TEHRAN - Speaking of business as unusual. A mere two
months ago, the news of a China-Kazakhstan pipeline
agreement, worth US$3.5 billion, raised some eyebrows in the
world press, some hinting that China's economic foreign
policy may be on the verge of a new leap forward. A clue to
the fact that such anticipation may have totally
understated the case was last week's signing of a mega-gas deal
between Beijing and Tehran worth $100 billion. Billed as
the "deal of century" by various commentators, this
agreement is likely to increase by another $50 billion
to $100 billion, bringing the total close to $200
billion, when a similar oil agreement, currently being
negotiated, is inked not too far from now.
The
gas deal entails the annual export of some 10 million
tons of Iranian liquefied natural gas (LNG) for a
25-year period, as well as the participation, by China's
state oil company, in such projects as exploration and
drilling, petrochemical and gas industries, pipelines,
services and the like. The export of LNG requires
special cargo ships, however, and Iran is currently
investing several billion dollars adding to its small
LNG-equipped fleet.
Still,
per the admission of the head of the Iranian Tanker
Co, Mohammad Souri, Iran needed to purchase another 87
vessels by 2010, in addition to the 10 already
purchased, in order to fulfill the needs of its growing LNG
market. Iran has an estimated 26.6-trillion-cubic-meter gas reservoir,
the second-largest in the world, about half of which is in
offshore zones and the other half onshore.
It is
perhaps too early to digest fully the various economic,
political and even geostrategic implications of this
stunning development, widely considered a major blow to
the Bush administration's economic sanctions on Iran and
particularly on Iran's energy sector, notwithstanding
the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) penalizing foreign
companies daring to invest more than $20 million in
Iran's oil and gas industry.
While
it is unclear what the scope of China's direct
investment in Iran's energy sector will turn out to be, it
is fairly certain that China's participation in the Yad
Avaran field alone will exceed the ILSA's ceiling; this
field's oil reservoir is estimated to be 17 billion barrels
and is capable of producing 300 to 400 barrels per
day. And this is besides the giant South Pars field,
which Iran shares with Qatar, alone possessing close to 8%
of the world's gas reserves. To open a parenthesis
here, until now Tehran has been complaining that Qatar
has been outpacing Iran in exploiting its resource 6-1. In
fact, Iran's unhappiness over Qatar's unbalanced access
to the South Pars led to a discrete warning by Iran's
deputy oil minister and, soon thereafter, Qatar complied
with Iran's request for a joint "technical committee"
that has yet to yield any result.
For a
United States increasingly pointing at China as the
next biggest challenge to its Pax Americana, the
Iran-China energy cooperation cannot but be interpreted as
an ominous sign of emerging new trends in an
area considered vital to US national interests. But,
then again, this cuts both ways, that is, the deal
should, logically speaking, stimulate others who may
still consider Iran untrustworthy or too radical to enter
into big projects on a long term basis. Iran's
biggest foreign agreement prior to this gas agreement with
China was a long-term $25 billion gas deal with Turkey, which
has encountered snags, principally over the price,
recently, compared with Iran's various trade agreements
with Spain, Italy and others, typically with a life-span
of five to seven years.
Thus some Iranian officials are
hopeful that the China deal can lead to a fundamental
rethinking of the risks of doing business with Iran on
the part of European countries, India, Japan, and even
Russia. Concerning India, which signed a memorandum of
understanding with Iran initially in 1993 for a
2,670-kilometer pipeline, with more than 700km
traversing Pakistani territory, the Iran-China deal will
undoubtedly give a greater push to New Delhi to follow
Beijing's lead and thus make sure that the "peace
pipeline" is finally implemented. The same applies,
mutatis mutandis,
to Russia, which has as of late been dragging
its feet somewhat on Iran's nuclear reactor, bandwagoning
with the US and Group of Eight (G8) countries on the
thorny issue of Iran's uranium-enrichment program. The Russians
must now factor in the possibility of being supplanted
by China if they lose the confidence of Tehran and
appear willing to trade favors with Washington over
Iran. Russia's Gazprom may now finally set aside its
stubborn resistance to the idea of entering major joint
ventures with Iran.
Iran appears more and more
interested to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) and form a powerful axis with its twin pillars,
China and Russia, as a counterweight to a US power
"unchained". The SCO comprises China, Russia, Tajikistan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
China,
Russia and Iran share deep misgivings about the
perception of the United States as a "benevolent hegemon" and tend
to see a "rogue superpower" instead. Even short of
joining forces formally, the main outlines of such an
axis can be discerned from their convergence of threat
perception due to, among other things, Russia's disquiet
over the post-September 11, 2001, US incursions in its
traditional Caucasus-Central Asian "turf", and China's
continuing unease over the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan;
this is not to mention China's fixed gaze at a "new Silk
Road" allowing it unfettered access to the Middle East
and Eurasia, this as part and parcel of what is often
billed as "the new great game" in Eurasia. Indeed, what
China's recent deals with both Kazakhstan (pertaining to
Caspian energy) and Iran (pertaining to Persian Gulf
resources) signifies is that the pundits had gotten it
wrong until now: the purview of the new great game is
not limited to the Central Asia-Caspian Sea basin, but
rather has a broader, more integrated, purview
increasingly enveloping even the Persian Gulf.
