Iran's Deadly Ambition (13 page)

For years, however, the bloc held Iran at arm’s length, worried over its fraught relations with the West, one of several problems Tehran could bring into the fold.
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Cognizant of this fact, Rouhani used his September 2013 visit to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, to marshal support among SCO members for his country’s nuclear program, to back Russia’s stance on Syria, and to call for the ouster of the U.S.-led coalition from Afghanistan.
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The charm offensive had the desired effect. By the following year, SCO members were singing a decidedly different tune. In September 2014, at the organization’s summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the bloc finalized the mechanism for including new members, paving the way for Iran, as well as Pakistan and India, to finally be brought formally into the fold.
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The reasons for the move were practical. The impending U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan created an opening
for both Beijing and Moscow to play a greater role there. At the same time, SCO members were painfully aware of the possibility that, without greater counterterrorism cooperation among regional states, America’s exit could lead to the resurgence of the Taliban and other Islamist forces in the geopolitical periphery of Russia and China. The resulting consensus in Beijing, as elsewhere, was that an expansion of the bloc had “become absolutely necessary.”
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All this, naturally, is music to the ears of Iranian policy makers, who have made clear that full membership in the bloc remains a strategic objective for the Islamic Republic.
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But such hopes have been put on hold—at least temporarily. Just days after the September 2014 summit, SCO officials declared that Iran’s bid to join the organization as a full member could not be considered at the present time on account of the bloc’s stipulation that “countries under international sanctions cannot get membership.”
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Yet that state of affairs is exceedingly temporary. Should Iran hammer out a deal with the West over its nuclear program, there is little doubt that it will gain SCO membership in short order. Indeed, officials in Moscow are banking on it and are actively attempting to establish a link between the two issues. According to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, membership for the Islamic Republic in the SCO is “becoming more actual in order to settle Iran’s nuclear issue.”
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In other words, Moscow sees Tehran’s inclusion in the bloc as a sweetener for Iranian good behavior.

Others, however, worry that Iranian membership in the SCO could, at the very least, make the Islamic Republic more geopolitically adventurous. At worst, given the size of China’s economy and the combined energy potential of the SCO’s Central Asian members, it could crush any chance for the West to isolate the Islamic Republic in a meaningful way.

Yet Iran’s courtship of the SCO is just part of a larger
story. The past two decades have seen a concerted effort by the Iranian government to expand its footprint throughout the territory once occupied by the Soviet Union. It has done so by leveraging its historical, linguistic, and cultural ties to the “Stans” of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), by exploiting the countries of the South Caucasus as conduits for its illicit nuclear trade, and by aligning itself with the region’s emerging security architectures, like the SCO. But nowhere in the region is Tehran’s footprint more significant than in Moscow, where the Islamic Republic now enjoys a deep—and growing—strategic partnership with a fellow rogue state: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

On August 5, 2014, as the planned November deadline for nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers approached, Russia’s energy ministry announced a most unwelcome development. While meeting in Moscow, Iran’s oil czar, Bijan Zangeneh, and his Russian counterpart, Alexander Novak, had signed a five-year memorandum of understanding worth an estimated $20 billion, laying the groundwork for a deeper economic relationship between the two countries, including an oil-for-goods swap that could see Russia purchase as much as 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil daily, approximately a fifth of the Islamic Republic’s total output.
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The deal stunned Western policy makers. It had been in the works for months, even as Western diplomats worked feverishly to pressure Iran over its nuclear program. And if fully implemented, it held the power to blunt the effect of U.S. and European sanctions against the Islamic Republic. As such, it was a telling reminder of the strategic bonds between Iran and Russia, and how that relationship could undermine Western efforts to bring Iran’s nuclear program to heel.

The contemporary strategic bonds between Moscow and Tehran date back to the early 1990s, when Russia, reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union, sought—and acquired—a new strategic partner in Iran. To be sure, close diplomatic ties between the two countries had existed during the latter part of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union supported the Islamist opposition to Iran’s shah and subsequently made common cause with Khomeini’s newly minted revolution. But it was in the post–Cold War era that bilateral cooperation truly flourished.

For Moscow, partnership with Iran was driven by three primary interests. Commercially, Russia’s once-robust defense industry was reeling from the Soviet collapse and in dire need of new clients. Iran, then coming out of its costly eight-year conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, fit that bill perfectly and became nothing short of an economic lifeline for the struggling Russian state.
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Ideologically, Moscow was eager to secure Tehran’s good behavior in the post-Soviet space. The breakup of the USSR had untethered five majority-Muslim states (the so-called Stans) from Russia. Officials in Moscow also worried that the wave of Islamic radicalism then sweeping the region could lead to a further fragmentation of Russia itself, and that Iran, which had a long history of fomenting instability abroad, could play a hand in it if it was not properly mollified. Finally, Moscow was also searching for allies to augment its diminished post–Cold War status and help it to challenge America’s perceived hegemony in world affairs. Iran’s radical regime, with its long-standing hatred of the Great Satan, seemed like a logical partner.

Iran’s motivations dovetailed with those of Russia. In the early, heady days after the USSR’s collapse, Iran’s leaders hoped for expanded influence in the post-Soviet space.
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But years of grinding war with neighboring Iraq left the Islamic Republic demoralized, militarily diminished, and in need of
a patron. As a result, Iran’s leaders abandoned their grandiose hopes for a “Union of Islamic Republics” on the territory of the former Soviet Union in favor of partnership with the Kremlin.

At first, it would be fair to say that the resulting strategic alignment was a marriage of convenience; it was a way for Moscow to play in Mideast politics in the wake of the Soviet collapse as an external ally for a struggling Tehran. Over time, however, it became much more.

