Iran: Russia, China drift
toward US By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has
warned that the current US-led push for United
Nations sanctions against Iran could turn out to
be a "pretext for war", and yet both Russia and
China, long thought to be opponents of any
sanctions, are now inching toward the US strategy
with regard to Iran.
It is China that has
taken the lead, by putting its weight behind the
yet-to-be-submitted set of European "conditional
incentives" for Iran to give up its
uranium-enrichment program, which has had the
effect of forcing Moscow to follow suit.
There is, after all, a diplomatic minuet
involved here, with Beijing and Moscow carefully
crafting every step according to the ebbs
and
flows of a fluid crisis that features multiple
players with distinct, shared, parallel and
opposing interests.
The news of China's
slow accommodation with the US-EU plan was broken
by US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in
his May 10 congressional testimony. He assured
members that China "has agreed in principle" to
play along. This was followed by a similar report
by the Los Angeles Times that Tang Jiaxuan, a
leading member of the Chinese Communist Party's
Central Committee, has called for an Iranian
moratorium on all enrichment-related activities.
As expected, this has had the desired
effect, from the US point of view, of mollifying
Russia, which has been seething at the recent US
criticisms of its human-rights and energy
policies. Thus at a press conference with his
Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, Lavrov echoed
China's backing of the European Union proposal by
stating, "We will suggest this approach and will
expect Iran to respond to it in a constructive
way. We are firmly convinced that this is the only
way to settle the situation."
The
pertinent question, of course, is what will Moscow
and Beijing do once the EU proposal is formally
submitted and rejected by Iran, in light of
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's preemptive "don't
give a damn" reaction? Are they willing to set
aside their opposition to UN sanctions? Another
question is: How far are China and Russia willing
to go to sacrifice their relations with Iran in
order to maintain healthy relations with the
United States?
The latter question touches
on, among other things, the future of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization. Unfortunately, contrary
to the earlier official announcements,
particularly by China's officials, the SCO is now
on the verge of changing its mind about expanding
its membership and accepting Iran, as well as
Pakistan and India, as new members.
"There
are no plans to fundamentally enlarge the SCO. I
don't think the number of SCO members will greatly
increase in the foreseeable future," Lavrov said
at a press conference on Tuesday, exactly one
month prior to the SCO summit in Shanghai, in
reaction to the news that the US government has
asked Russia for "explanation" about the news that
Ahmadinejad plans to attend the June summit.
In turn, the Iranian press has reacted
negatively to Russia's turnabout on Iran's
membership in the SCO and has questioned the
wisdom of Ahmadinejad's participation in the
absence of full membership. Iran has only been
given observer status so far. Without doubt,
should Moscow keep firm on its present line
against Iran's inclusion in SCO, this will be
interpreted as a major diplomatic setback for Iran
and will negatively influence the course of
Iran-Russian relations.
Interestingly,
precisely at a time when the Russian and Chinese
foreign ministers were holding a joint press
conference and implicitly, if not explicitly,
criticizing Iran's defiant stance, their
respective ambassadors in Tehran were meeting with
the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki,
praising Iran's diplomacy and willingness to
engage in dialogue with the US on the nuclear
issue. Both Russia and China have a history of
making deals over Iran with Washington, and
naturally one wonders whether we are now
witnessing another sad spectacle of trading
principles for quid pro quos from Uncle Sam by
both countries.
EU's old proposal sold
as new Whereas a top US official has
admitted that the EU's "new" package is actually a
"dusting off" of the pre-existing proposals "on
the table", the Western media have uniformly
praised the "new European package of incentives",
including the offer of a modern light-water
reactor.
In fact, while the final package
has yet to be unveiled, and there are reports of
serious US misgivings about any EU pledge of
nuclear assistance to Iran, awaiting the verdict
of the upcoming London meeting of the Permanent
Five plus Germany, it is worth remembering that in
November 2004, the EU-3 (Germany, France and
Britain) signed an agreement in Paris with Iran
that called for "cooperation" on "nuclear issues".
The Paris Agreement is dead, long live the
Paris Agreement. It stated: "The E3/EU recognize
Iran's rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty
exercised in conformity with its obligations under
the treaty, without discrimination." The agreement
called for Iran's suspension of its
enrichment-related activities on a temporary
basis. There is in fact no ambiguity about this
aspect of the document that reads: "The E3/EU
recognize that this suspension is a voluntary
confidence-building measure and not a legal
obligation."
By all indications, Iran
faithfully implemented the terms of the Paris
Agreement until January, when it resumed
enrichment activities after the EU-3/EU's radical
departure from their own agreement by calling for
a permanent suspension, after the United States'
blunt criticisms of the Paris Agreement. Turning
history upside down, Western media pundits have
now manufactured a consent about Iran's
blameworthy behavior breaking the Paris Agreement,
when in reality it was the surrogate Europe that
caved in to US pressure and disrespected its own
pledge to Iran - to respect Iran's nuclear rights
"without discrimination".
Consequently,
the EU is about to hurl an old package under new
wraps, deemed as "generous" by the German
negotiator, Michael Schaffer, in his recent
communication to this author, without an iota of
guilty conscience or moral qualm about its own
pattern of misbehavior toward Iran. The irony that
the EU has turned a complete blind eye to Brazil's
simultaneous declaration of an ambitious new plan
to accelerate its nuclear-fuel program, simply
because the world "trusts Brazil" (but don't tell
that to Brazil's neighbors!), has simply escaped
the attention of Western media.
