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RUSSIA AND IRAN: OLD NEIGHBOURS, NEW RIVALS
James Owen
Open Democracy, UK
March 30 2006
The already entangled history of two post-imperial, post-revolutionary
states - Russia and Iran - is being complicated today by strategic
competition, reports James Owen.
Russia's relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are undergoing a
gradual change. The last decade has been a period of bilateral bonhomie
fuelled by shared commercial interests, arms sales, common views
of the threat of Islamist radicalism, and the transfer of nuclear
expertise. Indeed, Iran has in this period constituted a crucial
part of Russia's overall approach to its Eurasian ("near abroad")
neighbourhood. Today, Russia is starting to see Iran as a geopolitical
rival. Russia's central role in the crisis over Iran's nuclear-research
programmes, currently a matter of intense negotiation in and between
the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), is only the most visible indicator of a relationship
becoming more uneasy and competitive.
The history of the relationship has not been smooth. Russia has at
various points invaded, annexed and bullied Iran. Persia (as the
country then was known) lost all its possessions in the Caucasus
to Moscow by 1828 and in subsequent decades became a mere pawn in
the "great game" of the period where Britain's protection of its
interests in India collided with Russia's ambition to have access to
the Persian Gulf.
A century later, an era of separate spheres of influence broke
down under pressures of war. The Soviet Union mounted a full-scale
invasion of northern Iran in 1941, and after 1945 its refusal to
withdraw from the Iranian part of Azerbaijan was one of the cold
war's opening gambits. The dispute was a portent: it helped cement a
United States-Iranian strategic alliance that was to last (with an
interruption during the Mossadegh period and the US-sponsored coup
of 1953) until 1979.
The revolution in Iran in 1979, followed ten months later by the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a decade-long war against jihadi
militants, did nothing to draw the two countries together. It was
only in the 1990s - after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the end
of the devastating Iran-Iraq war, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan
in 1988-89, and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself
at the end of 1991 - that the Russian-Iranian relationship thawed.
The new post-cold-war, post-Soviet era transformed geopolitical
realities in the region and fundamentally altered the strategic mindset
of Moscow and Tehran. The still embryonic Russian state encountered
an Iran still counting the cost of its long conflict with its Arab
neighbour. The newly-independent lands between them - from Armenia
to Tajikistan - were brimming with ethno-nationalist discontent;
the United States, an ideological fixation of Russian and Iranian
elites alike, had emerged as the sole global superpower. In short,
the conditions were ripe for cooperation.
Also in openDemocracy on the external relationships of Iran and Russia:
Paul Rogers, "Confident Iran" (March 2005)
Trita Parsi, "The Iran-Israel cold war" (October 2005)
Paul Rogers, "Iran in Israel's firing-range" (December 2005)
Paul Rogers, "The United States, nuclear weapons, and Iran"
(January 2006)
If you find this material enjoyable or provoking please consider
commenting in our forums - and supporting openDemocracy by sending
us a donation so that we can continue our work for democratic dialogue
A blossoming relationship
Iran lacked the muscle to challenge Russian hegemony. It could scarcely
influence the secular, nation-building projects of central Asia's new
republics (whose predominantly Turkic origins in any case made them
wary of Tehran). Iran thus calculated that Russian preponderance
there was preferable as a counterbalance to the US and a possible
proxy through which to secure Iran's own interests. As a result, it
refrained from proselytising political Islam, criticising Russia over
Chechnya, or showing any sympathy with the Sunni, jihadi worldview
of al-Qaida and other Islamist groups in central Asia (such as the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMU] and Hizb-ut-Tahrir).
Russia and Iran discovered (somewhat to their mutual astonishment)
that in face of regional instability and vulnerability to domestic
separatism, that they shared common interests and perceptions of
broader threats. A honeymoon blossomed.
In the 1990s, Russia and Iran cooperated in the south Caucasus,
central Asia and Afghanistan. Iran conformed to the Russian lead on
Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-majority enclave inside Azerbaijan
that was the occasion of a bitter war between Yerevan and Baku.
