The Christian Science Monitor printed an article on Thursday about Russia's influence on Iran, acknowledging that the Russian leadership holds the key to disarming a potentially nuclear Iran. Whereas the article paints the conflict as being over the US missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic on the one hand (threatening to Russia), and Iran's nuclear ambitions on the other (threatening to Israel, and by extension the West), in my opinion Russia has a much more devious and existential goal in helping Iran to poke its fingers in the eyes of the West: keeping Iran an enemy of the West so that it can never become a viable transshipment point for Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to Europe.
After all, wasn't that also the cause of the recent war in Georgia?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Russia's incentive to keep Iran belligerent
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1 comment:
A pity nobody commented yet. The Iran-Russia relationship is a major key to which way Eurasia will go. In your article you assume that Russia has an incentive to play the US-Iran-Russia triangle in such a way that Iran remains an enemy of the West. I agree. But what if this goes further? Russia and Iran could even be partly allied. Look at the arguments of those who doubt that possibility. How strong are those arguments?
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