Iran's Economic Ties with China Deepen

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi met in Beijing Feb. 19.

Zarif led an Iranian delegation to Beijing that included the speaker of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, and the ministers of finance and petroleum, as well as the CEO of the country’s central bank.

Wang told Zarif he hoped the visit would “deepen the strategic trust between our two countries.” 

Zarif replied that “Our relationship with China is very valuable to us. We consider the comprehensive strategic partnership between Iran and China as one of our most important relations.”

China’s President Xi Jinping also threw his weight behind efforts to build stronger relations between Tehran and Beijing.

“China is seeking to develop strategic wide-ranging relations with Iran,” he said in a meeting with Larijani.

The Majlis speaker pointed to “historical” and “friendly” relations between the two sides and described Beijing as “a reliable partner” for Tehran.

Larijani indicated that Tehran is prepared to cooperate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

President Xi’s infrastructure project, launched in 2013, seeks to connect China to global markets by linking Asia and Europe via a set of land and maritime trade routes.

The project is valued at more than one-trillion dollars, spanning over 60 countries across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. And Iran is at the geographic and logistical center of this new Silk Road between east and west.

For millennia, Iran has prospered as a trading hub linking east and west. Now, that role is set to expand in coming years.

Iran is now critical to China’s ability to realize its economic ambitions. Other routes to western markets are longer and lead through Russia, potentially a competitor of China.

The proposed 3,200-kilometre route of the new Silk Road begins in Urumqi in western China and continues to Iran, where it will continue northwest through Turkey into Europe.

China and Iran have already cooperated with each other in the construction of some lines on Tehran’s subway, and on the Tehran-Isfahan high-speed railway currently under construction.

Other rail projects will connect Tehran and Mashhad with deep water ports in the country’s south.

In a 2016 test, China and Iran drove a train from the port of Shanghai in eastern China to Tehran in just 12 days, a journey that takes 30 days by sea. 

In Iran, they used the existing track between Tehran and Mashhad, powered by a slower diesel-powered train. When the new line is opened in 2021, it is expected to accommodate electric trains at speeds up to 200 kilometres an hour.

Last November, United States President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Iran, resulting in a depreciated currency, rampant inflation is rampant, and high unemployment. 

Boosting ties with China and Russia, permanent members of the UN Security Council, would help reduce the impact of U.S. pressure. And China is indeed looking for ways to keep Iran afloat.

 “China has healthy, superb, extensive and stable relations with Iran, particularly in the field of economy, and we want to further expand them,” remarked China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Zhang Jun last summer.

Iran could facilitate China’s relations with the Middle East and Europe via the road, he noted.

As well, joint projects in Iran’s oilfields will help the economic development of both countries. China is an important market for Iranian oil – Beijing imports approximately 10 percent of its oil from Iran -- and because of American sanctions, it is the only source of the large amounts of capital Iran needs to finance critical infrastructure projects.

Today, China is Iran’s most important trading partner. Chinese and Iranian trade is based on everything from energy to arms, from nuclear technologies to Chinese infrastructure investment in Iran, from sunflowers to hijabs.

Chinese state companies are active all over the country, building highways, digging mines and making steel. Tehran’s shops are flooded with Chinese products and its streets full of Chinese cars and buses.

 “China is dominating Iran,” declared Mehdi Taghavi, an economics professor at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran, but he suggested that the “Iranian authorities do not see any drawbacks to being dependent on China. Together, we are moving ahead.”

The "Seductive" Power of the United States

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In a course I am teaching on the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, one student gave an excellent presentation on the relationship between today’s Russia and the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

One of the journal articles she examined was entitled “Beyond Spheres of Influence: The Myth of the State and Russia’s Seductive Power in Kyrgyzstan,” by Stefanie Ortmann, a professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex in England.

Ortmann questions the analytical value of “spheres of influence” for understanding power and the state in the post-Soviet region, instead drawing on the concept of “seductive power” through an extended discussion of Russian influence in the central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, a country often described as a Russian client state. 

For today’s Russian Federation, the 14 other former republics of the old Soviet Union are considered the “near abroad.” They are both foreign, yet not entirely foreign.

For Moscow, she writes, “this is power at a distance, ‘seductive power’ that works to produce particular political subjectivities and is effective precisely because it draws on mutually constitutive understandings of state and space.”

Shared Russian and Kyrgyz conceptions of state and space, as well as material factors, such as enduring networks at both elite and societal level, reproduce Russian power in Kyrgyzstan, even though the latter has been a sovereign entity since 1991.

In other words, there is no simple and inexorable link between sovereign power and exclusive control over bounded territory. Seductive influence may transcend this supposedly watertight connection.

For Russians, Kyrgyzstan is not a foreign state in the sense that, say, Pakistan is. And for the Kyrgyz, the same holds true – despite the greater distance, Moscow is subjectively closer than Islmabad.

I would submit that this same type of relationship exists between Canada and the United States – and it is an even closer one.

“Soft” power is a concept that is simultaneously seductive and slippery: It captures something that most of us intuitively recognize — the capacity to influence others without twisting arms, threatening, or compelling. The currency of soft power is culture, political values, and foreign policies. 

