China and the Axis of the Sanctioned

1 view
Skip to first unread message

Bill Totten

unread,
May 23, 2023, 9:03:01 PM5/23/23
to GoogleGroups
China and the Axis of the Sanctioned

How America's Divide-and-Rule Strategy in the Middle East Backfired

by Juan Cole

https://tomdispatch.com (May 16 2023)


https://static.dw.com/image/64953065_605.jpg
Featured image: Life of Lieutenant General Yitzhak Rabin, 7th IDF
Chief of Staff in photos by Israel Defense Forces is licensed under CC
BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi
Jinping's foreign minister Wang Yi delivered a seismic shock in
Washington. There he stood between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of
Iran's National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser
Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban. They were awkwardly shaking hands on an
agreement to reestablish mutual diplomatic ties. That picture should
have brought to mind a 1993 photo of President Bill Clinton hosting
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat on
the White House lawn as they agreed to the Oslo Accords. And that
long-gone moment was itself an after-effect of the halo of
invincibility the United States had gained in the wake of the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming American victory in the 1991
Gulf War.

This time around, the US had been cut out of the picture, a sea change
reflecting not just Chinese initiatives but Washington's incompetence,
arrogance, and double-dealing in the subsequent three decades in the
Middle East. An aftershock came in early May as concerns gripped
Congress about the covert construction of a Chinese naval base in the
United Arab Emirates, a US ally hosting thousands of American troops.
The Abu Dhabi facility would be an add-on to the small base at
Djibouti on the east coast of Africa used by the People's Liberation
Army-Navy (PLAN) for combating piracy, evacuating noncombatants from
conflict zones, and perhaps regional espionage.

China's interest in cooling off tensions between the Iranian
ayatollahs and the Saudi monarchy arose, however, not from any
military ambitions in the region but because it imports significant
amounts of oil from both countries. Another impetus was undoubtedly
President Xi's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, which aims
to expand Eurasia's overland and maritime economic infrastructure for
a vast growth of regional trade - with China, of course, at its heart.
That country has already invested billions in a China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC) and in developing the Pakistani Arabian
seaport of Gwadar to facilitate the transmission of Gulf oil to its
northwestern provinces.

Having Iran and Saudi Arabia on a war footing endangered Chinese
economic interests. Remember that, in September 2019, an Iran proxy or
Iran itself launched a drone attack on the massive refinery complex at
al-Abqaiq, briefly knocking out five million barrels a day of Saudi
capacity. That country now exports a staggering 1.7 million barrels of
petroleum daily to China and future drone strikes (or similar events)
threaten those supplies. China is also believed to receive as much as
1.2 million barrels a day from Iran, though it does so surreptitiously
because of US sanctions. In December 2022, when nationwide protests
forced the end of Xi's no-Covid lockdown measures, that country's
appetite for petroleum was once again unleashed, with demand already
up 22% over 2022.

So, any further instability in the Gulf is the last thing the Chinese
Communist Party needs right now. Of course, China is also a global
leader in the transition away from petroleum-fueled vehicles, which
will eventually make the Middle East far less important to Beijing.
That day, however, is still 15 to 30 years away.

Things Could Have Been Different

China's interest in bringing to an end the Iranian-Saudi cold war,
which constantly threatened to turn hotter, is clear enough, but why
did those two countries choose such a diplomatic channel? After all,
the United States still styles itself the "indispensable nation". If
that phrase ever had much meaning, however, American indispensability
is now visibly in decline, thanks to blunders like allowing Israeli
right-wingers to cancel the Oslo peace process, the launching of an
illegal invasion of and war in Iraq in 2003, and the grotesque
Trumpian mishandling of Iran. Distant as it may be from Europe, Tehran
might nonetheless have been brought into Nato's sphere of influence,
something President Barack Obama spent enormous political capital
trying to achieve. Instead, then-President Donald Trump pushed it
directly into the arms of Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation and Xi's
China.

