Just the other day, in August 2020, Iran tested a new land transit route: Iran - Afghanistan - Uzbekistan. As part of a run-in of the route from the Iranian port of Shahid Rajai in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas, a cargo was sent to Uzbekistan via Afghanistan, and it arrived at the site without obstacles. Huge trucks with flags posed for the Iranian media, first from Afghanistan, then from Uzbekistan: the route is laid, hurray!
This route is one of many included in the roadmap of the Chinese New Silk Road, connecting China with Europe through the Middle East, and in this belt (Belt and Road Initiative), a global infrastructure project of China, Iran is assigned a crucial role in transport, energy interconnection and , which is important, in the field of route safety.
So while the United States is fighting Iran through the UN, trying to extend the arms embargo and trying to restore sanctions, and Russia and China are gathering a European coalition for the fact that the United States unilaterally itself legally withdrew from the nuclear deal and now the fate of Iran is being decided without them, China and Iran began implement your action plan by testing running transport hubs.
Let me remind you that at the end of June, Iran and China signed a 25-year economic and security agreement worth $ 400 billion of Chinese investments in Iran. Officially, it is called the Sino-Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and I wrote about it in the Lion and Dragon Union column.
This partnership formally began back in 2016 with Xi Jinping's visit to Tehran. But since Trump destroyed the nuclear deal in 2018 and withdrew from the deal and all countries doing business with Iran were in danger of sanctions, the Sino-Iranian alliance went into the shadows and was severely punished by Washington (war with Huawei and the arrest of the daughter of the founder of the company Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, etc.).
This document, labeled "final version", is dated June 2020, although the author of this column considers January 3, 2020 as the date of signature of the final version of the Sino-Iranian agreement. Signatures in blood as a sign of the highest reliability.
The Indian newspaper Financial Express writes that China should invest $ 120 billion to modernize Iran's transport infrastructure, starting with a 2,300 km road that will connect Tehran with Urumqi, a city in China's Xinjiang province. This road will be connected to the Urumqi-Gwadar line, developed within the framework of the Chinese-Pakistani economic corridor of the New Silk Road, and will connect Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and then through Turkey to Europe.
Of course, looking at the map and the routes being laid, it is difficult to refrain from obvious associations: scarlet valleys of poppies, peasants harvesting crops, ships and trains with bales, the famous Chinese opium wars, but official protocols are trying to cool our ardor: we are talking about the development of Uzbek and other Central Asian exports: cotton, dried fruits, various chemical materials.
"The pilot opening of this corridor indicates that Afghanistan is serious about developing transit through its territory and connecting the countries of Central Asia with southern waters, including ports along the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman (in Chabahar. - Author)," Mustafa Ayati said. Representative of the Customs Administration of the Islamic Republic of Iran IRICA.
The Gulf of Oman is also included in the map - a four-sided Agreement on the creation of an international transport and transit corridor between the governments of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Oman.
But all of these transport routes must be perfectly secured, you say. Especially in such a difficult hot region. And you will be absolutely right.
“A military alliance between China and the countries of Central Asia has been formed. Its key point is Tajikistan; South China wrote about this in detail back in 2015. Tajikistan is the center of confrontation between India and China. A real military alliance has existed since this time, it is called 阿 中 巴塔 - "Ajunbata". This is a meeting of the heads of the general staffs of Afghanistan (A), China (Zhong), Pakistan (Ba), Tajikistan (Ta), ”says Nikolai Vavilov, an expert on China and its political clans, who has lived in China for ten years, the author of the South China Telegram channel. and the forthcoming book "Chinese Power". - The level of the meeting is very high, suffice it to say that before the "coronation" of the Chief of the General Staff, Li Zuocheng participated in the meeting, after which he received a new position. It is a full-fledged anti-Indian alliance led by China. And Tajikistan is the "thinnest" place of this alliance and the overland hydrocarbon trade corridor that China is building bypassing the US-India-Japan-Vietnam coalition in case of war. "
But in this military alliance between China and the states of Central Asia, there is no Iran, it is hard not to notice. Although in fact the closest military cooperation between China and Iran is a historical fact, moreover, it can be said that Iran is just covering up Chinese interests in the Middle East in sensitive issues of security and military strategy. Why is there no Iran in this alliance?
