Iran
embraces its Eurasian future
By Pepe EscobarAugust
07, 2021"Information
Clearing House" -
Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi was
sworn in as the 8th president
of Iran this Thursday at the Majlis
(Parliament), two days after being
formally endorsed by Leader of the
Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei.
Representatives of the UN
secretary-general; OPEC; the EU; the Eurasia
Economic Union (EAEU); the Inter-Islamic
Union; and quite a few heads of state and
Foreign Ministers were at the Majlis,
including Iraq President Barham Salih and
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
The Islamic Republic of Iran now enters a
new era in more ways than one. Khamenei
himself outlined its contours in a
short, sharp speech, ‘The Experience
of Trusting the US’.
Khamenei’s strategic analysis, conveyed even
before the final result of the JCPOA negotiations in
Vienna in 2015, which I covered in my Asia Times
ebook
Persian Miniatures , turned out to be
premonitory: “During the negotiations I repeatedly
said they don’t uphold their promises.” So, in the
end, “the experience tells us this is a deadly
poison for us.” During the Rouhani administration,
Khamenei adds, “it became clear that trusting the
West doesn’t work”.
With perfect timing, a new, six-volume book,
Sealed Secret, co-written by outgoing Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif and two top JCPOA negotiators,
Ali Akbar Salehi and Seyed Abbas Araghchi (who’s
still involved in the current, stalled Vienna
debate) will be published this week, for the moment
only in Farsi.
Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of
Tehran summed up for me the road map ahead: “Iran’s
foreign policy decisions are pretty clear. Iran will
be putting less emphasis on Western nations,
especially European, and more emphasis on the Global
South, the East, neighboring countries, and of
course that will include China and Russia. That
doesn’t mean the Iranians are going to ignore Europe
altogether, if they decide to return to the JCPOA.
The Iranians would accept if they abide by their
obligations. So far, we have seen no sign of that
whatsoever.”
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Marandi could not help referring to Khamenei’s
speech: “It’s pretty clear; he’s saying, ‘we don’t
trust the West, these last 8 years showed that’,
he’s saying the next administration should learn
from the experience of these 8 years.”
Yet the main challenge for Raisi will not be
foreign policy, but the domestic framework, with
sanctions still biting hard: “With regard to
economic policy, it will be tilting more towards
social justice and turning away from neoliberalism,
expanding the safety net for the disenfranchised and
the vulnerable.”
It’s quite intriguing to compare Marandi with the
views of a seasoned Iranian diplomat who prefers to
remain anonymous, and very well positioned as an
observer of the domestic conflict:
“During Rouhani’s 8 years, contrary to the
Supreme Leader’s advice, the government spent lots
of time on negotiations, and they have not been
investing on internal potential. Anyhow the 8 years
are now finished, and contrary to Rouhani’s promises
we currently have Iran’s worst economic and
financial record in 50 years.”
The diplomat is adamant on “the importance of
paying attention to our internal capacities and
abilities, while having powerful economic relations
with our neighbors as well as Russia, China, Latin
America, South Africa as well as maintaining mutual
respectable ties with Europeans and the US
government, if it changes its behavior and accepts
Iran as it is and not always trying to overthrow the
Iranian state and harm its people by any possible
means.”
Iranians are heirs to a tradition of at least
2,500 years of fine diplomacy. So once again our
interlocutor had to stress, “the Supreme Leader has
never, ever said or believed we should cut our
relations with Europeans. Quite the opposite: he
deeply believes in the notion of ‘dynamic
diplomacy’, even concerning the US; he said multiple
times we have no problem with the US if they deal
with us with respect.”
And now, let’s time travel
There are no illusions in Tehran that Iran under
Raisi, much more than under Rouhani, will remain the
target of multiple “maximum pressure” and/or Hybrid
War tactics deployed by Washington, Tel Aviv and
NATOstan,
crude false flags included, with the whole combo
celebrated by US Think Tankland’s analyses penned by
“experts” in Beltway cubicles.
