{"id":217011,"date":"2022-07-25T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T11:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217011"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:38:49","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:38:49","slug":"the-multipolar-iran-russia-turkey-troika-overshadows-unipolar-joe-biden-in-west-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/07\/the-multipolar-iran-russia-turkey-troika-overshadows-unipolar-joe-biden-in-west-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Multipolar \u201cIran-Russia-Turkey Troika\u201d Overshadows \u201cUnipolar Joe Biden\u201d in West Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The presidents of Russia, Iran, and Turkey convened to discuss critical issues pertaining to West Asia, with the illegal US occupation of Syria a key talking point.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Oil and gas, wheat and grains, missiles and drones \u2013 the hottest topics in global geopolitics today \u2013 were all on the agenda in Tehran this week.
Photo Credit: The Cradle<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Jul 2022 – <\/em>The Tehran summit uniting Iran-Russia-Turkey was a fascinating affair in more ways than one. Ostensibly about the Astana peace process in Syria, launched in 2017, the summit joint statement duly noted that Iran, Russia and (recently rebranded) Turkiye will continue, \u201ccooperating to eliminate terrorists\u201d in Syria and \u201cwon\u2019t accept new facts in Syria in the name of defeating terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a wholesale rejection of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d exceptionalist unipolarity that once ruled West Asia.<\/p>\n

Standing up to the global sheriff<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin<\/strong>, in his own speech<\/a>, was even more explicit. He stressed \u201cspecific steps to promote the intra-Syrian inclusive political dialogue\u201d and most of called a spade a spade: \u201cThe western states led by the US are strongly encouraging separatist sentiment in some areas of the country and plundering its natural resources with a view to ultimately pulling the Syrian state apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

So there will be \u201cextra steps in our trilateral format\u201d aimed at \u201cstabilizing the situation in those areas\u201d and crucially, \u201creturning control to the legitimate government of Syria.\u201d For better or for worse, the days of imperial plunder will be over.<\/p>\n

The bilateral meetings on the summit\u2019s sidelines \u2013 Putin\/Raisi and Putin\/Erdogan \u2013 were even more intriguing. Context is key here: the Tehran gathering took place after Putin\u2019s visit to Turkmenistan in late June for the 6th<\/sup> Caspian summit, where all the littoral nations, Iran included, were present, and after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov\u2019s travels in Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, where he met all his Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) counterparts.<\/p>\n

Moscow\u2019s moment<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So we see Russian diplomacy carefully weaving its geopolitical tapestry from West Asia to Central Asia \u2013 with everybody and his neighbor eager to talk and to listen to Moscow. As it stands, the Russia-Turkey entente cordiale\u00a0<\/em>tends to lean towards conflict management, and is strong on trade relations. Iran-Russia is a completely different ball game: much more of a strategic partnership.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s hardly a coincidence that the National Oil Company of Iran (NIOC), timed to the Tehran summit, announced the signing of a $40 billion strategic cooperation agreement with Russia\u2019s Gazprom. That\u2019s the largest foreign investment in the history of Iran\u2019s energy industry \u2013 badly needed since the early 2000s. Seven deals worth $4 billion apply to the development of oil fields; others focus on the construction of new export gas pipelines and LNG projects.<\/p>\n

Kremlin advisor Yury Ushakov<\/strong> deliciously leaked that Putin and Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,<\/strong> in their private meeting, \u201cdiscussed conceptual issues.\u201d Translation: he means grand strategy, as in the evolving, complex process of Eurasia integration, in which the three key nodes are Russia, Iran and China, now intensifying their interconnection. The Russia-Iran strategic partnership largely mirrors the key points of the China-Iran strategic partnership.<\/p>\n

