Central Asia/Russia


	May 22, 2002	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

The schizophrenic Russian-Iranian nexus
By Ehsan Ahrari

The Russian-Iranian nexus, though it has been around for more than 10 years, has a schizophrenic character that makes one wonder whether it will stay intact, and if so, for how long. The relationship's schizophrenic aspects refer to two contradicting trends, one intending to keep it intact and the other leading to its potential disintegration.

The unifying aspects include cooperative endeavors to maximize the strategic objectives of Russia and Iran. The potentially disintegrating aspect is the simmering conflict between Tehran and Moscow regarding the division of oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. Those tensions notwithstanding, the nexus is significant in the sense that it enables the two countries to pursue policies that the United States watches with quite a bit of concern. And if it were to remain strong, this nexus might result in increased competition between the United States and Russia in and around Central Asia and West Asia in the coming years.

The schizophrenic character of this nexus also reflects the fact that the strategic objectives of Iran and Russia are becoming increasingly intricate. This reality is its Achilles heel, and makes it potentially enticing for the US to lure one of the partners away, thereby bringing about its disintegration. The chances of America's success in doing so regarding Iran remain virtually nonexistent, however, especially in the aftermath of President George W Bush's axis of evil speech of last January, grouping Iran with Iraq and North Korea as countries that were developing weapons of mass destruction.

In the last years of the late Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini's life, Iran toned down the stridency of its verbal attacks on the former Soviet Union. References to it as the "little Satan" (as opposed to regular references to the United States as the "great Satan") became scarce in public statements. Iran needed Soviet weapons to continue to fight the Iran-Iraq war, and Moscow was willing to sell. As Iran emerged from that nine-year long bloody war in 1988, its revolutionary perspectives lost their idealistic edge and became hardened.

Iran was not about to forget that the international community offered it little support, even though Iraq was the aggressor in that war. All Arab countries, save Libya and Syria, sided with Iraq. Western sources of weapons were not available to Iran, largely as a result of the systematic American endeavors to close those avenues, leaving Russia, China, and North Korea as the main sources of weapons purchase. Even though weapons from those countries did not have the quality of Western weapons, they were available to Iran with few or no political strings attached, as long as it was able to pay in hard currency. Thus, an Islamic republic became dependent on weapons from communist countries, initially to be able to continue fighting a war with a fellow Muslim Iraq, and, after the end of that war, to enhance its security within a turbulent region.

One bitter "lesson learned" was that Iran adopted a fiercely self-reliant policy in defense affairs. The disaggregation of that policy meant that it was to sign contracts with the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea to initially only assemble, but later on manufacture, those weapons domestically. The indigenous know-how thus developed was to enable that country to eventually become a self-reliant conventional arms producer of significant proportion.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, its successor state Russia not only understood the significance of honoring its defense agreements with Iran, but also institutionalized those commitments, thereby creating a nexus with the Islamic republic. Russia was motivated to become Iran's major weapons supplier for two reasons. First, it was in dire need of hard currency to bankroll not only the research and development part of its defense sector, but also to be able to pay for such basic essentials as salaries of its military personnel and the upkeep of its intricate operating weapons systems. Second, since it was then attempting to find its own permanent international status in the world arena, having Iran as a state dependent on its weapon supplies became a source of prestige for Moscow. After all, Iran, despite its diminished status as a military power stemming from the turbulent revolutionary change, had retained its significance as a major Persian Gulf nation, and a foremost opponent of America's dominance in its neighborhood. As Russia calculated, it could always use the "Iran card" in its intricate ties with the United States.

For Iran, Russia was an important country because its perspectives on the sale of weapons coincided with those of Iran. Besides, as its contacts related to the purchase of Russian weapons became more frequent, Iran became quite certain that it could persuade Russia to sell increasingly sophisticated weapons, and even allow its highly skilled scientists - who found themselves without jobs with the implosion of Soviet Union - to help Iran acquire indigenous technological knowledge in developing sophisticated weapons systems, and even facilitate the development of Iranian nuclear know-how.

The Gulf War of 1991 significantly diminished the threat potential of Iraq to Iran. But Saddam Hussein was still in power, and Iran was convinced that Iraq's desires to emerge as a nuclear power remained unaltered. Consequently, Iran decided to maintain an active program of nuclear development under the rubric of "peaceful nuclear use". In addition, it opted to develop highly ambitious programs of acquiring indigenous skills to develop ballistic and cruise missiles.

Russia, as the chief successor state of the Soviet Union, though no longer a superpower, became a permanent "wannabe superpower". As such, it resented the unipolar system that emerged at the cessation of the Cold War. The United States became the dominant global power in both economic and military affairs. However, Russia favored a "multipolar" global system, that is, a system where a number of great powers would collectively, or by forming ad hoc groupings, resolve heady global issues. In other words, no single power in a multipolar system could veto the actions and strategic preferences of another great power with impunity. Thus, the phrase multipolar system became a euphemism for bringing about an end to US hegemony, a preference that Russia and China, as well as Iran, strongly share. But these countries also knew that any collective endeavors for the creation of a multipolar system had to be benign in nature, for the dominant power, in the final analysis, may decide to resort to military power to sustain its dominance.