The Kremlin, for instance, emerged as a key enabler of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In the mid-1990s, despite U.S. and European concerns, Russia signed an agreement to build a plutonium plant in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr.
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It also committed to providing the Islamic Republic with nuclear training and know-how, which helped Iran build the critical knowledge base necessary to eventually cross the nuclear threshold.
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In other words, much of our contemporary problem with Iran’s nuclear program is of Russian manufacture.

Over the years, that assistance has continued, even as Western powers have tried to convince Iran to curtail its nuclear activities. As recently as November 2014, Russia inked an agreement to build two additional reactors in the Islamic Republic as supplements to Bushehr.
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That, however, may be just the beginning. Construction of the two new plants could be “possibly followed by another six,” news coverage of the arrangement made clear, making Moscow a major stakeholder in Iran’s nuclear future.
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Over the years, Moscow has also provided Tehran with much-needed armaments for its ongoing military modernization. In 2000, as a reflection of their burgeoning strategic ties, Iran ranked as Russia’s third-largest arms client.
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This assistance has allowed Iran to launch a full-spectrum modernization
of its military capabilities.
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In September 2013, Russia announced an $800-million deal under which it would, among other things, provide Iran with new S-300 anti-aircraft missiles.
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The move represented a significant reversal; back in 2007, the two countries had signed a deal for Iran to acquire the S-300, but the arrangement was cancelled three years later as a result of U.N. pressure and Russian jitters over potential Israeli military action against Iran.

Today, the relationship is even more significant. Over the past year, as a result of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, Moscow has reverted to its traditional adversarial role vis-à-vis the West. As a result, Russia’s relationship with Iran has become more important than ever before.

In November 2013, Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych blinked in the face of Russian pressure and reversed political course, turning away from the European Union. Up until then, Kyiv had been on track to sign an association agreement with the European Union that would have put it on a solidly Euro-Atlantic path. But Russian political pressure and the Kremlin’s promise of a $15-billion bailout for Ukraine’s struggling economy led Yanukovych to scrap plans for integration with Europe in favor of a supporting role in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s premier economic project, the Eurasian Union.

That decision prompted widespread protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities—a wave of popular discontent that became known as the Euromaidan. Weeks of unrest succeeded in removing Yanukovych from power, but they also precipitated a massive Russian response. Moscow stage-managed a referendum in Ukraine’s heavily pro-Russian Crimean Peninsula and then annexed the territory into the Russian Federation. It also launched a sustained campaign of subversion in Ukraine’s south and east, assisting pro-Russian rebels
to establish, and then hold, their own separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia’s strategy, which relies on irregular detachments, covert influence, and low-intensity conflict, has been dubbed a “hybrid war” by U.S. and European officials.
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It has also engendered a significant Western response; to date, the United States and European Union have applied multiple rounds of sanctions on the Russian Federation and worked to exclude Russia from multilateral fora, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and G8. So strained are relations between Russia and the West that observers actively talk about a new cold war with Moscow.
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Yet there is little doubt that the Western response to Russian aggression has been constrained, at least in part, by a harsh reality. With its permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, its nuclear arsenal, and its ubiquitous presence in world affairs, Moscow remains a key player on a multitude of international issues—and perhaps none is more important than Iran’s nuclear capability. Russia is a core member of the P5+1, and its alignment is essential to the diplomatic consensus aimed at limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All this, Roger Cohen of the
New York Times
astutely points out, is bound to influence and constrain White House policy toward the Kremlin, lest a forceful response make it more difficult to secure a deal with Iran’s ayatollahs.
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If Moscow has any say in the matter, its role could become more important still. Current plans reportedly under discussion between Iran and the P5+1 envision a nuclear compromise in which the Islamic Republic would send its spent uranium to Russia for safekeeping.
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Such a move would effectively make the Kremlin, now hewing to an increasingly anti-Western line, the custodian of Iran’s nuclear breakout potential, with all of the security implications this connotes.

COURTING THE SOUTH CAUCASUS

The Republic of Georgia is far and away the most pro-American nation in Eurasia. The country’s 2003 Rose Revolution, which saw the ouster of pro-Kremlin strongman Eduard Shevardnadze and his replacement with Western-oriented Mikheil Saakashvili, made it an early adopter of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda.” That placed Tbilisi on a Euro-Atlantic trajectory, reversing decades of subservience to Moscow. Policy makers in Washington took notice, and when Georgia found itself in Russia’s military crosshairs in August 2008, the Bush administration quickly provided both humanitarian aid and public political support.
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In a testament to its gratitude, the bustling four-lane thoroughfare that stretches from the country’s main airport through the nation’s capital is named the George W. Bush Highway.

Yet Georgia is also a major hub of Iranian activity. A fall 2014 investigation by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, found that Iranian proxies and middlemen have used Georgia—itself once a part of the Persian Empire—extensively “to facilitate banking transactions for sanctioned Iranian entities” and to insinuate themselves into the local economy through the acquisition of local businesses and companies. These businesses, according to the study, include shipping, trading, and transportation companies.
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Iran’s presence is particularly significant in Georgia’s Poti Free Industrial Zone, a tax-free area on the Black Sea that has been in operation since 2010. “Of the 166 companies currently registered, Iranian nationals own 84, or 52.5 percent,” the study notes. “Together, over 60 percent of Poti Free Zone registered entities can be traced back to Iranian ownership.”
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It is a situation that Georgia’s government, now
headed by academic and politician Giorgi Margvelashvili, has not yet begun to address in earnest.