MONTREAL - Turkey will cut oil imports
from Iran by 20%, the national oil refining
company Tupras announced at the end of last week.
Turkey is the fifth-largest importer of oil from
Iran. The 200,000 barrels that it imports from
Iran every day represent almost one-third of all
its oil imports and 7% of Iran's exports.
A new US law penalizes foreign financial
institutions engaging in transactions with Iran's
central bank, in consequence of Tehran's
intransigence over its nuclear program, repeated
failure to cooperate with inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy
Agency, and consequent
condemnation in a series of resolutions of the UN
Security Council.
Turkey will replace the
Iranian oil imports with crude from Libya after
Saudi Arabia refused to grant it preferential
treatment. Turkey is expected to continue seeking
an exemption from sanctions from the US State
Department, which has given such exemptions to
Japan and 10 members of the European Union but
only after they committed to significant cuts in
imports from Iran.
The Turkish move makes
China the only significant importing country that
has not yet officially committed to decreasing
imports from Iran. The International Energy Agency
estimates that Tehran's exports may fall by up to
one million barrels per day later this year as a
result of measures by the European Union, China,
India, Japan, and South Korea.
While US
diplomats praised the Turkish move, which was
widely commented on internationally, less
attention was paid to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's visit to Tehran on the very day of the
announcement, where he signed preferential trade
deals designed to more than double the bilateral
commerce between the two countries.
That
agreement was signed in the margin of meetings
held by Erdogan and his Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu with Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
and religious leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khameini
over the situation in Syria.
According to
Iranian state television as reported by China's
Xinhua news agency, Khameini told Erdogan that
Iran would continue to support the Assad regime in
Syria and was "strongly opposed to any
interference by foreign forces into Syria's
internal affairs".
Despite Turkey's "zero
problems" doctrine in foreign policy, problems
have only been multiplying; the slippage in
Turkey's regional prestige over the Syrian issue,
which it cannot resolve without Iran's
cooperation, is but one of the problems that
refuses to disappear. Davutoglu, who originated
the "zero problems" doctrine, is now caught in
cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile it with
the antagonism emanating from Iran.
"Solutions based on Assad's staying in
power are not realistic," Davutoglu said, yet
Turkey and Iran must "work [together on] this
issue" because "a regional balance based on
hostility between Turkey and Iran" is
impermissible.
The policy appears to be
based on the assumption that other countries in
the region will share Turkey's preference for
"zero problems" or else be convinced by its
example. He must now cope with the fact that Iran
has demonstrated its refusal to fall into either
category. He is doing so now by compartmentalizing
contradictory aspects of reality in his thinking
so that they do not undermine a basic premise on
which he has built the country's foreign policy.
Segments of the Iranian political elite
represented for example by long-standing and
influential Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen
Rezaie multiply anti-Turkish criticisms. Reuters
recently quoted Rezaie as saying that the Istanbul
venue for scheduled April 13 nuclear talks,
between Iran and the five UN Security Council
permanent members plus Germany, is unsatisfactory
because this "might give this wrong impression to
the opposite side that Iran has grown weak and is
in a weak condition".
What this means is
that Rezaie regards Istanbul as a hostile location
for such talks. Nor is he alone. The same Reuters
dispatch reports that Esmail Kowsari, a member of
parliament, accuses Turkey of playing of the role
of messenger for the US and Israel, while
Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has called the
Istanbul meeting a "conference to bribe Israel".
This must be extremely frustrating to Erdogan and
Davutoglu, who have gone out of their way to
excoriate Israel at every public opportunity.
Yet the problems that Davutoglu seeks to
turn aside multiply even on the merely bilateral
level. For example, Turkey purchases natural gas
from Iran, paying US$423 per thousand cubic
meters, which is more than any other country pays
despite its being immediately next door.
Ankara has long tried to negotiate a lower
price, but Tehran has refused to discuss the
matter. As a result, Turkey has been forced to
turn to international arbitration courts, even
though Iran's constitution forbids its government
from accepting or implementing the decision of
such tribunals.
Civilian trade between the
two countries, estimated to be worth $16 billion
this year, is still unlikely to be affected, even
if the $35 billion annual target invoked in the
signature of the bilateral trade preference
agreement in Tehran is not reached.
Dr
Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org),
educated at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and The University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the
United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and
Russia. Now senior research fellow in the
Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
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