Increasingly, the image of the Islamic Republic of Iran
as a sort of frontline state in a post-Cold War global
lineup against US hegemony is becoming prevalent among
Chinese and Russian foreign-policy thinkers.
For the
moment, however, the Iran-Russia-China axis is more a
tissue of think-tanks than full-fledged policy, and the
mere trade interdependence of the US and China, as well
as Russia's growing energy ties to the US alone, not
to mention its weariness over any perceived Chinese "overstretch",
militate against a grand alliance pitted against
the Western superpower. In fact, the Cold War-type
alliances are highly unlikely to be replicated in
the current milieu of globalization and complex interdependence;
instead, what is likely to emerge in the
future are issue-focused or, for the lack of a better
word, issue-area alliances whereby, to give an example,
the above-said axis may be inspired into existence along
geostrategic considerations somewhat apart from purely
economic considerations.
Hence what the SCO
means on the security front and how significant it will
be hinges on a complex, and complicated, set of factors
that may eventually culminate in its expansion, from the
current group of six, as well as greater, alliance-like,
cooperation. It is noteworthy that in Central
Asia-Caucasus, the trend is toward security
diversification and even multipolarism, reflected in the
US and Russian bases not too far from each other. In
this multipolar sub-order, neither the US is capable of
exerting hegemony, nor is Russia's semi-hegemonic sway
without competition. In the Caspian Sea basin, for
example, Kazakhstan has opted to take part in several
distinct, and contrasting, security networks, including
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Partnership for
Peace program, the Commonwealth of Independent States'
Collective Security Organization, the SCO, and
membership in OSCE (Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe).
Kazakhstan is not,
however, an exception, but seemingly indicative of an
expanding new rule of the (security and strategic) game
played out throughout Central Asia-Caucasus.
Economically, both Kazakhstan and Russia are members of
the Central Asia Economic Cooperation Organization, and
all the Central Asian states are also members of the
Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), which was
founded by the trio of Iran, Turkey and Pakistan.
Certain economic alliances are, henceforth, taking
shape, alongside the budding security arrangements,
which have their own tempo, rationale and security
potential. Concerning the latter, in 1998, the ECO
embarked on low security cooperation among its members
on drug trafficking and this may soon be expanded to
information-sharing on terrorism. Also, Iran has also
entered into low security agreements with some of its
Persian Gulf neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait.
The SCO initially was established
to deal with border disputes and is now well on its way
to focusing on (Islamist) terrorism, drug trafficking
and regional insecurity. Meanwhile, the US, not to
be outdone, has been sowing its own bilateral military
and security arrangements with various regional
countries such as Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan
and Uzbekistan, as well as promoting the Guuam Group,
which includes Azerbaijan and Georgia, formed alongside
the BTC (Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan) pipeline as a counterweight
to Russian influence. Consequently, the overall
picture that emerges before us is, as stated above, a
unique multi-trend of military and security
multipolarism defying the logic of Pax Americana. In this
picture, Iran represents one of the poles of attraction,
seeking its own sphere of influence by, for instance,
entering into a military agreement with Turkmenistan in
1994, and, simultaneously, exploring the larger option of
how to coalesce with other powers in order to offset
the debilitating consequences of (post-September 11)
unbounded Americanization of regional politics.
A glance at Chinese security narratives, and it
becomes patently obvious that Beijing shares Iran's deep
worries about US unipolarism culminating in, as in
Afghanistan and Iraq, unilateral militarism. Various
advocates of US preeminence, such as William Kristol,
openly write that the US should "work for the fall of
the Communist Party oligarchy in China". Unhinged from
the containment of Soviet power, the roots of US
unilateralism, and its military manifestation of
"preemption", must be located in the logic of
unipolarism, thinly disguised by the "coalition of the
willing" in Iraq; the latter is, in fact, as aptly put
by various critics of US foreign policy, more like a
coalition of the coerced and bribed than anything else.
But, realistically speaking, what are the
prospects for any regional and or continental
realignment leading to the erasure of US unipolarism,
notwithstanding the US military and economic colossus
bent on preventing, on a doctrinal level, the emergence
of any challenger to its global domination now or in the
future? The strategic debates in all three countries,
Russia, China and Iran, feature similar concerns and
question marks. For one thing, all three have to contend
with the difficulty of sorting the disjunctions between
the different sets of national interests, above all
economic, ideological and strategic interests. This
aside, a pertinent question is who will win over Russia,
Washington, which pursues a coupling role with Moscow
vis-a-vis Beijing, or Beijing, trying to wrest away
Moscow from Washington? For now, Russia does not
particularly feel compelled to choose between stark
options, yet the situation may be altered in China's
direction in case the present drift of US power
incursions are heightened in the future. The answer to
the above question should be delegated to the future.
For now, however, the quantum leap of China into the
Middle East and Caspian energy markets has become a
fait accompli, no matter how disturbed its
biggest trade partner, the US, over its geopolitical
ramifications.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD,
is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's
Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World
Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister
Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science
at Tehran University.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