In the years between the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, Russia was largely focused on creating global conditions for the evolution of a multipolar world. A number of major issues of US foreign policy - the development of the national missile defense (NMD) and the theater missile defense (TMD) systems, nuclear proliferation, and ballistic and cruise missile proliferation - were to be exploited by Russia, China and Iran for the evolution of a multipolar system. In the process, they were to enhance their respective bargaining positions vis-a-vis the United States. Especially for Iran, every one of those issues was at the very core of its security concerns, since the prospects of imminent US-Iran rapprochement was well nigh nonexistent.

The US was onto the Russian-Iranian preferences for a multipolar global order, and was especially concerned about active missile and nuclear programs in Iran that Russia, China and North Korea were supporting. But persuading Russia or China to cooperate, by ceasing their trade and assistance to Iran in these realms, was highly intricate, and involved offering the types of concessions to those countries that Washington was not willing to make. For instance, China would have wanted the United States to abandon its support of Taiwan so that it could tackle head-on the issue of reunification with that island territory. Similarly, both Russia and China wanted the US to forgo developing the NMD and TMD systems, and not abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty of 1972. All those issues became entirely significant sources of friction and dispute among the US, Russia and China when George W Bush was elected president.

The conventional patterns of international diplomacy were given a severe jolt when the terrorists struck the US on September 11. Those enormously tragic events initiated a militant phase of American foreign policy. The Bush administration declared war on global terrorism. All nations - mighty and weak - were put on notice when Bush issued a seemingly clear admonition: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Russia did not have to think twice before it jumped on the American bandwagon. There ensued a period of cooperation that the American media - in an almost wishful way - interpreted not only as a period of entente cordiale but even the making of an alliance between Washington and Moscow. What remained unstated in that collective exercise of wishful thinking was that Russia was to remain a junior partner of such a perceived relationship.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia was not interested in reading tea leaves a la the US media about the long-term prospects of alliance-building with the US. He clearly wanted his country to go along with the United States, but to use that new bumper sticker slogan "war against global terrorism" to pacify the Chechens, who are bent on breaking away from the Russian federation. It became clear only in early 2002 that Russia had its eyes fixed all along on the goal of "wannabe superpower". And the Russian-Iranian nexus was still going to play an important role in it. Thus, Moscow never agreed with the Bush administration's pleas for stopping the sale of advanced weapons systems, but especially the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran's "peaceful" nuclear programs.

Russia also continued transferring the missile know-how to Iran, despite the US-Israeli charges that Iran could easily integrate its missile and chemical technologies to build chemical armed missiles in the short run, and would eventually be able to transform its peaceful nuclear technology to develop nuclear weapons, very much like Israel itself did in the 1960s and India in 1998. Moscow was persistent in dismissing American interpretations of Iranian intentions related to its aspirations to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The Russian-Iranian nexus was also consistent in its support of the Northern Alliance in its intractable military conflict with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. But, despite the flow of military and materiel support to the Northern Alliance, the latter could not make any significant territorial gains against the Taliban. It was only after the US's military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda - Operation Enduring Freedom - in the aftermath of September 11 that the balance of power significantly shifted in favor of the Northern Alliance and resulted in the dismantlement of the Taliban regime from Afghanistan.

Russia and Iran drew a considerable amount of satisfaction from that development, since both of them had suffered from the jihadist tendencies of the Taliban - which were acutely anti-Shi'ite, and were also incredibly supportive of the on-going military conflict between Russia and the Chechen breakaway movement. However, Moscow and Tehran remained wary of the presence of the US forces in their neighborhood, and its implications for their own priorities of influencing the modalities of governance and the shape of politics in Afghanistan.

As Russia and the US cooperated during the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, Iran also offered its own moral support. Both those countries were present at the Bonn meeting of past November-December, which brought about the creation of the interim government under the chairmanship of Hamid Karzai. Russia and Iran pledged financial assistance for that government. But after the uprooting of the Taliban, the United States and Iran frequently clashed over the nature of activities of the latter in relation to the support of Ismail Khan, a warlord of the Herat province of Afghanistan. The Bush administration never understood, or did not want to recognize, that Iran has legitimate interests in ensuring the stability of Afghanistan, at least as much as, if not more than, the United States. Afghanistan is Iran's immediate neighbor, thus both countries are destined to share each other's fate, for better or for worse. The US's perspectives are rather simplistic - that any Iranian activities in the Afghan areas contiguous to its territories are nothing but evil and destabilizing in nature.

