Hegemony and Resistance Around the Iranian Nuclear Programme: Analysing Chinese, Russian and Turkish Foreign Policies by Moritz Pieper

Author:Moritz Pieper [Pieper, Moritz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Intergovernmental Organizations, Middle Eastern, Arms Control, Political Science, World, Military Policy, General, Russian & Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781315466361
Google: JCIlDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35035377
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

6 Conclusion

Russian foreign policy toward Iran and its nuclear programme has to be seen in the context of Russia’s political relations with ‘the West’ in general, and with the US in particular. Russo-Iranian commercial cooperation in the civilian nuclear sphere was a legacy that impacted on Russia’s reaction to the 2002 revelations of hitherto covert nuclear facilities in Iran. Russian foreign policy in the nascent Iranian nuclear crisis made a distinction between purely commercial and legitimate nuclear technology usage (Bushehr), and a security political dimension of the Iranian nuclear programme (‘Western allegations of military intentions remain unproven’). Here, Russia was also driven by an understanding that US policies towards Iran’s file were essentially politicised during the Bush administration. When the Iranian nuclear file was referred to the UNSC in 2006, Russia was slowing down the sanctions track, but eventually accepted and approved of international sanctions. This was seen as a lesser evil because the perceived alternative to sanctions could have been war with Iran, especially at a time when voices calling for unilateral air strikes grew louder. The approval of sanctions also had to be read as a frustration with Iran’s rejection of Russian technical proposals to de-escalate the tensions in 2006. Especially the revelation of the Fordow facility in 2009 set the stage for a momentum towards a P5 compromise on a new sanctions round in 2010. Here, working through UN channels to shape the outcome of sanctions was seen as the best way to exert influence over the Iran file and prevent worse policies from materialising, while Russian public rhetoric conveyed a scepticism of the use of sanctions all along. Moscow’s striving to preserve Great Power status in what Russian decision-makers refer to as a ‘polycentric’ world explains its advocacy for a security culture that breathes the ambition to ‘democratise’ international relations and resist US pressure. Russia and its Western counterparts in the P5 + 1 framework occasionally have appeared to be standing on two opposite ends of the spectrum of political instruments when it came to approaching the Iranian nuclear file. This was all the more true when Russia was vocal about its criticism of Western attempts from 2011 onwards to isolate Iran economically. As this chapter has shown, however, taking such disagreements as signs of an unalterable freezing into mutually opposed camps and portraying Russia as a cumbersome veto player in the UNSC does not do justice to much more complex foreign policy positions that have to bridge official discourse(s) with largely material, global power political and security motivations.

As has been discussed, an occasionally remarkable degree of pragmatic cooperation with the US on the Iran file has been observed – not only at the peak of the Obama–Medvedev ‘reset’ policy, but also in diplomatic negotiations in the P5 + 1 format. An outspoken criticism of Western unilateral sanctions policies was paralleled by a desire to be perceived as a constructive player in the Iranian nuclear dossier. A number of Russian initiatives (Putin’s 2006 proposal for the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.