints of
"uneconomical" gas to Armenia.
And then
there is the issue of China, which in the early
1990s canceled its deal with Iran for the sale of
two nuclear reactors as part of a mini-bargain
with the US, and which might well replace Russia
as Iran's main nuclear partner. China is already
Iran's main energy partner, having signed huge gas
and oil deals with Tehran.
Geopolitically,
the cost to Russia for its imminent policy drift
away from Iran may turn out to be immense, given
Russia's continued desire to utilize Iran as a
regional counterweight to the American leviathan,
whose encroaching power, if unchecked, is bound to
reverberate within the Russian federation sooner
or later.
Despite recent US
assurances about their benign intentions in
Central Asia and the Caspian basin, Russia
continues to be worried about the national
security threats posed by America's military
expansionism. And the Iran nuclear issue has the
potential to actually add to these worries by
reducing the Iranian deterrence that operates in
tandem with the Russian deterrence - which is
precisely why Iran has been allowed to participate
as an observer in the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization.
This brings one to a
consideration of the Russian proposal for a joint
Iranian-Russian company to fabricate nuclear fuel
on Russian territory. After giving "serious
consideration" to this proposal, the Iranians have
rejected it on the principle that they have the
right to enrich uranium to reactor grade on their
own soil. How far should Moscow insist on its
proposal, backed by Washington, and should it be
the cause for serious Russian disenchantment with
Tehran?
The answers, logically speaking,
are negative. Russia admitted it threw in that
proposal as a "compromise" to alleviate
international concerns over Iran's nuclear program
and, in hindsight, it would be a major policy
error on Moscow's part to turn it into a litmus
test for future Iran-Russia cooperation. To do so,
ie, to reduce or even reverse its nuclear
cooperation with Iran would be tantamount to a
major discontinuity in Russia's Iran policy,
hardly called for by the present circumstances.
Instead, a prudent next step by Russia
could be the formation of the above-mentioned
joint company to process uranium inside Iran,
under full IAEA inspection, which in turn gives
the international community a high degree of
confidence that the low- to medium-enriched
uranium is for purely peaceful purposes.
Indeed, as long as there is no "smoking
gun" confirming the West's suspicion of Iran's
"nuclear ambitions" and Iran continues to
implement the IAEA's Additional Protocol with
regard to inspections, Russia would be hard
pressed to justify any profound shift of policy
toward Iran, irrespective of the vitriolic
announcements of Iran's president on Israel.
Russian foreign-policy experts routinely
visiting Iran and speaking at Iran's think tanks
have uniformly praised Iran's stabilizing role in
the region, including its peace roles in Chechnya,
the Nagorno Karabakh dispute between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan.
And the
foreign policy elite of Russia is much more in
tune with the outward image of Iran as a status
quo power than is the case with either the US or
Europe. In other words, the present stigmatization
of Iran, caused by Tehran's political rhetoric
rather than actual policy, is taken with a pinch
of salt by the Russian elite.
Yet this
elite, headed by Putin, could redesign its Iran
policy, and one wonders if they have indeed
thought through the short- and long-term
consequences.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu.
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