Together they enforced a ceasefire to end the bloody civil war in
Tajikistan. Russia and Iran also aided Ahmed Shah Massoud and the
Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The defeat of the Taliban - whose hosting of al-Qaida and radical
jihadi currents sent ripple effects across the region, making it as
much a threat to Russian interests as to Shi'a Iran - presented a
further cause for bilateral cooperation: the drugs trade. Russia and
Iran combined to combat the trafficking networks that began (after
Kandahar's collapse in December 2001) to link Afghan poppy-fields to
markets in and via Iran, central Asia and Russia.
But the main stimulant to new bilateral cooperation was trade. The
Russian desire to sell in areas where it still produced marketable
goods, and the Iranian demand to buy (supported by high oil revenues)
developed apace. Moscow has provided consumer goods, foodstuffs,
and oil and gas equipment, and has assisted Iran on infrastructural
projects. It has also supplied ballistic-missile technology, chemical
and biological programmes and a range of lucrative contracts for
aircraft, helicopters, submarines, tanks and air-defence missile
systems.
Most controversially, it has provided the religious oligarchy in
Iran with a nuclear reactor at Bushehr and associated fuel-services
technology. On its side, the military-nuclear nexus has served
a regenerative economic function, a means for Russia to match
capabilities to great-power bravado and to redeploy Soviet expertise in
lucrative new ways (the Bushehr contract in 1995 was worth $800 million
for Russia and employed up to 1,500 on-site Russian scientists).
The nuclear partnership reflects institutional forces at work in the
developing Russian state. It may have been the Pakistani scientist and
proliferator of nuclear technology Abdul Qadeer Khan who supplied
nuclear material to Iran, but Russia has also played a part in
servicing Iran's nuclear ambitions. Vladimir Putin's abrogation of
the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement in November 2000 (set up to ensure
Russian compliance with the non-proliferation treaty [NPT] and the
IAEA) sent a defiant message to the US and underlined the importance
of the profit-motive in Russian decision-making. It also reflected
the sectoral influence of the military-industrial complex on state
policy and corruption.
At the same time as these commercial and nuclear linkages were being
forged, the praetorians of the oil-and-gas sector were becoming the
ascendant force in Russia. This was an early signal that the honeymoon
was turning sour.
The most evident arena of tension is the Caspian, where Russia and
Iran are becoming increasingly hostile towards each other. Moscow,
which views oil and gas as both a strategic asset and an instrument of
geopolitics in this region, is at odds with Tehran on two key points:
the legal status of the Caspian Sea and the export of its energy
resources. When the Soviet Union existed, it controlled the Caspian
along with Iran under the legally-codified principle of joint ownership
(entailing equality of access and use). In an era when several new
littoral states have a stake in the sea and what lies within, Russia
supports the view of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan that the seabed and
its resources should be divided along national lines.
Alongside the Caspian resources issue, Russian-Iranian relations are in
flux over energy pipelines. Russia's opposition to the (US-sponsored)
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Trans-Caspian pipelines has receded, while Iran
has signed gas agreements with Armenia, negotiated potential export
terms with Ukraine, and seeks an edge over Russia as a producer and
provider of gas to Turkey.
A different symmetry
The fall of the Soviet Union provided a clear rationale for
Russian-Iranian cooperation. Russia and Iran came together in the
face of common interests and threats, and to offset United States
hegemony. In this context, Russia's relations with Iran underline its
rejection of a unipolar world, its sense of itself as a Eurasian state,
and its continued avowal of derzhavnost (great-powerness). For most
of its life this relationship has been one of asymmetrical balance,
involving Russian predominance and Iranian concessions or pragmatism.
Today, an Iran more assertive since the election of Mahmood
Ahmadinejad is disruptive to that balance, and incidentally exposes
Russia's deep-rooted westerncentric orientation. Russia has pursued a
careful line over the Iran nuclear controversy, but where it matters
it has tilted towards the United States and European Union ("EU3")
side. Russia, after all, cannot avoid a concern that Iran could one
day point nuclear weapons in its own direction.
Russia still holds limited influence in Iran. But the failure of the
compromise deal it offered over enrichment of uranium for Iran's civil
nuclear-research purposes is a further sign of a developing trend. The
components of this long, complex relationship may be stuck with each
other, but each is looking for new partners.
