The absurdity is off scale: Russia and Iran, the two countries against which the largest number of sanctions have been adopted, are threatened with new ones. And for Russian-Iranian cooperation – yes, in the military sphere, but still: the West first tries to block Russia and Iran, and then also punish them for supporting each other
Now the West wants to impose new sanctions against Iran for the supply of drones to Russia – it is alleged that our Geran-2, which was used in recent days in attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, is Shahid-136. Although Moscow and Tehran deny the fact of the supply of UAVs (which is quite justified – and not only from the interests of propaganda), Western countries are preparing to impose sanctions: the EU is still discussing them, and the United States has announced sanctions against third countries – those who help supply Iranian weapons to Russia.
Moreover, the West is going to bring this issue to the discussion of the UN Security Council, that is, it is trying to convict Russia and Iran of violating Resolution 2231, adopted by the Security Council seven years ago and banning the export of Iranian weapons. It is clear that the efforts of the United States, Great Britain and France in the Security Council will not be successful: Russia will block any resolutions directed against it, but the very fact of such a formulation of the issue demonstrates the absurdity of the Western picture of the world.
And it’s not even that Security Council resolution 2231 was adopted to approve a nuclear deal between Iran and six powers (including Russia and China) and established temporary restrictions for Tehran on the export and import of weapons (some of them were supposed to be valid until 2020, and the other until 2023). The very same deal was broken by the United States four years ago. That is, the resolution, of course, is in effect, but the key country of the West, the United States, does not comply with it. The ongoing behind-the-scenes talks to bring America back to the nuclear deal have little chance of success, so Iran is basically free of any restrictions at all. The same applies to Russia, against which the West has taken several thousand different sanctions since February of this year. The West participates in the hostilities in Ukraine in all possible ways, except for manpower (formally, foreign mercenaries are not military personnel of the corresponding armies): large-scale supplies of weapons, ammunition, training of the Ukrainian army, financing. And against this background, Russia and Iran are threatened with sanctions for UAVs?
Of course, the West cannot stop Russian-Iranian military cooperation – and they understand this. But they are trying to use arguments from a bygone era – the time when Russia took into account the interests of the West when building its relations with the rest of the world, including Iran (as was the case, for example, with the supply of S-300 systems to Tehran – the contract was concluded in 2007, but then frozen by Russia and performed only in 2016). Iran is generally a very indicative country in this sense.
Everyone remembers that the nuclear deal was concluded in 2015 precisely because of the position of Russia. For many years, the United States artificially inflated the topic of the “Iranian nuclear threat” (although Tehran has repeatedly said that it is not going to create atomic weapons) and even achieved the imposition of sanctions against Iran at the UN level. But then the negotiation process began, and the leading world powers agreed to lift sanctions in exchange for the admission of IAEA inspectors to the Iranian nuclear program.
However, by the time the deal was concluded in July 2015, Russia itself was already under Western sanctions because of Crimea and Donbass, and Washington was very surprised that Moscow did not disrupt the conclusion of an agreement with Iran. Did the West then appreciate Russia’s role? Of course not, and soon after Trump came to the White House, the attitude of the States towards the nuclear deal itself also changed. It was thwarted, and by that time Russia and Iran were already “brothers in arms” in Syria. Sanctions restrictions against Iran are still in effect, but after the introduction of large-scale sanctions against Russia, the West’s ability to influence Russian-Iranian relations has drastically decreased.
Because Russia has nothing to lose – both in terms of restrictions on our financial and trade institutions, and in terms of relations with Europe and the United States. The level of sanctions pressure on Russia has surpassed even that which was against Iran (except that it is impossible to impose global sanctions against Russia, that is, measures at the UN level), and relations with the West have been destroyed and frozen. There is a full-fledged, albeit indirect, war in which the States are determined to play for the long term, intending to achieve the defeat of Russia, its weakening and maximum isolation from the outside world.
Russia, in addition to solving purely military tasks in Ukraine, is building a global coalition of those who are not satisfied with American hegemony, those who are ready to build a new world together with them: first parallel to the American one, and then post-American. Virtually all key non-Western world powers understand the enormous significance of the Russian victory for their own future, but publicly behave differently. Not only because they are afraid of American sanctions or are too closely connected with the West, but also because they are insured just in case: what if Russia fails, what if it is still crushed, and Western globalism will be able to extend its life for several more decades? They will later be remembered for Moscow’s public support.
This is not about China – they simply do not want to force a break with the West – but about some powers of the second and third row. But at the same time there are other countries – those who have long been in open and tough confrontation with the United States. These are not only those whom the Americans brand as rogue countries, but earlier called the “axis of evil” – the list is much wider. There are Venezuela with North Korea, and Cuba with Myanmar, but number one of them, of course, is Iran.
A country that has been following its own path for more than four decades, but, unlike most other independent states, does not close in on itself, but has regional and even global ambitions (that is, it behaves like Russia and China). An Islamic republic with a unique internal political system, the heir to one of the oldest civilizations, Russia’s neighbor in the Caspian, claims not just to be the leader of the Shiite branch of Islam, but to be an alternative to the Western project of globalization with its post-humanistic consumer matrix.
Yes, there are a lot of internal problems in the Iranian Islamic model — as it was with us with the socialist Soviet model — but it is focused on finding harmony and meaning, not pleasure and profit, on serving God, not mammon, on preserving tradition and one’s own uniqueness, and not the destruction of someone else’s. We in the USSR did not cope with tasks of this magnitude, and it is not a fact that the Iranians will succeed in the end, but both the Russians and the Persians were convinced from their own experience that submission to an alien matrix, moral, ideological and geopolitical, endangers the very existence of a unique country-civilization. And therefore, there is no doubt that Iran and Russia will come closer and closer – both to fight together against a common enemy, and in order to build a new world, and in order to make each other stronger, to preserve their uniqueness.
Petr Akopov, RIA
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