Iran says \u2018no\u2019 to NATO<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Khamenei, on NATO, did tell it like it is:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the road is open for NATO, then the organization sees no borders. If it had not been stopped in Ukraine, then after a while the alliance would have started a war under the pretext of Crimea.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were no leaks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) impasse between the US and Iran \u2013 but it\u2019s clear, based on the recent negotiations in Vienna, that Moscow will not interfere with Tehran\u2019s nuclear decisions. Not only are Tehran-Moscow-Beijing fully aware of who\u2019s preventing the JCPOA from getting back on track, they also see how this counter-productive stalling process prevents the collective west from badly needed access to Iranian oil.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the weapons front. Iran is one of the world\u2019s leaders in drone production: Pelican, Arash, Homa, Chamrosh, Jubin, Ababil, Bavar, recon drones, attack drones, even kamikaze drones, cheap and effective, mostly deployed from naval platforms in West Asia.<\/p>\n

Tehran\u2019s official position is not to supply weapons to nations at war \u2013 which would in principle invalidate dodgy US \u201cintel\u201d on their supply to Russia in Ukraine. Yet that could always happen under the radar, considering that Tehran is very much interested in buying Russian aerial defense systems and state of the art fighter jets. After the end of the UN Security Council-enforced embargo, Russia can sell whatever conventional weapons to Iran it sees fit.<\/p>\n

Russian military analysts are fascinated by the conclusions Iranians reached when it was established they would stand no chance against a NATO armada; essentially they bet on pro-level guerrilla war (a lesson learned from Afghanistan). In Syria, Iraq and Yemen they deployed trainers to guide villagers in their fight against Salafi-jihadis; produced tens of thousands of large-caliber sniper rifles, ATGMs, and thermals; and of course perfected their drone assembly lines (with excellent cameras to surveil US positions).<\/p>\n

Not to mention that simultaneously the Iranians were building quite capable long-range missiles. No wonder Russian military analysts estimate there\u2019s much to learn tactically from the Iranians \u2013 and not only on the drone front.<\/p>\n

The Putin-Sultan ballet<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Now to the Putin-Erdogan get together \u2013 always an attention-grabbing geopolitical ballet, especially considering the Sultan has not yet decided to hop on the Eurasia integration high-speed train.<\/p>\n

Putin diplomatically \u201cexpressed gratitude\u201d for the discussions on food and grain issues, while reiterating that \u201cnot all issues on the export of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports are resolved, but progress is made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putin was referring to Turkiye\u2019s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, who earlier this week assured that setting up an operations center in Istanbul, establishing joint controls at the port exit and arrival points, and carefully monitoring the navigational safety on the transfer routes are issues that may be solved in the next few days.<\/p>\n

Apparently Putin-Erdogan also discussed Nagorno-Karabakh (no details).<\/p>\n

What a few leaks certainly did not reveal is that on Syria, for all practical purposes, the situation is blocked. That favors Russia \u2013 whose main priority as it stands is Donbass. Wily Erdogan knows it \u2013 and that\u2019s why he may have tried to extract some \u201cconcessions\u201d on \u201cthe Kurdish question\u201d and Nagorno-Karabakh. Whatever Putin, Russia\u2019s Security Council Secretary\u00a0Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev may really think about Erdogan, they certainly evaluate how priceless is to cultivate such an erratic partner capable of driving the collective west totally bonkers.<\/p>\n

Istanbul this summer has been turned into a sort of Third Rome, at least for expelled-from-Europe Russian tourists: they are everywhere. Yet the most crucial geoeconomic development these past few months is that the western-provoked collapse of trade\/supply lines along the borders between Russia and the EU \u2013 from the Baltic to the Black Sea \u2013 finally highlighted the wisdom and economic sense of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC): a major Russia-Iran-India<\/a>\u00a0geopolitical and geoeconomic integration success.<\/p>\n

When Moscow talks to Kiev, it talks via Istanbul. NATO, as the Global South well knows, does not do diplomacy. So any possibility of dialogue between Russians and a few educated westerners takes place in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the UAE. West Asia as well as the Caucasus, incidentally, did not subscribe to the western sanctions hysteria against Russia.<\/p>\n

Say farewell to the \u2018teleprompter guy\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Now compare all of the above with the recent visit to the region by the so-called \u201cleader of the free world,\u201d who merrily alternates between shaking hands with invisible people to reading \u2013 literally \u2013 whatever is scrolling on a teleprompter. We\u2019re talking of US President Joe Biden<\/strong>, of course.<\/p>\n

Fact: Biden threatened Iran with military strikes and as a mere supplicant, begged the Saudis to pump more oil to offset the \u201cturbulence\u201d in the global energy markets caused by the collective west\u2019s sanction hysteria. Context: the glaring absence of any vision or anything even resembling a draft of foreign policy plan for West Asia.<\/p>\n

So oil prices duly jumped upward after Biden\u2019s trip: Brent crude rose more than four percent to $105 a barrel, bringing prices back to above $100 after a lull of several months.<\/p>\n

The heart of the matter is that if OPEC or OPEC+ (which includes Russia) ever decide to increase their oil supplies, they will do it based on their internal deliberations, and not under exceptionalist pressure.<\/p>\n

As for the imperial threat of military strikes on Iran, it qualifies as pure dementia. The whole Persian Gulf \u2013 not to mention the whole of West Asia \u2013 knows that were US\/Israel to attack Iran, fierce retaliation would simply evaporate with the region\u2019s energy production, with apocalyptic consequences including the collapse of trillions of dollars in derivatives.<\/p>\n

Biden then had the gall to say,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have made progress in strengthening our relations with the Gulf states. We will not leave a vacuum for Russia and China to fill in the Middle East\u201d.<\/p>\n

Well, in real life it is the \u201cindispensable nation\u201d that has self-morphed into a vacuum. Only bought-and-paid for Arab vassals \u2013 most of them monarchs \u2013\u00a0believe in the building of an \u201cArab NATO\u201d (copyright Jordan\u2019s King Abdullah) to take on Iran. Russia and China are already all over the place in West Asia and beyond.<\/p>\n

De-Dollarization, not just Eurasian integration<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s not only the new logistical corridor<\/a> from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Astrakhan and then, via the Caspian, to Enzeli in Iran and on to Mumbai that is shaking things up. It\u2019s about increasing bilateral trade that bypasses the US dollar. It\u2019s about BRICS+, which Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are dying to be part of. It\u2019s about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which formally accepts Iran as a full member this coming September (and soon Belarus as well). It\u2019s about BRICS+, the SCO, China\u2019s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) interconnected in their path towards a Greater Eurasia Partnership.<\/p>\n

West Asia may still harbor a small collection of imperial vassals with zero sovereignty who depend on the west\u2019s financial and military \u2018assistance,\u2019 but that\u2019s the past. The future is now \u2013 with Top Three BRICS (Russia, India, China) slowly but surely coordinating their overlapping strategies across West Asia, with Iran involved in all of them.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the Big Global Picture: whatever the circumvolutions and silly schemes of the US-concocted \u201coil price cap\u201d variety, the fact is that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela \u2013 the top powerful energy-producing nations \u2013 are absolutely in sync: on Russia, on the collective west, and on the needs of a real multipolar world.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at <\/em>Asia Times and<\/em> columnist for<\/em> Consortium News and<\/em> Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he\u2019s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to <\/em>The Empire and The Crescent and<\/em> Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thecradle.co<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Jul 2022 – The Tehran summit uniting Iran-Russia-Turkey was a fascinating affair in more ways than one. Their Presidents convened to discuss critical issues pertaining to West Asia, with the illegal US occupation of Syria and wholesale rejection of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d exceptionalist unipolarity that once ruled West Asia, as key talking points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":217013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1126,1050,742,767,91,278,413,395,70,492,1206],"class_list":["post-217011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-syria","tag-turkiye","tag-usa","tag-war-on-terror","tag-west-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274959,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217011\/revisions\/274959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}