Iran's Deadly Ambition (14 page)

Iran’s penetration of Georgia is only part of a larger push into the region known as the South Caucasus. Nor is it the most important one. That honor belongs to Iran’s strong relationship with Armenia, for whom the Islamic Republic has become “one of the main and most dependable allies” during the past two decades.
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The ties between Tehran and Yerevan date back to the Soviet collapse, when Iran became an early investor in Armenia’s defense industry and came to rely extensively on the newly independent state as a source for high-tech arms.
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In return, Tehran turned into a backer of Armenia in its claims against rival Azerbaijan for sovereignty over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Iran’s backing of Armenia had another, more immediate, cause as well. Azeris constitute Iran’s largest ethnic minority, making up nearly a fifth of the total Iranian population. At some 13 million souls today, that is significantly more than the entire population of the nation of Azerbaijan.
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As a result, the Iranian regime has been perennially haunted by the specter of Azeri separatism and has waged a persistent clandestine campaign aimed at destabilizing its northern neighbor, with the goal of ensuring that Azeri separatism never gains enough traction to pose a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity.
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This consideration, coupled with Azerbaijan’s pronounced tilt toward both Israel and the United States over the past decade, has only reinforced the importance for Iran’s leaders of backing Armenia, irrespective of the deep religious differences between Shiite Tehran and Christian Yerevan.

Armenia, for its part, has come to see Iran as a strategic lifeline, and for good reason. Yerevan, after all, has strained relations with three out of four of its neighbors. To the west, Armenia’s common border with Turkey remains sealed, a
product of political disagreements stemming from Ankara’s long-standing refusal to recognize the 1919 Armenian genocide. To Armenia’s east lies regional rival Azerbaijan, which contests ownership of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in what has turned into the region’s most prominent frozen conflict. And to the north lies pro-Western Georgia—a country with which ties have been problematic at best since the Russian-Georgian War in 2008, owing to Armenia’s warming relations with the Kremlin.
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All this makes Iran—which lies to the south—an indispensable trade and political partner and a gateway through which isolated Armenia can reach the world. “For Armenia,” explains Richard Giragosian of Yerevan’s Regional Studies Center, “Iran offers an important alternative to closed borders and unresolved conflict and tension with its other neighbors, and offers an opportunity to overcome Armenia’s geographic isolation as a small landlocked state.”
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Ties between the two countries reflect this reality. Over the past two decades, Yerevan and Tehran have forged a robust economic and military relationship, encapsulating multiple defense cooperation pacts, as well as a joint natural gas pipeline which, since its inauguration in 2007, has made Armenia a major energy client of the Islamic Republic.
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Trade between the two countries is robust, totaling $1 billion in 2010.
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In 2012, Iran ranked as Armenia’s fifth-largest trading partner in terms of both imports and exports.
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Military contacts between Tehran and Yerevan have ballooned over the past decade, with new accords on a range of strategic issues, from counterterrorism to military exchanges.
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Even Iran’s traditionally strained ties to Azerbaijan are on the upswing. Political ties between the two countries have improved markedly, with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his Azeri counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, meeting four times in 2014 alone.
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Recent months have seen better economic
ties between the two sides as well, with new cooperation being considered on joint energy projects and border-security, customs, and legal issues. As an indication of this unfolding reality, in December 2014, the Azeri parliament approved a joint declaration of friendship and cooperation with the Islamic Republic.
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These steps threaten, among other things, to adversely affect the unfolding strategic bonds between Azerbaijan and Israel.

Yet Iran has found even more pliable partners in the post-Soviet space.

IRAN IN THE STANS

In the spring of 2013, the U.S. government took aim at a little-known Iranian businessman named Babak Zanjani. That April, the Treasury Department blacklisted Zanjani and several front companies he controlled for moving “billions of dollars on behalf of the Iranian regime” and for helping the Iranian government to conduct energy trade globally in violation of U.S. and Western sanctions.
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A key hub of this network was the tiny Central Asian nation of Tajikistan.
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The Treasury action was not entirely unprecedented. Zanjani had been sanctioned by the European Union for expediting Iranian oil deals and laundering the revenue for Iran in Dushanbe.
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(Since then, the Iranian businessman has received an unexpected reprieve; in the summer of 2014, the European Union rolled back its 2012 sanctions against him, citing a lack of evidence.
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)

That Zanjani chose Tajikistan as a base for his activities is not surprising. The Central Asian republic is known to be a notorious hub for illicit finance. The Basel Institute on Governance, a Swiss policy institute, ranked Tajikistan the fourth-most-at-risk nation in the world for corrupt financial practices in its 2013 AML (Anti-Money Laundering) Index.
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Moreover, Iran maintains deep cultural, linguistic, and historical
roots in the country dating back centuries. Indeed, of all the Persian Empire’s former holdings, Tajikistan, where the language remains Farsi written in Cyrillic characters, has the strongest Iranian influence.

Those bonds were on display in the immediate post-Soviet period, when Tehran assumed an outsized role in Tajikistan’s simmering civil war, which stretched from May 1992 until the summer of 1997. During that period, Iran played a distinctly disruptive part, supporting—and radicalizing—the country’s various Islamist political factions, insinuating itself into Tajik schools and culture, and fomenting pro-Iranian grassroots sentiment.
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Concerns over this growing influence led many U.S. politicians to ignore, or even tacitly approve of, Russia’s reengagement with Dushanbe in the late 1990s.
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The belief, clearly, was that a Tajikistan under Moscow’s sway was more desirable than one under Tehran’s.

