Tehran is located 1,531 miles
(2,464 kilometers) from Moscow. In 2010, Russia had a defense budget of
$59 billion and 1 million active armed forces personnel; Iran's defense
budget was $7 billion with 523,000 active armed forces personnel.
Russia's nuclear weapons arsenal is estimated to include 10,566
warheads; the capacity of Iran's nuclear program is uncertain. Charts by
Everything Type Company
By
Dmitri Trenin
Feb 15, 2012 8:00 AM GMT+0800
International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade Statistics, 2011; International
Institute for Strategic Studies Military Balance, 2010; Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute Yearbook, 2011; World Bank; Arms Control Association;
U.S. Energy Information Administration.
International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade Statistics, 2011; International
Institute for Strategic Studies Military Balance, 2010; Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute Yearbook, 2011; World Bank; Arms Control Association;
U.S. Energy Information Administration.
When Russians look at
Iran, they
see a country that has been their neighbor and rival forever.
As the Russian empire advanced, it wrestled the North and
South Caucasus from the Shah. Peter the Great annexed,
briefly, Iran’s entire
Caspian Sea coastline and put his
forces just north of Tehran.
In the early 20th century, Russia and the U.K.
divided
Iran into zones of influence. The Russians got the north and
proceeded to occupy Iran twice, during each of the world wars.
When Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill met with
Josef Stalin in Tehran in 1943, they were protected by the Red
Army.
Yet there was never much love lost between the two
countries. To Iranians,
Russia was too powerful and too
threatening. Russians, meanwhile, remembered their own embassy
trauma at Iranian hands in 1829. Every schoolchild knows the
fate of Alexander Griboyedov, the czar’s ambassador to Persia,
who was murdered, with his entire embassy staff, by an angry
Tehran mob. Griboyedov was a great Russian author, many of
whose lines Russian children -- and grown-ups -- know by
heart.
This brief background is vital to understanding where
Russians are coming from as they approach
Iran’s nuclear
program, and why they have adopted such a stop-go approach to
supporting international efforts to rein it in. Although
Russia has backed limited sanctions at the
United Nations, it
has clashed with the U.S. and
Europe over the much tougher
sanctions they are now imposing unilaterally. It strongly
opposes any use of military force.
Cyrus and Xerxes
Russians see their neighbor as a historical empire --
going back to the days of Cyrus and Xerxes -- which now seeks
to reassert itself as a regional power in the Greater Middle
East. They see, all at once, a young and growing population
already half the size of Russia’s, a proud nation determined
to rise to its full potential, and clever wheeler-dealers
always looking for a bargain. They see, too, ruthless fanatics
driven by some weird interpretation of their religion -- and
shiver as they remember Griboyedov.
If such a country, many Russians reason, wants to acquire
nuclear weapons, it probably will. Bombing known facilities
would set back the nuclear program, but would also ensure that
Iran eventually gets the bomb, to deter any such attacks in
the future. The only way to prevent Iran from having nuclear
weapons, the Russians believe, is for the international
community to craft a deal under which Iran would agree to stop
after achieving a nuclear-weapons capability, while the
world’s leading powers would agree to reintegrate Iran into
the international community by dropping sanctions, unfreezing
assets and admitting Iran into the
World Trade Organization.
The Russians are not resigned to the prospect of Iran
getting nuclear weapons and perfecting its missiles to carry
them. Iran, after all, is a close neighbor, meaning that even
its medium-range systems can reach deep into Russia. Diplomats
from Moscow have been trying hard, in the past decade, to
nudge the Iranians toward some sort of a compromise with the
world’s powers and have hoped to secure special benefits in
exchange for Russia’s role as a mediator in the process. So
far, the attempt has failed, but Russia has not given up
entirely.
Russia, as a result, is often portrayed as Iran’s ally.
Yet the notion sounds weird to most Russians, and probably to
most Iranians, too. True, Russia has been selling arms to the
regime in Tehran, but Russian weapons dealers have learned to
look at their trade as profit-making par excellence. As for
Iran, it might prefer other partners to boost its military,
but doesn’t have much choice. A couple of years ago, Russia
canceled delivery of an air-defense system in an effort to
pressure Iran. The Iranians were not amused.
Bushehr Reactor
Russia is also continuing its nuclear-energy cooperation
with Iran. The Bushehr reactor, Iran’s first, has been
completed at long last. The Russians see nuclear energy as one
of the few fields in which they are globally competitive. They
look at Iran as a promising market they would be loath to cede
to rivals. Russian officials, however, imposed a condition:
Iran had to return all spent fuel to Russia for processing,
thus preventing its use in a nuclear-weapons program.
Where the assessment in Moscow does differ from that in
Washington is in the scale of the Iranian threat, both in
terms of capabilities and intentions. Russians tend to be more
conservative in their estimate of Iran’s progress on the
nuclear and missile tracks, often pointing to exaggerated
American warnings in the past. Russia’s frequent references to
the “lack of hard evidence” of the military nature of the
Iranian nuclear program are probably meant to keep the door
open for dialogue.
As to the intentions of the leadership in Tehran, the
Russians are ambivalent. For a number of years after the fall
of the Soviet Union, Iran turned out to be a very useful
partner for Russia, particularly by abstaining from expanding
its revolution to the new Muslim states of the former
Soviet
Union and by refusing to condemn Russia’s war in Chechnya.
Iran even helped Russia to join the
Organization of the
Islamic Conference as an observer, and in the 1990s helped to
end the civil war in
Tajikistan, where a variant of Farsi is
spoken.
This pragmatic side of Iranian politics, associated in
the past with the likes of former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, has been overshadowed more
recently by the far less cheerful streak of dark warnings and
messianic rhetoric from the current president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Neither Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin nor
President
Dmitry Medvedev succeeded in getting much out of
him.
Meanwhile, the supreme leader of Iran, the impervious
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the increasingly powerful
Revolutionary Guard Corps remain totally out of reach for
officials in Moscow. Russian Iran-watchers analyzing the
evolution of the political regime in Tehran expect it to
change in a pretty fundamental way in the foreseeable future,
but they have no clue as to the time frame or the direction of
the change.
Russians are watching warily as tensions around Iran
continue to rise. Sanctions, they think, beyond those already
authorized by the UN Security Council, would weaken Iran’s
pragmatists and empower its ideologues. Russia believes that
the even more stringent sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its
European allies not only won’t do what the West wants -- stop
the Iranian nuclear program or turn the Iranian people against
their government -- but also will fail to stave off an Israeli
airstrike. Such an attack inevitably would drag the U.S. into
the fray. That means, unless diplomacy is given one last
chance, the two things that concern Russian leaders most -- a
U.S. war against Iran, and an Iran armed with nuclear weapons
-- may become a reality soon.
(Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
This is the first in a series of op-ed articles about Iran,
from writers in countries that have a direct interest in the
escalating debate over how to rein in its alleged nuclear
weapons program. The opinions expressed are his own.)
editor comment:
it obviously seem Iranian had alliance with federal power of Russian, America, France, Britain, and China.
this 5 super power united supported Iranian against Muslim world.