Jealous of
Moscow's monopoly of Iran's nuclear market, the
EU's latest proposal is partially aimed at
preempting the recent Russian announcement of
plans to build two new nuclear reactors in Iran,
by potentially luring Iran away from such a deal
and toward the more technologically advanced
European nuclear market. Russian policymakers
would indeed be remiss to overlook the purely
self-interest elements of the latest European
proposal.
Another clue to the EU's
perceived hypocrisy, from Iran's point of view, is
the recent joint EU/GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)
statement expressing concerns about Iran's nuclear
program, coinciding with new, and more energetic,
efforts by the GCC with respect to the disputed
islands of Abu Mussa, Little Tunb and Big Tunb.
The EU's hidden tactic is, in other words, to lend
support to the GCC over these Iran-controlled
islands, to put additional pressure on the nuclear
front.
The SCO historic
bloc Surely the SCO would be hobbled by new
headaches caused by a significant expansion of
membership that would, in turn, add to its
qualitative weight and geopolitical significance.
But to assume that the negative side-effects will
necessarily outweigh the advantages is to succumb
to the seeds of doubt planted by the West, which
is wary of the emergence of a formidable
anti-North Atlantic Treaty Organization
counterweight via the SCO. The SCO, now and in the
prospective future, is not so much an anti-NATO
coalition as a potential countervailing bloc to
the United States' interventionist policies. But
surely the time is ripe to take the SCO to the
next level.
Certainly, this is not to fall
into the naive analyses of an impending "new Cold
War" favored by certain Russian politicians, given
the complexities of the post-Cold War world order.
Taking account of these complexities, including a
certain lack of fit between the geo-economic and
geopolitical considerations, China and Russia
would be well advised to eschew their present
drift against the SCO's expansion, which will only
appease the US.
One potential advantage of
Iran's membership in the SCO is that it would
allow China and Russia to influence more
positively Iran's foreign policy and, by
implication, the Muslim World. The SCO's chief
concerns about terrorism can clearly benefit from
Iran's inclusion, as this would translate into
greater regional cooperation against Islamist
extremism in, among others, Russia's and China's
Muslim-led regions as well as the entire Central
Asia-Caspian basin.
The SCO calls for
"force sharing", and this would also translate
into enhanced military cooperation among the
member states, which, if inclusive of Iran, would
have net benefit vis-a-vis the common Russia-China
concerns about the undue expansion of NATO in the
East.
Concerning the latter, there is talk
of a NATO "encirclement of Iran" in Washington
these days, championed by certain leading
Republican senators, such as Senator John Warner,
who have praised NATO's decision to more than
double its forces in Afghanistan and to expand
ties with some of Iran's other neighbors such as
Azerbaijan. This must resonate with Moscow, which
has similarly complained of NATO expansion and
"encirclement" post-September 11, 2001.
A point of no return Both China
and Russia are on record opposing the Security
Council's recourse to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter
declaring Iran a threat to peace, in which case
the US would be justified, from the prism of
international law, in taking unilateral military
action against Iran's nuclear facilities. And yet
instead of exploring the perfectly viable options
of full-scope international monitoring of Iran's
limited, contained enrichment program, Russian and
Chinese policymakers are slowly but surely
adjusting themselves to precisely such a scenario,
whose net effect would be detrimental to their own
geopolitical vested interests, particularly if war
breaks out.
Already, Washington is awash
with self-justifying arguments for war against
Iran, the main one being that Iran is on the verge
of reaching a "point of no return" in terms of
nuclear know-how and technology. The other
argument is that this situation resembles the
pre-World War II period of appeasement, as if 2006
were 1938 again.
Indeed, it is fascinating
how many prominent journalists, academics, and
present and/or former officials in the US have
lent their penmanship to the "never again" 1938
scenario. The long list includes the Washington
Post's Charles Krauthammer, Middle East scholar
Bernard Lewis, and former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger. To his credit, Kissinger has, however,
nuanced this alarmist view with a prudent call for
US-inclusive multilateral talks with Iran.
Unfortunately, in the present debates in
the US on Iran, the upper hand belongs to those
nay-sayers who have persuaded the administration
of President George W Bush to turn down
Ahmadinejad's call for direct talks, arguing that
the "UN is the best forum". Since when have the
same neo-conservatives, who have carved out an
inglorious history for themselves for hammering
the UN for six consecutive years, become such big
fans of the UN?
John Bolton, the US
ambassador to the UN, has recently lashed out at
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed
ElBaradei for making political statements as the
head of only a "technical organization".
ElBaradei's latest guilt is that he has played
down the news of certain reports by IAEA
inspectors regarding traces of highly enriched
uranium at a razed military site in Iran.
US nuclear experts have, however, wasted
little time putting the right spin on this news,
by claiming that this "casts serious doubt" on
Iran's declarations on that particular site and
the broader issue of alleged military involvement
in Iran's civil nuclear program. According to IAEA
spokeswoman Melissa Fleming, ElBaradei had been
misquoted. His main point had been that the
analysis of environmental sampling at Lavizan was
still ongoing and that it was too early to reach a
definitive conclusion. Iran has already flatly
rejected Western media's report on this issue as
false.
As the heavyweights gear up for the
next round, portending more serious initiatives
against Iran at the Security Council, both China
and Russia need seriously to re-examine the
present drift of their policy, which will only
strengthen the United States' "unipolar moment"
and weaken their hoped-for multilateralist
breakout. The stakes in the Iranian nuclear crisis
transcend Iran.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating
Facts Versus Fiction.
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