Page 2 of 2 Russia's grand bargain over
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
come the next round of battle for tougher
sanctions at the Security Council.
There
is a catch here, though. China is simultaneously
keen on the potential circuit-breaker impact of
the UN resolution with respect to any US-Iran
cooperation on Iraq, in light of the Iraq Study
Group's (ISG's) recommendation for US engagement
with Iran (and Syria). Compared with the shrinking
Russia, China's star
in
the geopolitical universe is rising, and Beijing
relishes the US quagmire in Iraq that is taxing
its hegemonic prowess.
By unwittingly
torpedoing the shrewd ISG recipe for salvaging US
hegemony in Iraq via Iraq's big neighbor, the
sanctions resolution has in fact played a double,
short-term and long-term purpose for China. On the
one hand it smooths China-US cooperation, rattled
over North Korean nukes, and simultaneously
guarantees US troubles with the defiant Iranians
and their agents of influence in Iraq and
elsewhere in the region.
Does this mean
the end of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
in which Russia and China are key players? This is
yet another related, and pertinent, question we
may pose in light of the new Russia-US alliance
shaping before our eyes around Iran. The alliance
acts as a pivotal learning experience setting
precedence for future such cooperation, to the
chagrin of China, which may have counted too much
on Russia as an anti-Western bulwark.
But
Putin is enamored of Russia's European heritage
and, when the price is right, he has no hesitation
to sell out his Eastern friends and allies.
Another pertinent question is: What really killed
Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov in the same
week that the world witnessed the UN's move
against Niyazov's military ally, Iran?
In
the mid-1990s, Iran signed its one and only
military pact with another country, Turkmenistan,
the details of which remain confidential. From
Iran's vantage point, Niyazov was a reliable ally
irrespective of his democratic shortcomings, given
the various burgeoning energy and trade relations
between Ashgabat and Tehran while Niyazov ruled
his people as a benevolent dictator.
It
was a devastating blow to Iran's Central Asia
policy, the full ramifications of which we shall
know once the issue of succession and the
post-Niyazov drift of policy is cleared. The
Iranians are still in a state of shock at the
velocity of multiple punches - which include the
arrest of a couple of high-ranking Iranian
officers in Basra, Iraq, by US forces, as well as
a US federal judge's ruling - in favor of families
of American servicemen who died in the Khobar
bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1996 - that the
bombings were authorized by Iran's supreme leader,
Ali Khamenei. Call it US hegemony in action, with
a couple of murder twists spicing the flavor.
But just as quickly things can unravel in
today's topsy-turvy world politics, and the
strains of Russia's common cause may show up
sooner than expected. After all, Russia's
population may be diminishing, but Russia's
historical ego is not, and playing subservient to
Washington's whims in Russia's eastern back yard
will have its consequences.
In fact,
already Putin's stooges are hard pressed to
justify Russia's vote against their hitherto
reliable neighbor on the other side of Caspian
Sea. For example, Putin's press deputy openly
admitted that there was no evidence of an Iranian
military misuse of its peaceful nuclear program,
and that the International Atomic Energy Agency
had not found any "smoking gun" either. Yet he
goes on to allude to "intelligence from other
countries" and other such nonsense.
Wasn't
it Putin himself who in February 2005 confirmed
that all the information he had received indicated
that Iran's nuclear program was peaceful? And
didn't Lavrov echo that conclusion to US and
European interlocutors repeatedly throughout 2006?
What iota of new "intelligence", other than
fabricated "disinformation" by the US intelligence
community, has led Putin and Lavrov and other
enlightened Russian leaders to change their minds
and become ever so concerned about Iran's nuclear
proliferation?
What is more, the Kremlin's
assurances about the safety net around the Bushehr
project will most likely turn out hollow as well,
in light of the frank admission by Sergei
Kirieynko, the head of Russia's Atomic Agency,
that the sanctions regime imposed on Iran would
make it harder for Russian contractors to get the
parts from "foreign companies" needed to finish
Bushehr - already seven years overdue.
Even short of such technical difficulties,
less than two months from now, Putin and company
will be pressured at the Security Council to
curtail their nuclear cooperation with Iran even
further in view of Iran's rejection of the
council's demand to halt uranium-enrichment
activities.
All this spells trouble for
Russia's external image, however, in light of
Moscow's already abysmal record as a trusting
trade partner after Putin's exercise of "politics
of leverage" vis-a-vis Ukraine and Georgia, which
now are adamantly looking to diversify their
energy sources instead of remaining hostage to the
Kremlin's power politics with signed contracts.
Indeed, Russia's poor record with its
neighbors serves as more incentive for the
Iranians to master their independent nuclear-fuel
cycle and avoid becoming forever beholden to the
unpredictable, flimsy neighbors to the north.
Nor should the Iranians pursue the
memoranda of understanding they have signed with
Russia for several more reactors, now that Moscow
is on the verge of reneging on the pledge to
complete the exorbitant Bushehr plant, which over
time produced employment for more than 20,000
Russians and some 300 Russian companies.
In the end, Russia's grand nuclear bargain
with Iran may turn out as the casualty of its
other grand bargain with the White House, and the
question haunting them for some time will be: Was
it the right deal? The political future of
Vladimir Putin hangs on this question.
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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