Iran moving into the big
league By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's
three-nation tour of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India
and the welter of agreements and understandings
reached between Tehran and these governments serve
notice beyond the mere issue of energy security
and Iran's expanding role in the sub-continent's
energy market; rather, these developments signify
a new stage in Iran's foreign policy that is best
described as "pan-regionalism".
From the
Persian Gulf to the Caspian region, the Caucasus,
Central Asia, South Asia and beyond, thanks to its
unique geographical location, Iran is in many ways
an ideal connecting bridge that has not until now
fully exploited its advantageous
"equidistance" from India and
Europe.
Straddled between the two energy
hubs of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea, Iran is
a suitable conduit for trade, energy and
non-energy, between the Arab states of the Persian
Gulf, which are members of the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC), and the landlocked Central Asian
states. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Also, with ambitious transportation links
projected under the veneer of a "north-south
corridor", Iran, Russia and India have conceived
new areas of cooperation that connect northern
Europe to the Indian Ocean via Iran and the
Russian Federation [1] . Already, Iran is an
energy exporter to Europe through Turkey,
funneling through Turkmenistan's gas and swapping
oil with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
Also,
Iran has plans not to lag behind the so-called new
"Silk Road" project that involves China, India and
the GCC states first and foremost and yet for
every conceivable reason must be considered
Iran-inclusive because of the country's proximity,
its expanding trade and economic cooperation with
the GCC, and its own trade liberalization
policies, reflected in the expansion of free-trade
zones.
This is one reason why Iran is
modernizing its Persian Gulf islands of Kish and
Qeshm, hoping to turn them into tourist hotspots
as well as hubs for trade and even finance in the
near future [2].
The $7.6 billion
Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI), meanwhile, has
the potential more than any other existing Iranian
project to extend the purview of Iran's
"pan-regional" approach, by organically connecting
Iran to the sub-continent on a long-term basis and
by providing a new Iran-Pakistan-India nexus that
could in turn be used for addressing what is
lacking so far, that is, more than paltry
inter-regional trade.
The 2,600-kilometer
IPI pipeline, which was conceived in 1994,
envisages transporting Iranian gas to Pakistan and
then on to India. Following Ahmadinejad's visit to
India this week, Iran reported the three countries
were close to signing a "final agreement".
The poor state of Iran's trade with South
Asia is reflected in the sub-optimal trade between
Iran and Pakistan, as is the case between Iran and
other members of the region's 10-nation Economic
Cooperation Organization (ECO) [3].
Attempts to make the ECO a fulcrum of
regional cooperation have by and large failed and
the ECO's struggle to achieve a major breakthrough
in terms of regional cooperation has not brought
significant tangible fruits.
Yet that may
change, particularly if Iran (a) is inducted in
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at which it
is presently an observer [4], and (b) the IPI
project finally gets underway, in which case
Iran's greater integration into larger entities
will bolster its attempt within the ECO to make
this regional organization, which is headquartered
in Tehran, more effective.
With respect to
the Persian Gulf, the GCC, which continues to shun
Iran's olive branch of cooperation, is under new
pressures to rethink that attitude as a result of
the Shi'ite-led government in Iraq, a potential
Iran allay in the politics of the Persian Gulf. It
is not far-fetched to think that Iran and Iraq
will one day join the GCC states in a new regional
cooperative framework.
Certainly, that is
how Iran wants it today, as seen in the recent
unveiling of Iranian plans for cooperative
security and the like put forward at their
hitherto recalcitrant GCC neighbors [5], perhaps
better pitched as part of an Islamic common
market.
Certainly, significant hurdles
confront Iran's "pan-regional" approach that seeks
to make the country an integrative, nodal point of
cooperation between and among various regions,
ranging from United Nations and US sanctions out
of fear of Iran and its purported "nuclear
ambition", as well as a host of purely economic
and technical difficulties, such as poor
transportation links and cumbersome custom
regulations.
Regarding the latter, one of
the ECO's key contributions has been in the area
of prioritizing a customs agreement, as well as
tariff reduction schemes, between the member
states that would facilitate trade in the ECO
region. Still, the low level of trade between the
ECO states is a harsh reminder of the long road
ahead before Iran's lofty objective of
"pan-regionalism" can be fully realized.
Irrespective, the tangible gains mentioned
above illustrate the viability of Iran's
"pan-regional" approach that could conceivably
elevate its status beyond a mere regional power
and add to the cluster of values in its arsenal as
a global power.
In fact, as reflected in a
recent statement by Iranian National Security
Advisor Saeed Jalili regarding Iran as a "global
power", Iran's self-image and self-understanding
is global-looking and fuels an activist foreign
policy that is fully within the camp of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and which constantly
prioritizes "global justice".
Economically, however, for Iran and other
NAM states seeking a redistribution of global
wealth, concentrated in Western hands today, there
is no alternative but to push for greater
cooperation between themselves and achieve better
coordination at international institutions such as
the World Trade Organization (WTO), in light of
the WTO's ongoing trade wranglings known as the
Doha rounds.
Although Iran is not yet a
WTO member, it will be directly impacted by the
final agreements of the Doha rounds, due later
this year, which is why it is incumbent on Iranian
policymakers to focus on the Doha rounds and to
scrutinize the agricultural and non-agricultural
new policies of the WTO that distinguish between
developed and developing nations. Yet these fall
short of addressing the adverse impacts of
globalization and WTO-induced trade liberalization
for a whole host of Third World nations.
One thing is clear, the greater the
impetus for Iran's "pan-regional" goals and
objectives, the more Tehran will find itself
entangled in complex regional, extra-regional and
global issues and controversies that impact the
country's foreign policies, trade, and security
both directly and indirectly.
One of the
understudied aspects of Iran's "pan-regionalism"
is, indeed, how it connects to the issue of
globalization that, so far, has been a mixed
blessing for the developing world. After all,
regionalism and globalization have unhappy kindred
relations, with the former simultaneously
strengthening and weakening it.
Notes 1.
For more information on the International
North-South Transport Corridor, click here. 2. For more on the free-trade
zones, click here. 3. For more on the Economic
Cooperation Organization, click here 4. For more on the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, click here 5. See Iran unveils a Persian Gulf security
plan by Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, Asia Times Online, April 14, 2007.
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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