But Iran’s outreach continued. A slew of commercial activity, both private and public, led to a notable uptick in trade, and the Iranian government ended the decade of the 2000s as one of Tajikistan’s main trading partners. Iran continued to proffer attractive economic projects to Dushanbe, as it did in 2012, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visiting Tajikistan to celebrate the Persian New Year (Nowruz), pledged greater economic cooperation in the form of new gas and water pipelines—projects that would be game changers for Tajikistan and allow the country to break its dependency on China and neighboring Uzbekistan for energy.
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All this has helped push Tajikistan decisively into Iran’s orbit. Tajik foreign minister Hamrokhon Zarifi acknowledged his country’s orientation in July 2013, when he called the Islamic Republic a “strategic partner” of his government.
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Iran’s ties with the other Central Asian states have followed the same upward trajectory. The past decade has seen Iran make notable inroads in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. These contacts are measured less in economic ties—Iran’s trade with the region remains largely peripheral
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—and more in political acceptance and pragmatic engagement.
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Tehran’s interest is very much a modern phenomenon. “Despite centuries of cultural, commercial and political interchange,” scholars Sebastien Peyrouse and Sadykzhan Ibraimov have noted, “Central Asia is a region that contemporary Iran has largely ignored.”
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As a sign of this neglect, it was not until 2001 that Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, articulated anything resembling a coherent strategy toward Eurasia.
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That is decidedly not the case today. For much of the past decade, Iran has viewed the region in tactical terms. In the words of one observer, “Iran’s closer cooperation with the Central Asian countries, in particular with Tajikistan, decrease[s] the impact of the sanctions, imposed by the international community against the country.”
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Today, however, as a function of its expanding foreign-policy horizons, Iran is thinking bigger and seeking to reclaim its historic geopolitical role in Eurasia.
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And while this effort is still far from being realized, two things are already clear. The first is that Iran’s ayatollahs are angling for a more prominent role in the post-Soviet space. The second is that they are succeeding.

CHAPTER

VI

Iran’s Asian Lifeline

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n January 26, 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces, convened a major press conference at the Pentagon. The objective was to outline the policies and programs prioritized by the Pentagon as part of an effort to build a “smaller and leaner, but agile, flexible, ready and technologically advanced” military.
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The centerpiece of the event was, without a doubt, the unveiling of a new strategic priority: to rebalance American resources and pay more attention to Asia.

“U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities,” the accompanying military policy-planning document outlined. “Accordingly, while the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region.”
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The rationale behind the move was understandable. The preceding three years had been difficult ones for the Obama administration, punctuated as they were by the turmoil of
the Arab Spring, the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, and numerous other crises in the Middle East for which the White House did not seem to have a ready response. America’s relations with Europe, too, had soured significantly, as Team Obama progressively walked away from NATO defense and security commitments in pursuit of a better relationship with Russia. Against this backdrop, a pivot toward Asia was widely seen as a quest for greener foreign-policy pastures.

It was also opportunistic. China’s so-called peaceful rise to regional prominence, and the increasingly adventurist foreign policy pursued by Beijing as a result, had created widespread unease among Asian nations. The Obama administration was eager to exploit opportunities created by these jitters and by the willingness of regional states to cooperate more fully with Washington on security and political issues.

But America was not alone. Other nations tilted toward Asia as well, viewing it as an arena of economic opportunity and strategic engagement. The list includes Russia, which embarked on its own pivot toward Asia years ago, and Turkey, whose prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has stressed the country’s distinct Asian ambitions on many occasions. But it was Iran’s focus on the Asia-Pacific that was perhaps the most interesting.

For Iran’s pivot, although undoubtedly more rudimentary than that of the United States, nonetheless held enormous strategic significance. Over the past several years, Asia has emerged as an economic lifeline for the Islamic Republic and is an arena where regional partners have helped lessen the economic pain caused by widening American and European sanctions. But Asia is much more than that; it is a theater in which Tehran has begun to successfully put its global vision into action.

A HELPING HAND FROM CHINA

In Iran’s Asia strategy, no country matters more than China. In the three and a half decades since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran and Beijing have forged a vibrant strategic partnership—one animated by mutual commercial and military benefit and a shared interest in diluting perceived Western (specifically, American) hegemony. Today, ties between Tehran and Beijing are driven, above all, by one thing: energy.

Over the past fifteen years, China’s rapid economic growth, averaging some 8 percent annually, has generated a voracious appetite for energy. China’s oil consumption is now estimated to be growing at a rate of 7.5 percent per year—seven times faster than that of the United States.
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In September 2013, China surpassed the United States as the world’s leading importer of oil. And by the end of the decade, it will spend a projected $500 billion annually on the purchase of crude oil from foreign sources.
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Even so, China faces a looming energy deficit—one that could top nine million barrels of crude daily by the end of this decade, according to some projections.
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All this has made Iran—a bona fide energy powerhouse that holds the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and some 10 percent of the planet’s proven oil reserves—an indispensable partner for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Sino-Iranian ties reflect this realization: in 2004, the countries inked two massive accords, worth an estimated $100 billion over twenty-five years, that gave Chinese firms the rights to develop Iranian petroleum and natural gas reserves.
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In 2005, their bilateral energy partnership was estimated to be worth in excess of $120 billion.
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