Acá va una interesante nota de William
Engdahl publicada la semana pasada en su sitio web (http://www.williamengdahl.com/). El tema: el triángulo estratégico conformado por China, rusia e Irán. A ver si te gusta:
Título: The
Iran-Russia-China Strategic Triangle
Epígrafe: The
developing economic, political and military links binding Iran, China and
Russia in what I see as an emerging Golden Triangle in Eurasia, are continuing
to deepen in significant areas. This, while it seems to be US geopolitical
strategy in a prospective Trump Administration to distance Washington from both
Iran and from China, while dangling the carrot of lessened confrontation
between Washington and Moscow–classic Halford Mackinder or Kissinger
geopolitics of avoiding a two-front war that was colossally backfiring on
Washington by trying to shift the power balance. At present, the dynamic of the
past several years of closer cooperation by the three pivotal states of the
Eurasian Heartland is gaining strategic momentum. The latest is the visit of
China’s Minister of Defense and of Russian senior officials to Teheran.
Texto: On November 14-15
in Teheran, during a high-level visit of the Chinese Defense Minister, General
Chang Wanquan, with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Iranian Defense
Minister Hossein Dehghan, the two major Eurasian nations signed a deal to
enhance military cooperation. The agreement calls for intensification of
bilateral military training and closer cooperation on what the Iran sees as
regional security issues, with terrorism and Syria at the top of the list.
Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Hossein
Baqeri, said Iran is ready to share with China its experiences in fighting
against the terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria. Dehghan added that the
agreement represents an “upgrade in long-term military and defense cooperation
with China.”
In recent weeks
China has directly become engaged, joining Russia and Iran, at the behest of
the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, in the war against ISIS and
other terrorist groups including Al Qaeda-Al Nusra Front and its numerous
spinoffs. The formal agreement with Teheran, which has considerable on the ground
experience with the fight in Syria, clearly represents a deepening of bilateral
China-Iran relations.
At the same time
as China and Iran were meeting in Teheran, Viktor Ozerov, head of the Defense
and Security Committee of the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of
the Parliament, was also in Teheran. There, he told RAI Novosti that Russia and
Iran are in talks over an arms deal worth around $10 billion. It calls for
Russia to deliver T-90 tanks, artillery systems, planes and helicopters to Iran.
In brief, we have
a deepening of military defense links between the three points of the emerging
Eurasian Triangle. This will have huge consequences, not merely for
stabilization of Syria and Iraq in the Middle East. It will also give a major
boost to the emerging economic links between the three great powers of the
Eurasian Heartland.
Halford J.
Mackinder, the father of British geopolitics variously called Russia the
Heartland Power, and towards the end of his life, in a 1943 guest article in
Foreign Affairs, journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations,
suggested China might equally play the geographic and political role of Russia
as the Eurasian Heartland Power.
Today, given the
enormous growth since 1943 of the geopolitical importance of the Persian Gulf
oil and gas-producing nations for the world economy, the bonding together of
Iran to China and to Russia forms a new Heartland Power, to stay with the
designation of Mackinder.
The added element
since 2013 is the initiative of China President Xi Jinping to criss-cross all
Eurasia and even South Asia with what he calls China’s One Belt, One Road
infrastructure. Both China and Russia have formally agreed to coordinate with
China in this multi-trillion dollar vast infrastructure project to link entire
new emerging markets of Central Asia, Iran–and potentially Turkey– to a
coherent high-speed rail and maritime port network that within the end of this
decade will already begin to transform the economic worth of the entire
Eurasia.
China-Iran Trade
Already despite
onerous US and EU economic sanctions on Iran, Sino-Iranian trade had grown even
before the 2015 nuclear agreement loosened some sanctions. Bilateral trade grew
from $400 million in 1989 to almost $52 billion in 2014. Today the Iran-China
Chamber of Commerce and Industries (I.C.C.C.I.), has grown from 65 members in
2001 to 6,000, an indication of the intensity of economic cooperation.
On the lifting of
sanctions this January, 2016 China President Xi Jinping went to Teheran where
the two countries signed major economic agreements. After their January 23
talks, Iranian president Rouhani announced that, “Iran and China have agreed to
increase trade to $600 billion in the next 10 years,” adding that both
countries, “have agreed on forming strategic relations, reflected in a 25-year
comprehensive document.” Moreover, Iran agreed to nuclear energy cooperation
and formally participating in China’s One Belt, One Road which Russia and the
Eurasian Economic Union countries had formally agreed to join in 2015.
