In the aftermath of President George W
Bush's recent tour of the Persian Gulf, coinciding
with a similar trip by France's President Nicolas
Sarkozy, culminating in a deal with the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) for a small French base,
Iran's security calculus has changed. It has
almost reached the point of Tehran considering the
option of reciprocating the perceived excess
Western intrusion into its vicinity by allowing a
military base for China at one of Iran's Persian
Gulf ports or on one of its islands.
Without doubt, this would be a significant
geopolitical move on both Iran's and China's part,
bound to unsettle the US superpower that enjoys
unrivalled hegemony in the oil region and which has
unsettled China with its
recent civilian nuclear agreement with India,
widely interpreted as a long-term "containing
China" initiative.
In the tight interplay
of geopolitics and geo-economics, with China
heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran and
other Persian Gulf states, the trend is definitely
toward China's naval complement of its flurry of
energy deals in order to secure its precious oil
and (liquefied) gas cargo ships exiting through
the narrow corridors of the Strait of Hormuz.
Presently, China's strategy is confined to
the port city of Gwadar along the southwestern
coast of Pakistan in Balochistan province,
strategically located near the Hormuz Strait. Yet,
due to the close US-Pakistan relations, it is
highly improbable the US would permit Islamabad to
enter into strategic relations with Beijing so
that China, still lacking a formidable navy, could
utilize it for power projection in the region.
Not so with Iran, which is constantly
threatened by the US, and now France, and which
already enjoys observer status at the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), headed by China
and Russia. Iran's bid to join the SCO has been
stalled partly as a result of the standoff over
its nuclear program, but will likely succeed in
the not too distant future should the present
patterns of Iran-Russia and Iran-China cooperation
continue.
Regarding the latter, China has
already surpassed Germany as Iran's number one
trade partner. Sinopec, China's largest oil
refiner, has just finalized a multi-billion dollar
deal to develop the giant Yadavaran oil field, and
this is in addition to the "deal of the century"
contract for natural gas from Iran's immense North
Pars field. Chinese contractors are also busy
constructing oil terminals for Iran in the Caspian
Sea, extending the Tehran metro, building
airports, among other projects. And this while
China arms sales to Iran have included such hot
items as ballistic-missile technology and
air-defense radars.
The growing Iran-China
cooperation on the energy and trade fronts is
bound sooner or later to spill over into more
meaningful military cooperation and, in turn, this
depends to some extent on the ebbs and flows of
Iran-US and China-US "games of strategy",
particularly if China feels additional pressure
from the US on the geopolitical front.
For
sure, Iran's willingness to show a greater
willingness than hitherto to embrace China's naval
vessels making port calls to Iran is now in the
cards, this as a prelude to more extensive
agreements up to and including provisions for a
small Chinese naval outpost on one of Iran's
Persian Gulf islands.
Again, such a
scenario, sure to raise the serious ire of
Washington, depends on a number of intervening
variables. These include future US moves in the
Persian Gulf, for example, whether or not the US
military will end up utilizing some of the
man-made artificial islands set up by the UAE. If
so, thus enhancing the US's power projection
capability with regard to Iran, Tehran may be more
inclined to try to offset the US's leaning so
heavy on it by playing the "China card".
To reiterate, France's bold new move in
the Persian Gulf is equally unsettling to Tehran,
which finds the new pro-US turn of French foreign
policy detrimental to its national interests. The
net result is the cognitive bifurcation of "West"
versus "us" [1] that nicely dovetails with the new
"eastern orientation" of Iran under President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This is part and parcel of an
energetic new "globalist" approach that includes
new strategic openings with certain Latin and
Central American nations.
In other words,
it is sheer error to misinterpret Iran's "new
foreign policy" as one-dimensionally regional or
continental in nature, despite its narrow focus on
Iran's immediate regions.
"Iran cannot
remain indifferent to the aggressive geopolitical
maneuvers against it by Western nations [who are]
targeting Iran in no unmistakable language," says
a prominent political science professor at Tehran
University.
The professor loudly wondered
how France would react if all of a sudden Iran
started setting up bases near its coastline or,
for that matter, how Washington would respond to
an Iranian base in Iran-friendly Nicaragua? "They
definitely need a wake-up call that national
security is not a one-way process."
While
Iran's political pundits are not yet willing to
concede that Iran is now at the stage to allow a
Chinese base along its vast Persian Gulf
coastline, nonetheless quite a few agree that with
the changing geopolitical milieu representing
potentially serious national security threats to
Iran, all options must remain open.
Note 1. After all,
Sarkozy has stepped down from his predecessor's
talk of "multiploarism" and, instead, per an
article in this week's New York Times, "has
tempered that notion with talk about France's
place within its 'Western family', an expression
welcomed in Washington".
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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