Iran's value to China is not only due to its unique geopolitical position in Western Asia.
Not only that Iran controls Hezbollah, the entire Shiite axis in the world and Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, forming the so-called Axis of Resistance, abutting Palestine and like an arrow flying to other continents.
Iran, which is not officially a member of the anti-Indian Chinese alliance, acts as a moderator and mediator of complex Sino-Indian relations through the most important and sensitive point - the Iranian port of Chabahar, which is part of the free economic zone. It is the only ocean port in Iran, which has about 300 km of water border with the Gulf of Oman, and is one of the ten most important strategic ports in the world. It was about him that Marco Polo wrote: “Many merchants who travel across the sea stop there. A lot of goods are taken from there by land roads. " Chabahar is a crossroads of West-East and North-South roads.
- © Screenshot of Pars Today website
In 2016, India, Iran and Afghanistan signed an agreement on the creation of a transport and transit corridor using Chabahar, connecting the region with Central Asia, and then, in 2017, India sent its first consignment of export wheat through this port, and in 2018 to New Delhi, Iranian President Rouhani signed an agreement to lease India one of the two Chabahar ports - Shahid-Beheshti.
For India, blocked in the West by Pakistan (the keys to which, again, China has today - through the CPEC, China Pakistan Economic Corridor), Chabahar is the most important export channel for rice, wheat and others to Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The India Business Line informs that the port of Chabahar, funded by India, was integrated into the Iranian free zone in July 2020 with the approval of the Guardian Council (IRGC). A branch of the Da Afghanistan bank will soon appear there.
“Back in 2000, China and Iran signed an agreement on the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to China through Afghanistan, but then the American invasion of Afghanistan began, and the construction was disrupted because the US is seriously concerned about the Iranian-Chinese rapprochement. But since China today considers a war scenario with the United States possible, it seeks to ensure uninterrupted oil supplies, pending an oil embargo, as happened with Japan on the eve of the war. Therefore, now China is striving to ensure uninterrupted supplies of continental oil, primarily Iranian and Russian, in case of a military conflict, ”Vavilov said.
The moment for the Sino-Iranian-Russian game is ideal: Trump is isolating America more and more, withdrawing from international agreements, completely destroying the status quo created after World War II.
The United States, preoccupied with domestic affairs and problems thanks to Trump, with its aggressive foreign policy, is no longer playing the role of hegemon and the world's chief sheriff. At the same time, a great Eurasian geopolitical project is being created before our eyes.
By the time Washington started the tariff war, China had become the world's second largest economy. And some analysts believe that by 2035 it would definitely have become the first, if not for the strange COVID-19 epidemic that began to kill the very Chinese economy.
The Eurasian project connects China and Europe with multiple blood arteries and vessels of transport routes, pipelines, telecommunications, financial systems and railways (in China and Europe, by the way, the same width of the railroad tracks).
The Tehran Times does not hide its glee: “The timing of the deal could not have been better for the Islamic Republic. For China and the United States in a squabble, the Iran-China deal will further worsen bilateral ties between the world's two largest economies. ” Translating Persian diplomacy: a deal with us will push China and the United States even more apart, making their reconciliation (dangerous to our survival) almost impossible, which means China will stay with us. And if the US wants to renegotiate, it will have to pay more than China is offering.
Majid Reza Hariri, president of the Iranian-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, claims that theoretical studies on 6G have been completed in China, while such studies have not even begun in the United States (where Trump is fighting 5G - on the one hand, in concern for national security, but on the other hand, increasing the technological gap between the United States and China, between East and West, between the Atlantic alliance and the coalition of forces of the Celestial Empire, which is gathering more and more states).
"Iran is the key to China's plans, just as China's plans are the key to the fate of Eurasia," Robert Kaplan writes in The New York Times.
So, in the summer of 2020, we are recording: the first transport and transit lines of the New Silk Road with Huawei's telecommunications infrastructure in Asia have already been launched.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.