Iran – Key Link
China’s One Belt,
One Bridge, sometimes referred to as her New Economic Silk Road, is a brilliant
geopolitical, economic, military and cultural project. It will enable the
member nations to be far more shielded from USA Naval power to interdict vital
goods trade by sea from Europe or the Middle East that must pass through the
US-patrolled Strait of Malacca. As well, while Washington and Brussels impose
economic sanctions on Russian trade with Europe, the Ukrainian crisis forced a
far more serious Russian “pivot to the East,” notably to China.
What has emerged
since the crisis created for Russia with the USA February 2014 Ukraine coup
d’etat, is a strategic cooperation between the three major powers–Iran, China
and Russia, what Zbigniew Brzezinski described in his 1997 book, The Grand
Chessboard, as the largest geopolitical challenge facing continued Sole
Superpower supremacy of the United States following Washington’s destruction of
the Soviet Union in 1989-91.
Brzezinski
declared then, accurately, “…how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power
that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and
economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control
over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination,
rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically
peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s
people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as
well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for
about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
For the Eurasian
cohesion under the China OBOR infrastructure developments, Iran is strategic.
Not only is China a major buyer of Iranian oil, Iran’s largest export customer.
But Iran is also vital to China’s vision to create entirely new manufacturing
and logistics centers or hubs in Central Asia and Europe. And, as Indian
strategic consultant, Debalina Ghoshal points out, China, “has a keen interest
in Iran’s geostrategic location, bordering both the Caspian Sea and the Persian
Gulf. The location enables China to carry out the One Belt One Road agenda.”
Iran is already
partly linked to a recently-completed section of China’s OBOR rail-port
infrastructure great project. In early 2015 rail freight began to move across
the new Zhanaozen—Gyzylgaya—Bereket—Kyzyl Atrek—Gorgan railway, completed in
December, 2014 in the impressive time of five years from start.
That rail line
links Iran to China via the rail line through Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, a
founding member of the OBOR idea since Xi Jinping first unveiled it in a visit
to Kazakhstan in 2013. The new rail link, known as the North-South
Transnational Rail Corridor connects Iran to Kazakhstan via Turkmenistan and on
to the China border. The new rail line runs 908 kilometers, beginning at Uzen
in Kazakhstan (120 km), then through Gyzylgaya-Bereket-Etrek in Turkmenistan (700
km) and ending at Gorgan in Iran (88 km). As a result of the new rail link,
freight traffic is shifting from truck to rail as the line connects all key
ports and terminals of the entire Caspian region.
The recently
completed Uzen to Gorgan rail line as part of the OBOR is transforming the
economic importance of an entire part of Central Asia
The new
Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan to China rail line will transform the entire
economic significance of the vast Central Asian region. Bereket in Turkmenistan
— which is at the crossroads of the existing Trans-Caspian rail line linking
Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea with Uzbekistan, Eastern Kazakhstan and China —
is now to be site of a large locomotive repair depot together with a modern
state-of-the-art freight terminal, making it a major freight hub.
Further, the
Turkmen government is building a huge port at Turkmenbashi that would enable
further trade links potentially to the Russian Federation by sea. The rail link
to Gorgan in Iran already is linked to Iran’s national railway grid and will
thereby enable rail transport between China, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
The connection will shorten the route by 400 km, and reduce freight transport
time more or less in half, from 45-60 days at present to 25-30 days. This is a
huge economic gain.
Since April this
year as well, Moscow and Teheran have been engaged in discussions of building a
ship canal from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf through Iran. Russia,
Azerbaijan and Iran also agreed to speed up the talks on a North-South
transport corridor that partly would go along the western coast of the Caspian
Sea from Russia to Iran through Azerbaijan. The North-South corridor, when
completed will reduce the time of cargo transport from India to Central Asia
and Russia from at present about 40 days from Mumbai, India to Moscow to 14
days and bypass the congested and expensive Suez Canal.
Everywhere we go
today across Eurasia, from the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea to Russia,
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and on to China, there is a process underway for the
first time since the original Silk Road era of more than two thousand years
ago, of building up an entire new economic space, the Eurasian Heartland. Were
the Turkish government to join the OBOR project wholeheartedly, the potentials
for a Eurasian transformation would become enormous. It remains to be seen what
a USA with a Trump presidency will do or not do to try to destroy this
beautiful Eurasian build up. If he is as wise as his sound bites make him sound,
he will recognize that this kind of development is the only true future for his
United States other than bankruptcy, economic depression and wars of
destruction. If not, more and more much of the rest of the world seems
determined to go it without the “Sole Superpower.”
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