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Iran aims to get shanghaied

By Benedetta Berti - posted Tuesday, 13 January 2009


Iran’s growing involvement in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and its quest for permanent membership represent a potential strategic turning point for the organisation. The SCO is already an important global player - including both China and Russia among its members, encompassing strategic locations such as the Persian Gulf, the strait of Hormoz, and Central Asia, and having one of the world’s the highest rate of energy production and consumption. However, the degree of global influence and the role of the organisation could be additionally enhanced by the entry of Iran as permanent member, and by the subsequent rise of a triple Iranian-Russian-Chinese alliance.

The SCO is a permanent intergovernmental organisation created in 2001 as an evolution of the "Shanghai Five" mechanism devised in the aftermath of the Cold War and aimed at fostering security, political, and economic co-operation among its regional members. It is composed of China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as permanent members, and Iran, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia attending with observer status.

In the past few months, the SCO has adopted a series of measures to improve its internal security and defense mechanisms, and its economic co-operation.

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First, in the course of the past summer, SCO members agreed on a shared protocol to conduct joint military exercises and anti-terrorism operations.

Additionally, during the organisation’s annual summit in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), in August 2008 the member states further boosted their mutual security arrangements by creating a common system to assess and tackle external threats. On that occasion, Chinese President Hu Jintao stressed the need to increase the role of the SCO regionally and proposed a five-point plan to further common security arrangements, economic and trade co-operation, as well as cultural, scientific and technological exchanges both between permanent members and observer states.

Finally, in October 2008, during the Council of Heads of Governments of the SCO Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested the need to develop space co-operation among SCO members, including practical use of space-based telecoms, navigation and Earth observation systems.

Iranian participation and strategic vision

The Islamic Republic of Iran - an observer state since 2005 - has been playing an important role within the SCO, sharing the vision of those who are seeking to enhance the organisation’s regional and global role. In this sense, Iran recently proposed to rely exclusively on SCO-states currencies when trading among members “to maintain and strengthen the value of the foreign exchange reserves of member states,” as explained by Iranian President Ahmadinejad during the August 2008 meeting.

The President also suggested the creation of a SCO bank to increase and facilitate monetary transactions, as well as the adoption of a single trading currency between members. Similarly, during the October Council of Heads of Governments Summit, the Islamic Republic asked the member states to include Tehran as a member of the SCO Banking Consortium to lower trade costs. “Iran's presence in the members' banking consortium can reduce the costs of economic ties and increase the volume of trade,” said Iran's First Vice President Parviz Davoudi.

Moreover, Iran has been using the SCO framework to boost bilateral and multilateral ties with other members, with the objective of raising the level political support for the Islamic Republic. For example, during the August 2008 meeting, Iran held substantial talks with Persian-speaking countries of Tajikistan and Afghanistan - and the three states agreed to increase reciprocal economic, security, and political ties, and to discuss further the idea of creating a Farsi-speaking union.

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However, despite the important results achieved by Iran in the last SCO meetings, the country’s most important objective - namely the full membership in the organisation - has not been yet attained. There are several reasons as to why Iran has been pursuing full membership into the SCO. These efforts have to be read in the context of the country’s quest to increase both its role within regional organisations, as well as to upgrade status and global influence of the organisations themselves. The strategy behind this move is twofold.

First, from a political perspective, achieving full integration within the SCO would upgrade and enhance both Iran’s regional and global role. Moreover, by seeking new and increasingly solid alliances with regional organisations and emerging global powers like China and Russia, Iran is gradually reducing its international isolation - thus improving its strategic position when dealing with the United States and the “West” in the context of the nuclear crisis.

In this sense, Iran sees a stronger SCO as a strategic asset. In fact “(…) The SCO can emerge as an effective weight in the international arena and play an effective role in improving the new world order upon interests of the countries of the region,” as explained by Iranian Vice-President Parviz Davoudi during the 2007 SCO annual meeting.

Second, full membership in the SCO also offers Iran military and strategic advantages. The Islamic Republic is in fact seeking to boost the existing regional security arrangements, to ultimately reduce the role and presence of external powers. This same strategy led Tehran to invest in the 2007 Caspian Sea Summit. On that occasion, Iran obtained a two-part security arrangement indicating a general commitment to a “non-aggression policy,” and a specific promise of each participant country to deny the use of their territory for military actions against other Caspian Sea states. Moreover Iran envisions a more powerful and active SCO, which would ideally develop into a regional security organisation to counterweight NATO - a “NATO of the East” (as the Iranian state-owned radio described the SCO on August 27).

The membership debate

The question of Iranian membership in the SCO has to be analysed in the context of the ongoing internal debate regarding the expansion of the organisation, which recently led the Heads of State Council to create an ad hoc group to devise potential strategies and mechanisms for such enlargement to take place.

However, the issue of Iran’s entry in the SCO raises additional and more complex political and strategic questions that will likely affect the vision and evolution of the organisation. Specifically, in the context of the ongoing confrontation between Iran and the United States, the country’s entry into the SCO as permanent member would assume a larger geopolitical significance. In fact, although the SCO was not conceived as an opponent to NATO, the current political context would make the Unites States extremely suspicious of the Russian-Chinese-Iranian military alliance, which would likely be seen as an attempt to shift the global balance of power.

Therefore, given the complexity of the issue, all permanent members have developed different approaches with respect to the Iranian membership question. The most supportive member so far has been Tajikistan. For instance, during the August 2008 Summit Tajik Foreign Minister Hamrokhan Zarifi declared that the Iranian entry into the SCO would empower the regional group. Kazakhstan also has been in favor of Tehran, despite of its strong relations with the US. However, in determining whether Iran will indeed join the SCO as a permanent member, China and Russia’s posture will be particularly crucial.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed his country’s interest in increasing the level of co-operation and participation of observer states within the SCO and he has also praised Iran for its positive impact on the organisation. However, Russia has not yet openly advocated in favour of Tehran’s full membership, and it is perhaps conditioning its sponsorship to a stronger Iranian support for Moscow’s policies. Russia is seeking closer and stronger allies within the SCO; especially after, during the last war with Georgia, other permanent members fell short of supporting Russia’s actions, and instead issued a statement denouncing the use of force and calling for respect for every country's territorial integrity. In this context, Russia may be interested in using its support for Iran’s permanent membership as a bargaining chip in return for a stronger backing from the Islamic Republic.

Finally, China may be the real wildcard in determining whether Iran will join the SCO. On the one hand, China has an interested in avoiding an open confrontation with the United States. On the other hand, China has been boosting its ties with Iran and, on December 3, 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said that his country plans to maintain contact with Iran and conduct mutually beneficial co-operation with the Islamic Republic. Previously, China had also stated that it welcomed Iran’s interest in SCO membership.

In sum, the question of the SCO expansion in general, and of the Iranian permanent membership more specifically, raises crucial strategic questions that will impact the future of the regional organisation, as well as the relations within its members and with the rest of the international community.

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About the Author

Benedetta Berti is the Bradley Foundation Doctoral fellow at the Fletcher School (Tufts University), and a Neubauer Associate Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (Tel Aviv University). Ms. Berti specializes in international security studies and Middle Eastern politics.

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