Things could indeed have been different. With the 2015 Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, brokered by the
Obama administration, all practical pathways for Iran to build nuclear
weapons were closed off. It's also true that Iran's ayatollahs have
long insisted they don't want a weapon of mass destruction that, if
used, would indiscriminately kill potentially vast numbers of
non-combatants, something incompatible with the ethics of Islamic law.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1568587813/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20


Whether one believes that country's clerical leaders or not, the JCPOA
made the question moot since it imposed severe restrictions on the
number of centrifuges Iran could operate, the level to which it could
enrich uranium for its nuclear plant at Bushehr, the amount of
enriched uranium it could stockpile, and the kinds of nuclear plants
it could build. According to the inspectors at the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency, Iran faithfully implemented its obligations
through 2018 and - consider this an irony of our Trumpian times - for
such compliance it would be punished by Washington.

Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei only permitted President Hassan Rouhani
to sign that somewhat mortifying treaty with the permanent members of
the UN Security Council in return for promised relief from
Washington's sanctions (that they never got). In early 2016, the
Security Council did indeed remove its own 2006 sanctions on Iran.
That, however, proved a meaningless gesture because by then Congress,
deploying the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets
Control, had slapped unilateral American sanctions on Iran and, even
in the wake of the nuclear deal, congressional Republicans refused to
lift them. They even nixed a $25 billion deal that would have allowed
Iran to buy civilian passenger jets from Boeing.

Worse yet, such sanctions were designed to punish third parties that
contravened them. French firms like Renault and TotalEnergies were
eager to jump into the Iranian market but feared reprisals. The US
had, after all, fined French bank BNP $8.7 billion for skirting those
sanctions and no European corporation wanted a dose of that kind of
grief. In essence, congressional Republicans and the Trump
administration kept Iran under such severe sanctions even though it
had lived up to its side of the bargain, while Iranian entrepreneurs
eagerly looked forward to doing business with Europe and the United
States. In short, Tehran could have been pulled inexorably into the
Western orbit via increasing dependence on North Atlantic trade deals,
but it was not to be.

And keep in mind that Israeli Prime Minister (then as now) Benjamin
Netanyahu had lobbied hard against the JCPOA, even going over
President Obama's head in an unprecedented fashion to encourage
Congress to nix the deal. That effort to play spoiler failed - until,
in May 2018, President Trump simply tore up the treaty. Netanyahu was
caught on tape boasting that he had convinced the gullible Trump to
take that step. Although the Israeli right-wing insisted that its
greatest concern was an Iranian nuclear warhead, it sure didn't act
that way. Sabotaging the 2015 deal actually freed that country from
all constraints. Netanyahu and like-minded Israeli politicians were,
it seems, upset that the JCPOA only addressed Iran's civilian nuclear
enrichment program and didn't mandate a rollback of Iranian influence
in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, which they apparently believed to be the
real threat.

Trump went on to impose what amounted to a financial and trade embargo
on Iran. In its wake, trading with that country became an increasingly
risky proposition. By May 2019, Trump had succeeded handsomely by his
own standards (and those of Netanyahu). He had managed to reduce
Iran's oil exports from 2.5 million barrels a day to as little as
200,000 barrels a day. That country's leadership nonetheless continued
to conform to the requirements of the JCPOA until mid-2019, after
which they began flaunting its provisions. Iran has now produced
highly enriched uranium and is much closer to being capable of making
nuclear weapons than ever before, though it still has no military
nuclear program and the ayatollahs continue to deny that they want
such weaponry.

In reality, Trump's "maximum pressure campaign" did anything but
destroy Tehran's influence in the region. In fact, if anything, in
Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq the power of the ayatollahs was only
strengthened.

After a while, Iran also found ways to smuggle its petroleum to China,
where it was sold to small private refineries that operated solely for
the domestic market. Since those firms had no international presence
or assets and didn't deal in dollars, the Treasury Department had no
way of moving against them. In this fashion, President Trump and
congressional Republicans ensured that Iran would become deeply
dependent on China for its very economic survival - and so also
ensured the increasing significance of that rising power in the Middle
East.

The Saudi Reversal

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices spiked,
benefiting the Iranian government. The Biden administration then
imposed the kind of maximum-pressure sanctions on the Russian
Federation that Trump had levied against Iran. Unsurprisingly, a new
Axis of the Sanctioned has now formed, with Iran and Russia exploring
trade and arms deals and Iran allegedly providing drones to Moscow for
its war effort in Ukraine.

