In a recent article entitled “US Should Warn Russia Over its Soviet Middle East Policy”, Dr. Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation strongly criticized Moscow’s recent foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East. In particular, Cohen asserts that Moscow’s agreements with Tehran to supply the Islamic republic with atomic energy and sophisticated weapons systems, as well as President Vladimir Putin’s invitation of the Hamas leadership for talks in Moscow after their electoral success in Palestine, is a reflection of Russia breaking away from the mainstream foreign policy approach toward the region held by the US, the UN and the EU. “Moscow is playing a dangerous game in the Middle East”, he adds, by “seeming to placate Islamist extremists (Hamas) and by empowering Tehran to become a regional hegemon...where a nuclear armed Iran, closely allied with and armed by Russia and China, could challenge the US, its interests and its allies in the region....and deny US access to the Gulf”.
Cohen fails to grasp some of the realities driving contemporary international relations. First, one should note that Russia’s foreign policy initiatives are guided by its national interests, which is closely linked to economic policy objectives of national significance. Such initiatives are themselves often closely tied to promoting Russia’s energy sector (subdivided into its various subsectors including, oil, gas, electricity, nuclear fuels, etc.), which during Putin’s presidency has greatly assisted Russia in regaining a sense of status and respect in the global arena. While the oil and gas subsectors have been high-flying since the late 1990s, and electrical energy is attracting its fair share of investor interest, the Russian nuclear industry has been, for the most part, much slower to recover from the early post-Soviet recession.
Moscow’s initial $800 million agreement to build and supply the Bushehr nuclear reactor in southwestern Iran has, in that sense, been described by some commentators as the savior of the Russian atomic energy industry. Tehran also has a technical agreement with Moscow for Russia to build and supply another two, and possibly five, nuclear reactors, including a second one at Bushehr. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to see Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lobby against the US-led initiatives to have Iran’s nuclear enrichment program referred to the UN Security Council to consider imposing sanctions against Tehran, while simultaneously declaring Russia’s solidarity with the international community that Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Furthermore, while Moscow’s cooperation with Tehran has received much attention and its fair share of international criticism, it should not be taken for granted that such cooperation is not devoid of its anxious moments. For example, while it was declared in the international press that Moscow and Teheran reached a significant new agreement over Iran relocating some of its nuclear enrichment program to Russian territory in February 2006, the head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (and former Prime Minister) Sergei Kiriyenko, likewise declared that “Iran still had to take serious steps before the deal could be completed”.
Numerous reports during the course of 2005 suggest that Iran has been dissatisfied with its Russian partners over the manner in which they have been meeting their contractual obligations over the Bushehr plant, delaying Tehran’s timetable to make the reactor operational. It is also important to note that the Bushehr nuclear reactor project predates Iran’s revolution and was originally developed by European/German contractors during the period of the Shah — when Tehran was a key US ally in the region. Despite the increasingly truculent foreign policy position of Iran’s new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it is quite likely that Iran would prefer to have access to Western, as opposed to Russian, technical assistance for the Bushehr reactor if it would not be for American-led efforts to isolate the country. Iran’s current nuclear cooperation with Russia should therefore be seen more as Tehran’s only available option to access the necessary technologies for meeting its uranium enrichment objectives, than as a strategic alliance between the two countries.
A similar scenario is evident in relation to Russia’s recent transfers of military hardware to the Islamic republic. During the Cold War, Moscow transferred arms to its allies within the Warsaw Pact and allied regimes in the developing world predominantly to meet its ideological and political objectives, particularly that of countering the NATO power and its allies around the world. There was little commercial motivation in the USSR’s arms transfers and Moscow often supplied its allies with weapons either at no cost or on very favorable terms, provided political objectives were maintained. During the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian arms production industry went into severe recession and within the context of Russia’s broader economic recovery, reviving the once great Russian arms industry has become a priority for the Kremlin. However, since the Russian military establishment is still devoid of the necessary financial muscle to absorb Russian arms manufacturers’ production, lucrative export contracts have become the key prize for Russian arms producers.
While Moscow announced a $1 billion arms transfer agreement with Tehran last January, it also announced a similar agreement with Algeria at roughly the same time, both of which constitute lucrative contracts for the Russian arms industry. The Moscow-Algiers arms agreement has drawn little criticism from Islamophobes in the West, who have likewise raised little concern about Russia’s ongoing, large-scale arms trade agreements with long standing customers such as China and India.
Furthermore, it should be noted that Russia has been trying to break into the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) arms market for most of the post-Soviet period. Russian arms producers, often supported by the lobby efforts of senior Russian military officials, are frequent participants in annual arms industry exhibitions held in the GCC countries and Russia has experienced a limited degree of success in accessing the GCC arms market.
There is little evidence of any quasi-Soviet content in Russia’s present foreign policy initiatives in the Gulf and Middle East as a whole, which can be seriously compared to Moscow’s policy toward the region during the Cold War.
New realities are at play in the global arena at present. As is the case with the governments of other major powers engaged in contemporary international relations, promoting national commercial interests of strategic significance is one of the key drivers behind current Russian foreign policy initiatives both in the Middle East and in other regions. Russia’s current nuclear cooperation with Iran and the arms trade as an issue of strategic significance for both countries.
This should also be seen in light of Russia’s broader energy policy objectives toward the global economy.
Exports of oil and gas are now Moscow’s major trump card, both in terms of revenues for the national economy as well as a foreign policy instrument. In recent years, Moscow has developed a strategic relationship with Europe as well as booming East Asian economies based on exports of oil and gas, and is also engaged in serious energy dialogue with Washington — all of which are of greater priority for Russia than its current strategic partnership with Iran.
— Dr. Marat Terterov is the external moderator of the GCC-CIS Relations Program at the Gulf Research Center, Dubai.
