China agreed to invest $400 billion in Iran over 25 years in
exchange for a steady supply of oil to fuel its growing economy under a
sweeping economic and security agreement signed on Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
The deal could deepen China’s influence in the Middle East
and undercut US efforts to keep Iran isolated. But it was not immediately clear
how much of the agreement can be implemented while the US dispute with Iran
over its nuclear program remains unresolved.
President Joe Biden has offered to resume negotiations with
Iran over the 2015 nuclear accord that his predecessor, President Donald Trump,
abrogated three years after it was signed. American officials say both
countries can take synchronized steps to bring Iran into compliance with the
terms of the agreement while the US gradually lifts sanctions.
Iran has refused to do so, and China has backed it up,
demanding that the United States act first to revive the deal it broke by
lifting unilateral sanctions that have suffocated the Iranian economy. China
was one of five world powers that, along with the US, signed the 2015 nuclear
agreement with Iran.
The foreign ministers of the two countries, Javad Zarif and
Wang Yi, signed the agreement during a ceremony at the foreign ministry in
Tehran, Iran, on Saturday, according to Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency.
That capped a two-day visit by Wang that reflected China’s growing ambition to
play a larger role in a region that has been a strategic preoccupation of the
United States for decades.
“China firmly supports Iran in safeguarding its state
sovereignty and national dignity,” Wang said in his meeting with Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, the Chinese foreign ministry reported. The United
States, Wang said, should immediately rescind its sanctions on Iran and “remove
its long arm of jurisdictional measures that have been aimed at China, among
others”.
Iran did not make the details of the agreement public before
the signing, nor did the Chinese government give specifics. But experts said it
was largely unchanged from an 18-page draft obtained last year by The New York
Times.
That draft detailed $400 billion of Chinese investments to
be made in dozens of fields, including banking, telecommunications, ports,
railways, health care and information technology, over the next 25 years. In
exchange, China would receive a regular — and, according to an Iranian official
and an oil trader, heavily discounted — supply of Iranian oil.
The draft also called for deepening military cooperation,
including joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development
and intelligence-sharing.
Iranian officials touted the agreement with Beijing — first
proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping during a 2016 visit — as a
breakthrough. But it has been met with criticism inside Iran that the
government could be giving too much away to China.
Hesamoddin Ashena, a top adviser to Rouhani, called the deal
“an example of a successful diplomacy” on Twitter, saying it was a sign of
Iran’s power “to participate in coalitions, not to remain in isolation”. He
called it “an important decree for long-term cooperation after long
negotiations and joint work”.
A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, Saeed
Khatibzadeh, called the document a “complete road map” of relations for the
next quarter-century.
Wang has already visited Iran’s archrival, Saudi Arabia, as
well as Turkey, and is scheduled to go to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain,
and Oman in the days ahead. He has said that the region is at a crossroads and
offered China’s help in resolving persistent disputes, including over Iran’s
nuclear program.
China is even ready to play host to direct talks between the
Israelis and the Palestinians, hinting that US dominance in the region has
hindered peace and development.
In Iran, opinions about China’s expanding influence have been
mixed.
After Xi first proposed the strategic agreement during his
visit in 2016, negotiations to complete it moved slowly at first. Iran had just
reached its deal with the United States and other nations to ease economic
sanctions in exchange for severe restrictions on its nuclear research
activities, and European companies began flocking to Iran with investments and
offers of joint partnerships to develop gas and oil fields.
Those opportunities evaporated after Trump withdrew the
United States from the deal and imposed new sanctions that the Europeans feared
could entangle them, forcing Iran to look east.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ordered a
revival of talks with China, appointing a trusted conservative politician and
former speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, as a special envoy.
“China is a friend for hard times,” Zarif, the foreign
minister, said after signing the deal. “The history of cooperation between two
ancient cultures of Iran and China dates back centuries. Signing the cooperation
agreement will further strengthen the ties of the two nations.”
Critics have complained that the negotiations lacked
transparency and called the deal a sellout of Iran’s resources, comparing it to
one-sided agreements that China has made with countries like Sri Lanka.
Supporters of the deal said that Iran had to be pragmatic
and recognize China’s growing economic prominence.
“For too long in our strategic alliances, we have put all
our eggs in the basket of the West, and it did not yield results,” said Ali
Shariati, an economic analyst who until recently was a member of Iran’s Chamber
of Commerce. “Now, if we shift policy and look at the East, it won’t be so
bad.”
It remains to be seen how many of the ambitious projects
detailed in the agreement will materialize. If the nuclear agreement collapses
entirely, Chinese companies, too, could face secondary sanctions from
Washington, an issue that has infuriated China in the past.
The US prosecution of Chinese telecommunications giant
Huawei includes accusations that the company was furtively trading with Iran in
violation of those sanctions.
Chinese officials have emphasized that both Washington and
Tehran needed to take steps to resolve the nuclear dispute.
“All the parties can consider an
approach of synchronized reciprocity, creating a road map for restoring
observance of the agreement,” Wang said in the talks with his Iranian
counterpart, Zarif. “There can be efforts to achieve initial gains, creating
the conditions for relaunching the whole agreement.”
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