James Owen
Open Democracy, UK
March 30 2006
The already entangled history of two post-imperial, post-revolutionary
states - Russia and Iran - is being complicated today by strategic
competition, reports James Owen.
Russia's relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are undergoing a
gradual change. The last decade has been a period of bilateral bonhomie
fuelled by shared commercial interests, arms sales, common views
of the threat of Islamist radicalism, and the transfer of nuclear
expertise. Indeed, Iran has in this period constituted a crucial
part of Russia's overall approach to its Eurasian ("near abroad")
neighbourhood. Today, Russia is starting to see Iran as a geopolitical
rival. Russia's central role in the crisis over Iran's nuclear-research
programmes, currently a matter of intense negotiation in and between
the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), is only the most visible indicator of a relationship
becoming more uneasy and competitive.
The history of the relationship has not been smooth. Russia has at
various points invaded, annexed and bullied Iran. Persia (as the
country then was known) lost all its possessions in the Caucasus
to Moscow by 1828 and in subsequent decades became a mere pawn in
the "great game" of the period where Britain's protection of its
interests in India collided with Russia's ambition to have access to
the Persian Gulf.
A century later, an era of separate spheres of influence broke
down under pressures of war. The Soviet Union mounted a full-scale
invasion of northern Iran in 1941, and after 1945 its refusal to
withdraw from the Iranian part of Azerbaijan was one of the cold
war's opening gambits. The dispute was a portent: it helped cement a
United States-Iranian strategic alliance that was to last (with an
interruption during the Mossadegh period and the US-sponsored coup
of 1953) until 1979.
The revolution in Iran in 1979, followed ten months later by the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a decade-long war against jihadi
militants, did nothing to draw the two countries together. It was
only in the 1990s - after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the end
of the devastating Iran-Iraq war, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan
in 1988-89, and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself
at the end of 1991 - that the Russian-Iranian relationship thawed.
The new post-cold-war, post-Soviet era transformed geopolitical
realities in the region and fundamentally altered the strategic mindset
of Moscow and Tehran. The still embryonic Russian state encountered
an Iran still counting the cost of its long conflict with its Arab
neighbour. The newly-independent lands between them - from Armenia
to Tajikistan - were brimming with ethno-nationalist discontent;
the United States, an ideological fixation of Russian and Iranian
elites alike, had emerged as the sole global superpower. In short,
the conditions were ripe for cooperation.
Also in openDemocracy on the external relationships of Iran and Russia:
Paul Rogers, "Confident Iran" (March 2005)
Trita Parsi, "The Iran-Israel cold war" (October 2005)
Paul Rogers, "Iran in Israel's firing-range" (December 2005)
Paul Rogers, "The United States, nuclear weapons, and Iran"
(January 2006)
If you find this material enjoyable or provoking please consider
commenting in our forums - and supporting openDemocracy by sending
us a donation so that we can continue our work for democratic dialogue
A blossoming relationship
Iran lacked the muscle to challenge Russian hegemony. It could scarcely
influence the secular, nation-building projects of central Asia's new
republics (whose predominantly Turkic origins in any case made them
wary of Tehran). Iran thus calculated that Russian preponderance
there was preferable as a counterbalance to the US and a possible
proxy through which to secure Iran's own interests. As a result, it
refrained from proselytising political Islam, criticising Russia over
Chechnya, or showing any sympathy with the Sunni, jihadi worldview
of al-Qaida and other Islamist groups in central Asia (such as the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMU] and Hizb-ut-Tahrir).
Russia and Iran discovered (somewhat to their mutual astonishment)
that in face of regional instability and vulnerability to domestic
separatism, that they shared common interests and perceptions of
broader threats. A honeymoon blossomed.
In the 1990s, Russia and Iran cooperated in the south Caucasus,
central Asia and Afghanistan. Iran conformed to the Russian lead on
Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-majority enclave inside Azerbaijan
that was the occasion of a bitter war between Yerevan and Baku.