Russia and Iran continue to see eye-to-eye on the need for having a large say about what happens in Afghanistan, without necessarily adopting the roles of "kingmakers" for that country. As long as the end result of US activities in Afghanistan is the emergence of a government that is not hostile to Russia and Iran, these countries are willing to limit the scope of their own activities and wait for the outcome of the loya jirga of June in Afghanistan to select a more permanent government.

So much for the integrated aspects of the Russian-Iranian nexus. Its schizophrenic part becomes clear when one examines the dynamics of the involvement of Moscow and Tehran in the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian Sea is a region where oil specialists have over the years issued a variety of figures on the size of oil reserves. While reading those estimates, one has to distinguish between possible, probable and recoverable numbers. For instance, in 1994 it was reported that the Caspian Sea held 200 billion barrels of oil. Later, that figure was trimmed to 115 billion barrels, or even less. In both instances, the numbers reflected possible and probable estimates only. In a recent report, the US Department of Energy issued an estimate of 233 billion barrels of possible reserves. But the Italian oil company ENI might have been closer to reality when its chairman, Gros Pietro, stated that the Caspian Sea contains only 7.8 billion barrels of oil. This figure reflected recoverable oil reserves.

Five littoral countries - Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - are claimants to the Caspian Sea oil reserves. The issue of growing contention is the formula of dividing the sea floor among those states. Russia has "authored a formula of dividing only the sea floor into national sectors", leaving the waters open to its dominant navy. Iran, on the other hand, "has sought common control of the entire Caspian Sea or a 20 percent share, while the Russian plan would give it perhaps 12 percent". Iran bases its claims on the "equal partnership treaties" that it signed with the Soviet Union in 1921 and in 1940.

Despite numerous meetings among the littoral states for the past 10 years, a mutually acceptable formula has not been negotiated. Putin, after yet another failed summit meeting on the issue in April, stated that he would pursue bilateral and trilateral arrangements. That was unmistakably a not-so-subtle threat to leave Iran out of the negotiating process. However, he set off alarm bells in Tehran by flying from that summit meeting to the Russian naval base at Astrakhan, where he ordered a naval exercise that will be held this summer.

And Putin was good to his word. Last week he signed a bilateral agreement in Moscow with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to divide the natural resources of the Caspian seabed.

With regard to the naval exercises, Moscow later attempted to calm Iranian concerns by stating that they were aimed at combating terrorism and drug- and caviar-smuggling, Iran got the message behind the sudden surge of militarism in Russia related to the heady issue of distribution of oil reserves. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, was the ranking official who bluntly gave Iran's reaction to Russia in a public statement. "Iran and Russia have good and close ties," he said, "but the Islamic Republic of Iran is obliged to defend its territorial integrity and national interests of the country. We are neither an aggressor nor [do we] tolerate aggression. We hope all countries, including Iran, will achieve their fair share in the Caspian Sea."

There is little doubt that neither Iran nor Russia would want to further ratchet up their differences in their quest for an acceptable formula for the allocation of Caspian Sea oil, for at least two significant reasons. First, given the currently somewhat depressed nature of global oil prices, it behooves both of them not to rapidly develop the Caspian Sea oil reserves. In fact, a case can be made that Iran and Russia as oil producers would want to postpone bringing their respective shares of Caspian Sea oil to the global market by at least by 10 years. Second, both countries are only too aware that they must maintain their nexus at a time when the US is enhancing its own presence in their neighborhood in the name of fighting global terrorism. The US military presence is indeed escalating in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, while Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have agreed to open their air space for the US to supply humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. That reality, in all likelihood, would lead to further military cooperation among them. Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have shown a high degree of interest in expanding the scope of security ties with the US, a development that both Moscow and Tehran are watching warily. Washington has also started training the security forces in Georgia, traditionally a country of significant interest to Russia.

The durability of the Russian-Iranian nexus became apparent once again when Russian officials reiterated their position, prior to the impending Bush-Putin Summit later this month, that their country was not providing missile or nuclear weapons technology to Iran. Even after the establishment of the Russia-NATO Council on May 14, Russia does not seem to have lessened the significance of its long-standing ties with Iran. On the Caspian Sea-related issues, even though Iran appears to be in a not too strong a negotiating position, neither is Russia, given its own concerns related to the growing American presence in Central Asia.

Thus, Moscow and Tehran are likely to find a formula for sharing the Caspian Sea oil that is reasonably acceptable to the latter. By doing so, they would avoid the emergence of any deleterious tensions within their nexus. In the final analysis, doing their fair share for the emergence of a multipolar international system remains an objective of high politics to both Iran and Russia. This type of system, in their collective judgment, will be eminently more promising to their strategic interests than the extant unipolar system of America's dominance, which in some instances ignores their interests, or, in others, assigns them lesser significance than they deserve.

Ehsan Ahrari is a Norfolk, Virginia, US-based strategic analyst.

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