All that is irrelevant in terms of what really
matters ahead in the Southwest Asia chessboard.
The late, great René Grousset, in his 1951
classic L’Empire des Steppes, has pointed
out “how Iran, renewing itself for fifty centuries”,
has “always given proof of astonishing continuity.”
It was because of this strength that Iranian
civilization, as much as Chinese civilization, has
assimilated all foreigners that conquered is soil,
from Seljuks to Mongols: “Every time, because of the
radiance of its culture, Iranism reappeared with
renewed vitality, on the road to a new renaissance.”
The possibility of a “new renaissance”, now,
implies a step beyond the “neither East or West”
first conceptualized by Ayatollah Khomeini: it’s
rather a back to the (Eurasian) roots, Iran reviving
its past to tackle the new, multipolar, future.
The political heart of Iran lies in the
sophisticated urban organization of the northern
plateau, the result of a rolling, pluri-millennial
process. All along Grousset’s “fifty centuries”, the
plateau has been the house of Iranian culture and
the stable heart of the state.
Around this central space there are plenty of
territories historically and linguistically linked
to Persia and Iran: in Eastern Anatolia, in Central
Asia and Afghanistan, in the Caucasus, in Western
Pakistan. Then there are Shi’ite territories of
other ethnic groups, mostly Arab, in Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen (the Zaidites) and the
Persian Gulf (Bahrain, the Shi’ites in Hasa in Saudi
Arabia).
This is the Shi’ite arc – evolving in a complex
Iranization process that is foremost political and
religious, and not cultural and linguistic. Outside
of Iran, I have seen in my travels how Arab Shi’ites
in Iraq, Lebanon and the Gulf, Dari/Farsi Shi’ites
in Afghanistan, those of Pakistan and India, and
Turcophone Shi’ites in Azerbaijan look up towards
political Iran.
So Iran’s large zone of influence relies mostly
on Shi’ism, and not on Islamic radicalism or the
Persian language. It’s Shi’ism that allows political
power in Iran to keep a Eurasian dimension – from
Lebanon to Afghanistan and Central Asia – and that
reflects once again Grousset’s “continuity” when he
refers to Persian/Iranian history.
From Ancient History to the medieval era, it was
always out of imperial projects, born in Southwest
Asia and /or the Mediterranean basin, that came the
drive to attempt the creation of a Eurasian
territory.
The Persians, who were halfway between
Mediterranean Europe and Central Asia, were the
first who tried to build a Eurasian empire from Asia
to the Mediterranean, but they were halted in their
expansion towards Europe by the Greeks in the 5th
century B.C.
Then it was up to Alexander The Great, in pure
badass blitzkrieg mode, to venture all the way to
Central Asia and India, de facto founding the first
Eurasian empire. Which happened to materialize, to a
large extent, the Persian empire.
Then something even more extraordinary happened:
the simultaneous presence of the Parthian and Kushan
empires between the Roman Empire and the Han Empire
during the first two centuries of the first
millennium.
It was this interaction that first allowed
commercial and cultural trade and connectivity
between the two extremities of Eurasia, between the
Romans and the Han Chinese.
Yet the largest Eurasian territorial space,
founded between the 7th and 10th
centuries, following the Arab conquests, were the
Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Islam was at the
heart of these Arab conquests, remixing previous
imperial compositions, from Mesopotamia to the
Persians, Greeks and Romans.
Historically, that was the first truly Eurasian
economic, cultural and political arc, from the 8th
to the 11th century, before Genghis Khan
monopolized The Big Picture.
All that is very much alive in the collective
unconscious of Iranians and Chinese. That’s why the
China-Iran strategic partnership deal is much more
than a mere $400 billion economic arrangement. It’s
a graphic manifestation of what the revival of the
Silk Roads is aiming at. And it looks like Khamenei
had already seen which way the (desert) wind was
blowing years before the fact.
Pepe Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030. Follow him on
Facebook.
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