Together they enforced a ceasefire to end the bloody civil war in
Tajikistan. Russia and Iran also aided Ahmed Shah Massoud and the
Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The defeat of the Taliban - whose hosting of al-Qaida and radical
jihadi currents sent ripple effects across the region, making it as
much a threat to Russian interests as to Shi'a Iran - presented a
further cause for bilateral cooperation: the drugs trade. Russia and
Iran combined to combat the trafficking networks that began (after
Kandahar's collapse in December 2001) to link Afghan poppy-fields to
markets in and via Iran, central Asia and Russia.
But the main stimulant to new bilateral cooperation was trade. The
Russian desire to sell in areas where it still produced marketable
goods, and the Iranian demand to buy (supported by high oil revenues)
developed apace. Moscow has provided consumer goods, foodstuffs,
and oil and gas equipment, and has assisted Iran on infrastructural
projects. It has also supplied ballistic-missile technology, chemical
and biological programmes and a range of lucrative contracts for
aircraft, helicopters, submarines, tanks and air-defence missile
systems.
Most controversially, it has provided the religious oligarchy in
Iran with a nuclear reactor at Bushehr and associated fuel-services
technology. On its side, the military-nuclear nexus has served
a regenerative economic function, a means for Russia to match
capabilities to great-power bravado and to redeploy Soviet expertise in
lucrative new ways (the Bushehr contract in 1995 was worth $800 million
for Russia and employed up to 1,500 on-site Russian scientists).
The nuclear partnership reflects institutional forces at work in the
developing Russian state. It may have been the Pakistani scientist and
proliferator of nuclear technology Abdul Qadeer Khan who supplied
nuclear material to Iran, but Russia has also played a part in
servicing Iran's nuclear ambitions. Vladimir Putin's abrogation of
the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement in November 2000 (set up to ensure
Russian compliance with the non-proliferation treaty [NPT] and the
IAEA) sent a defiant message to the US and underlined the importance
of the profit-motive in Russian decision-making. It also reflected
the sectoral influence of the military-industrial complex on state
policy and corruption.
At the same time as these commercial and nuclear linkages were being
forged, the praetorians of the oil-and-gas sector were becoming the
ascendant force in Russia. This was an early signal that the honeymoon
was turning sour.
The most evident arena of tension is the Caspian, where Russia and
Iran are becoming increasingly hostile towards each other. Moscow,
which views oil and gas as both a strategic asset and an instrument of
geopolitics in this region, is at odds with Tehran on two key points:
the legal status of the Caspian Sea and the export of its energy
resources. When the Soviet Union existed, it controlled the Caspian
along with Iran under the legally-codified principle of joint ownership
(entailing equality of access and use). In an era when several new
littoral states have a stake in the sea and what lies within, Russia
supports the view of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan that the seabed and
its resources should be divided along national lines.
Alongside the Caspian resources issue, Russian-Iranian relations are in
flux over energy pipelines. Russia's opposition to the (US-sponsored)
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Trans-Caspian pipelines has receded, while Iran
has signed gas agreements with Armenia, negotiated potential export
terms with Ukraine, and seeks an edge over Russia as a producer and
provider of gas to Turkey.
A different symmetry
The fall of the Soviet Union provided a clear rationale for
Russian-Iranian cooperation. Russia and Iran came together in the
face of common interests and threats, and to offset United States
hegemony. In this context, Russia's relations with Iran underline its
rejection of a unipolar world, its sense of itself as a Eurasian state,
and its continued avowal of derzhavnost (great-powerness). For most
of its life this relationship has been one of asymmetrical balance,
involving Russian predominance and Iranian concessions or pragmatism.
Today, an Iran more assertive since the election of Mahmood
Ahmadinejad is disruptive to that balance, and incidentally exposes
Russia's deep-rooted westerncentric orientation. Russia has pursued a
careful line over the Iran nuclear controversy, but where it matters
it has tilted towards the United States and European Union ("EU3")
side. Russia, after all, cannot avoid a concern that Iran could one
day point nuclear weapons in its own direction.
Russia still holds limited influence in Iran. But the failure of the
compromise deal it offered over enrichment of uranium for Iran's civil
nuclear-research purposes is a further sign of a developing trend. The
components of this long, complex relationship may be stuck with each
other, but each is looking for new partners.