Page 2 of 2 Iran courts the US at
Russia's
expense By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
representatives, according to a
Tehran analyst.
Again, the issue of a
timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from
Iraq has the potential to be a divisive issue. In
Dubai, Ahmadinejad forcefully called for the US
exit from not only Iraq but also the entire
region, and such tight coupling of the two issues,
whereby the US withdrawal from Iraq would be
interpreted as a first stage of a more
comprehensive withdrawal, runs contrary to
the
United States' Middle East policy. This is
particularly so as there are winds of a "new cold
war" with Russia.
Concerning the latter,
Russia continues to oppose the United States'
planned stationing of an anti-missile system in
Eastern Europe, and has at the same time delivered
a blow to Washington's Eurasian policy by
persuading Kazakhstan to use its pipelines to
export oil to Europe, instead of the US-backed
Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.
A shrewd
"geo-economic" master stroke by Moscow, this and
other energy-based initiatives aimed at making
Europe rather helplessly dependent on Russia as a
main energy provider undermine the United States'
post-Cold War global strategy, and this is
precisely where the resolution of the Iraq crisis
and possibility of a detente between Iran and the
US play a key role.
It is, in fact,
instructive that not everyone in Moscow is
thrilled about that possibility, and that may
explain why Russia may be inclined to stall on a
nuclear compromise, in light of alarmist
commentaries by various Russian experts about the
threat of a nuclear Iran. The question, then,
becomes: Who has more to fear of a nuclear-armed
Iran, Washington or Moscow? The answer depends to
some extent on developments on the US-Russia front
- will they take a turn for the better or worse?
Lest we forget, Moscow is designing a new
Middle East policy and has been trying to get
closer to the GCC states, and this is not
necessarily in harmony with Iran's foreign policy
either. From Tehran's vantage point, Russia's
refusal to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran and to
complete the Bushehr power plant, or to enter
Iran's bidding for new power plants, has left a
bitter taste with the Iranians for a long time to
come, and the damage cannot be undone overnight.
The trick for Tehran is how to exploit the
Washington-Moscow rift to its maximum advantage
and pursue its own regional security objectives,
eg, by building timely bridges with the Arab
world, without sacrificing anything.
Given
the UN sanctions and the continuing nuclear
standoff, the answer to this question is not
simple or straightforward, and the absence of the
slightest balance or delicate nuance might
backfire on the whole edifice of Iran's foreign
policy. Iran must move all its chips on the
multiple tables of diplomacy - with Arab and
non-Arab neighbors, Russia, Europe and the US, in
tandem with one another.
This is an
exceedingly difficult task, akin to playing
multiple games of chess simultaneously, with each
move impacting the picture on the other
chessboards. For now, there is a growing consensus
that Tehran has overcome some of the basic
deficiencies of a "one-dimensional" foreign policy
under former president Mohammad Khatami, which
pushed the arch of cooperation without adequate
resort to Iran's hard power and attendant tough
diplomacy.
The challenge for Ahmadinejad
as he re-embraces some of the wisdom of the
Khatami era by putting the accent on peaceful
co-existence and dialogue is how not to recycle
either that past or the more recent past of his
incipient months in office, when unreconstructed
sloganism appeared to have gained the upper hand.
The dictates of Iran's survival in the
tough international milieu have imposed a new
realism that is beginning to generate a new
harvest of foreign-policy pluses for the country.
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 also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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