As for Saudi Arabia, its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman, recently seemed to get a better set of advisers. In March
2015, he had launched a ruinous and devastating war in neighboring
Yemen after the Zaydi Shiite "Helpers of God", or Houthi rebels, took
over the populous north of that country. Since the Saudis were
primarily deploying air power against a guerrilla force, their
campaign was bound to fail. The Saudi leadership then blamed the rise
and resilience of the Houthis on the Iranians. While Iran had indeed
provided some money and smuggled some weapons to the Helpers of God,
they were a local movement with a long set of grievances against the
Saudis. Eight years later, the war has sputtered to a devastating
stalemate.

The Saudis had also attempted to counter Iranian influence elsewhere
in the Arab world, intervening in the Syrian civil war on the side of
fundamentalist Salafi rebels against the government of autocrat Bashar
al-Assad. In 2013, Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah militia joined the fray
in support of al-Assad and, in 2015, Russia committed air power there
to ensure the rebels' defeat. China had also backed al-Assad (though
not militarily) and played a quiet role in the post-war reconstruction
of the country. As part of that recent China-brokered agreement to
reduce tensions with Iran and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia just
spearheaded a decision to return the al-Assad government to membership
in the Arab League (from which it had been expelled in 2011 at the
height of the Arab Spring revolts).

By late 2019, in the wake of that drone attack on the Abqaiq
refineries, it was already clear that Bin Salman had lost his regional
contest with Iran and Saudi Arabia began to seek some way out. Among
other things, the Saudis reached out to the Iraqi prime minister of
that moment, Adil Abdel Mahdi, asking for his help as a mediator with
the Iranians. He, in turn, invited General Qasem Soleimani, the head
of the Jerusalem Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, to
Baghdad to consider a new relationship with the House of Saud.

As few will forget, on January 03 2020, Soleimani flew to Iraq on a
civilian airliner only to be assassinated by an American drone strike
at Baghdad International Airport on the orders of President Trump who
claimed he was coming to kill Americans. Did Trump want to forestall a
rapprochement with the Saudis? After all, marshaling that country and
other Gulf states into an anti-Iranian alliance with Israel had been
at the heart of his son-in-law Jared Kushner's "Abraham Accords".

The Rise of China, the Fall of America

Washington is now the skunk at the diplomats' party. The Iranians were
never likely to trust the Americans as mediators. The Saudis must have
feared telling them about their negotiations lest the equivalent of
another Hellfire missile be unleashed. As 2022 ended, President Xi
actually visited the Saudi capital Riyadh, where relations with Iran
were evidently a topic of conversation. This February, Iranian
President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing by which time, according
to the Chinese foreign ministry, President Xi had developed a personal
commitment to mediating between the two Gulf rivals. Now, a rising
China is offering to launch other Middle Eastern mediation efforts,
while complaining "that some large countries outside the region" were
causing "long-term instability in the Middle East" out of
"self-interest".

China's new prominence as a peacemaker may soon extend to conflicts
like the ones in Yemen and Sudan. As the rising power on this planet
with its eye on Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa, Beijing is
clearly eager to have any conflicts that could interfere with its Belt
and Road Initiative resolved as peaceably as possible.

Although China is on the cusp of having three aircraft carrier battle
groups, they continue to operate close to home and American fears
about a Chinese military presence in the Middle East are, so far,
without substance.

Where two sides are tired of conflict, as was true with Saudi Arabia
and Iran, Beijing is clearly now ready to play the role of the honest
broker. Its remarkable diplomatic feat of restoring relations between
those countries, however, reflects less its position as a rising
Middle Eastern power than the startling decline of American regional
credibility after three decades of false promises (Oslo), debacles
(Iraq) and capricious policy-making that, in retrospect, appears to
have relied on nothing more substantial than a set of cynical imperial
divide-and-rule ploys that are now so been-there, done-that.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell
collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is
the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the
Persian (2020) and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of
Empires (2020). His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam (2022).
His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident
Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and
of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the
newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Songlands
(2021), the final one in his Splinterlands series, Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story (2018), John Dower's The
Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two (2017),
and Ann Jones's They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America's Wars: The Untold Story (2020).

Links: The original version of this article, at the URL below,
contains several links to further information not included here:

https://tomdispatch.com/china-and-the-axis-of-the-sanctioned/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2023/05/24/china-and-the-axis-of-the-sanctioned/
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages