M. K. Bhadrakumar
WHAT motivated the US President Donald Trump to order the naval blockade of Iran? Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told France’s public television broadcaster in an interview recently that the Trump administration was moving in the direction of seizing control of Iran’s oil and gas reserves.
“Venezuela is a stark example. The claim was that the drug traffickers’ regime must be taken down. The bottom line is that the United States is taking control of Venezuela’s oil industry. The same is now happening with Iran,” Lavrov alleged.
That was one clever remark, given Russia’s deep interest in partnering with Iran’s oil and gas sector rather than competing. The cascading oil price brought windfall profits to Russia in dozens of billions of dollars on the one hand while also compelling Washington to ease the sanctions on the other hand to facilitate additional flow of Russian oil that was good for the market.
Tehran has taken note of the Venezuelan analogy. In a wide-ranging televised interview broadcast yesterday, the powerful Speaker of Iran’s Majlis Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a pivotal figure in the country’s leadership, inter alia noted, “The enemy believed Iran was like Venezuela and assumed that after a few days it could seize our oil and allow anyone wishing to transport oil from the Persian Gulf to do so.”
How far off the mark are the Indian analysts who wax eloquently that the Hormuz issue is all about Pax Americana — the rules-based order, freedom of navigation and open trade, open sea lanes, stable trade routes. Sheer naiveté!
The geopolitics of the Strait of Hormuz is plain to see. First, some clarity is needed as regards the Law of the Sea which does provide for freedom of navigation through territorial waters. But do not ignore wilfully that such freedom is also to be exercised in accordance with the regulations of the coastal parties, the littoral states that border the waterway.
Iran maintains that it is enforcing its regulations. There are no international waters where the sea lanes pass, and Iran’s territorial waters go to the midpoint of the waterway — and even beyond where it overlaps Oman’s territorial waters. (Hence Iran and Oman’s shared interest in the Hormuz strait.)
The Iranian regulations devolve upon the number of ships that pass through the water way, the payment of fee that these ships are to pay (which is a common international practice), the currency in which such payments are to be made, what the ships’ cargo will be, etc. None of this hampers ‘freedom of navigation’ as such.
Clearly, the blockade that the US has imposed has no validity under international law. It is brigandage, gunboat diplomacy, ‘flexing the muscle’ or whatever one may call it. It is in effect a piece of the so-called ‘tanker war’ that the West is waging in the downstream of the Russia sanctions triggered by the Ukraine conflict.
In the case of Iran, some analysts say the real plot is about restricting the flow of oil to China. Indeed, according to the US-China Economic and Security Commission latest report in March to the US Congress, “China is Iran’s largest trading partner and the primary buyer of Iranian oil. Chinese purchases account for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported oil.”
The strategic implications of the “tanker war” are self-evident. But the US report also estimates that “Beijing maintains a cautious approach to avoid jeopardising relations with other Middle Eastern partners such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates” and has even “limited its official support for Iran after US and Israeli strikes to diplomatic statements.”
China is absolutely right in saying that it has trade and energy ties with Iran under bilateral agreements, and US interference is unacceptable. Also, disruptions in the flow of Iranian oil upset China’s supply chain.
That said, China’s oil imports are also sourced from a remarkably broad array of regions as a matter of carefully calibrated policy. China’s main source is the “Other Middle East” (Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain) at 2.4 million barrels per day, followed closely by Russia at 2.2 million, Saudi Arabia at 1.6 million, and Iraq at 1.3 million.
It may seem there is no easy way out for Trump in the Hormuz riddle. But in reality, that isn’t really so — provided the US jettisons its 1979 conception of “revolutionary Iran,” which is actually an archaic notion today. The movers and shakers in Tehran are of different feathers but there is an overall consensus that improved relations with the US will help improve the economic conditions. Conceivably, the billionaire-politician Qalibaf himself is a stellar example.
Unless the US gets rid of the old shibboleths about Iran, it cannot easily reconcile with the new reality that allows Iran to generate out of Hormuz a fabulous income level running into hundreds of billions of dollars annually which holds the potential to liberate its economy from the clutches of western sanctions and stabilise its political economy.
As the man solely responsible for destroying the 2015 nuclear deal (JCOPA), Trump only can play such a role today, with a forward-looking agenda of the swiftest possible integration of Iran into the world economy.
Whether such an approach is too late or not can only be known if it is genuinely attempted. No more deceptions, please. One more round of fighting will be a tipping point that radicalises Iran. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decapitation strategy was a disaster.
A regime change in Iran to create a pro-American regime is a looney endgame. If anything, the constituency within Iran which sought good relations with the US is dramatically shrinking. Anyone who witnessed the period of the Islamic Revolution will understand the profound meaning of the videos currently circulating, which show Iranians pouring out into the streets of Tehran night after night.
Trump’s move to extend the ceasefire is a step in the right direction. What is needed is a leap of faith. Trump should take the Pakistani COAS Field Marshal Asim Munir’s advice to call off the naval blockade. It is a wrong notion that Iran can be made to negotiate at gunpoint. Iran’s national pride is a civilisational trait. and its deep distrust of the US is a backlog of history.
Make no mistake, things have inexorably reached an inflection point. Yet, there are enough people at the top decision-making level in Tehran who are still willing to negotiate, provided Trump can create the right setting for the negotiation to acquire a dynamic of its own.
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— The article originally appeared in Indian Punchline