As Harvard University political scientist Joseph Nye wrote in his 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries – admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness – want to follow it.”

If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes, he argued.

“This soft power – getting others to want the outcomes that you want – co-opts people rather than coerces them.” 

Soft power extends beyond the operations of government, to the activities of the private sector and to society and culture at large.

What was the content of America’s soft power? Nye put it into three categories: cultural, ideological, and institutional. In these areas, the world would want to be like the United States. And that pull, in turn, would help the nation shape the world. 

American soft power permeates Canada, through television, movies, songs, books and magazines, fashion, food, educational institutions, newscasts, and products of every shape and size. Its influence is so overwhelming it often escapes our notice.

Most Canadians live within a day’s drive of the U.S. border, and there are an almost infinite number of personal interactions, given a common language in most cases. 

Tens of thousands of snowbirds spend winter months in Florida and Arizona. Countless numbers of Canadian students attend colleges and universities south of the border and we often accept those degrees as having more value than Canadian ones.

Canadian actors, singers, and authors frequently move to cities such as New York, Los Angeles or Nashville to further their careers.

Canada and the U.S. are similar in ethnicities and religions, as well. For all these reasons, we do not really consider he United States to be a “foreign” country, the way we view every other nation – even our former colonial master Britain. 

As for the Americans, they view Canada as their “near abroad,” a kindred state with whom they retain cordial and peaceful relations. It too is not really a “foreign” nation.

Both sides, despite occasional flaps, prefer to keep it that way.

Trudeau’s Foreign Policy Problems

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Justin Trudeau has strained nearly every international relationship Canada has, notably with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and now, of course, China.

Relations with India have not recovered from last year’s fiasco, when Trudeau, visiting India, seemed oblivious to the threat of Sikh separatism there. 

A Canadian man convicted in a failed attempt to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister in 1986 had been invited to a formal event hosted by the Canadian High Commission in Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has still not forgiven Trudeau for this gaffe. Trudeau had already been beset by allegations that his Liberal Party curries favor with Canada’s prominent Sikh community by supporting secessionist Sikh groups that want an independent homeland called Khalistan.

In August, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expelled Canada’s ambassador and withdrew his own envoy after Foreign Minister Freeland used Twitter to call for the release of women’s rights activists who had been arrested in the country.

Saudi Arabia ordered 15,000 Saudi students to leave Canada, halted direct flights to and from Canada and froze new trade and investment.

More recently, a Saudi teen was described as a “brave new Canadian” as she fled her allegedly abusive family by Freeland, who appeared alongside Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun with her arm around the teen at Pearson Airport in January.

Following Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, two Canadians were seized by the Chinese government in December, and a third had his 15-year sentence for drug dealing raised to death, in apparent retaliation.

Countries such as the U.S. – who want to extradite Meng -- the U.K., Australia and France would normally have been expected to put a word in for their release without much prompting were largely silent.

Canada shares very few civic values with the Communist government and there is no indication that Beijing under President Xi Jinping intends to do anything but intensify his authoritarian state.

China is Canada’s second-largest trading partner, so the ramifications could be extremely serious. China’s ambassador Lu Shaye called the detention of Meng an example of “western egoism and white supremacy.”

Canada’s overarching vital interest is to maintain a secure and open border for bilateral trade and a strong security alliance with the U.S. Some 75 per cent of our exports go south of the border.

Yet renegotiating the new North American trade deal took much longer than anticipated, thanks in part to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to walk away from the talks.

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was finally signed by Trudeau, Trump, and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in November, but has still to be ratified by the U.S. Congress.

What about Russia and Ukraine? Relations with Moscow are in deep freeze, while we uphold the supposedly democratic government in Ukraine. But all is not as it seems.

Under the post-Euromaidan government, there is much less freedom in Ukraine and much more political violence.

Ukraine remains a corrupt state run by oligarchs, something that isn’t mentioned by our foreign minister, who hates Russia and supports the Kyiv regime wholeheartedly. But that government is no shining example of democracy.

Repressive measures include persecutions and imprisonment of citizens holding dissenting opinion; searches of the offices of media outlets that dare to criticize the new Ukrainian power holders; attacks by ultra-right nationalists against journalists and media offices; and cyber-bullying of journalists and bloggers who hold alternative opinions.

All of this is carried out with the informal support by the administration of President Petro Poroshenko, who is up for re-election in March.

There is one bright spot, however. Ottawa has recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate head of state in Venezuela, to send a clear message about what Trudeau has called “the illegitimacy” of the Nicolas Maduro regime. Venezuelan lawmakers named Guaido interim president in January.

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has repeatedly criticized Caracas’ human rights record. Recently she described the Maduro regime as a “dictatorship.”

Canada renewed its calls to allow humanitarian aid into Venezuela in a joint statement by Freeland and Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau.

“Canada is deeply concerned by the acts of violence allegedly perpetrated by the Maduro regime, designed to block the entry of relief items from neighbouring countries,” it read.