As anticipated in our post on The Washington Note on October 13 (and a monograph published by Johns Hopkins’ Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies earlier this week), China authoritatively signaled today that it will not support the imposition of anything approaching “crippling” international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities.

Nor will Chinese leaders support measures that would negatively impact what Beijing sees as its most important economic and strategic interests at stake in China’s developing relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Indeed, after meeting with Iran’s Vice President, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao noted that Sino-Iranian “cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened”, and stated that the Chinese government “will maintain high-level exchanges with Iran, enhance mutual understanding and trust, promote bilateral pragmatic cooperation and coordinate closely in international affairs”.

Wen’s statement comes a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – who has done more than anyone else in the Obama Administration to promulgate the threat of “crippling” sanctions if Tehran does not surrender on the nuclear issue – was disabused of whatever illusions she was clinging to about Moscow’s willingness to support a strategically meaningful intensification of international pressure on the Islamic Republic.

Furthermore, it comes a day after Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Kurt Campell, also in Beijing, offered more hot air about “the need to see more cooperation and coordination between the United States and China” regarding Iran.

We supported Barack Obama in his campaign for the White House in 2008 – but we have to say that, at this point, it is hard to identify any significant improvement in America’s Iran policy under President Obama compared to the strategically dysfunctional approach pursued by the George W. Bush Administration.

The Obama Administration’s continuing advocacy of a “dual track” approach to Iran is particularly misleading. There is not a serious sanctions “option” for resolving the nuclear issue or other strategic differences with Iran. The Administration’s constant cheer leading for sanctions does nothing for U.S. interests – but will undercut the credibility of whatever diplomatic overtures Secretary Clinton and her colleagues make toward Tehran.

The “dual track” approach only makes sense as a lowest-common-denominator consensus position among different camps of Obama’s foreign policy and political advisers. Looking for that kind of consensus may have been an effective way to run the Harvard Law Review. It is not a way to define coherent and effective foreign policy.

Significantly, the meeting between Wen and Rahimi took place on the margins of a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – a regional security forum comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, in which Iran, India, and Pakistan have observer status.

Among other things, summit participants will be launching discussions about expanding use of member states’ currencies for intra-SCO trade (including oil and gas), thereby reducing the dollar’s use as a transactional currency.

It is popular in U.S. foreign policy circles to dismiss the SCO as a “talk shop”. But we think the SCO is interesting as a harbinger of future strategic trends – trends that, left unchecked, could profoundly accelerate the decline of America’s strategic position. Checking those trends requires that the United States pursue a fundamentally different sort of relationship with Iran.

But that won’t happen until the Obama Administration faces reality about what its options really are.

Center for Strategic and International Studies Middle East Director Jon Alterman has a different perspective.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

A lot of attention is being focused on Chinese policy toward Iran, particularly regarding the Obama Administration’s threats to impose “crippling” international sanctions if diplomacy does not provide Washington with satisfaction (however defined) regarding the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The Administration’s reasoning about how the imposition of “crippling” sanctions on Tehran would come about runs roughly as follows:

• Because of President Obama’s efforts to “hit the reset button” with Russia, Moscow has come a long way toward the U.S. position regarding additional sanctions against Iran.

• China may not necessarily be happy at the prospect of new sanctions against one of its major energy suppliers, but, over the last three years, Beijing has let Moscow take the lead in opposing or watering down anti-Iran sanctions proposed by the United States and its European partners.

• Beijing does not want to be “on its own” in opposition to new sanctions, so, as long as Washington has Moscow on board, China will not block tougher international measures against Iran.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s logic regarding the plausibility of imposing “crippling” sanctions against the Islamic Republic hardly stands up to serious scrutiny. First of all, we do not believe that Moscow is, in fact, on board for significantly tougher sanctions against Iran. (We will have more to say on this in future posts.) Secondly–and more to the point here–our monograph demonstrates that the Obama Administration’s logic chain misreads China’s strategic calculus about its relations with the Islamic Republic.

In broad terms, the development of China’s relations with Iran epitomizes the challenges that Beijing faces in managing what John Garver describes as China’s “Persian Gulf dilemma”. This “dilemma” requires China to balance a major interest in maintaining comity with the United States against its interests in building cooperative ties to important Gulf countries–including those, like the Islamic Republic, in policy conflict with Washington. In their efforts to balance these interests, China’s leaders have been careful not to let their country’s developing ties to the Islamic Republic be perceived in Washington as a direct challenge to America’s longstanding hegemonic position in the Gulf. But, at the same time, Beijing is moving ahead to cultivate an increasingly strategic energy relationship with Iran.

On the Iranian nuclear issue, more specifically, Beijing has given just enough to Washington to avoid a fundamental rupture while also supporting Tehran against U.S.-led international pressure. Thus, since 2006, China has endorsed three UN Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic. In the process, Beijing has succeeded in keeping the nuclear issue in the Security Council–where, as a permanent member, China has significant influence and can, among other things, ensure that any prospective military action against Iran would have no interantional legitimacy. But Beijing has also worked (as has Moscow) to water down the sanctions actually actually imposed, thereby protecting China’s most important economic and strategic interests vis-à-vis Iran.

While China remains disinclined to challenge American hegemony in the Gulf directly, governmental and corporate decision-makers in Beijing are becoming more assertive in advancing China’s energy and economic interests in Iran–even as American concern over the nuclear problem intensifies. China is increasingly willing to stand on its own–that is, without necessarily having political cover from Russia–in opposition to specific measures proposed by the United States to raise international pressure on Tehran. In particular, Beijing has made clear that it will not endorse any measure that would seriously impede China’s access to Iranian hydrocarbon supplies or Chinese energy companies’ potential to pursue upstream positions in Iran.

Furthermore, China will continue developing its strategic energy ties to the Islamic Republic. Since 2007, China has not only continued to buy large amounts of Iranian oil–Chinese energy companies are now also developing substantial investment positions there. (Indeed, Iran is one of the few places in the Gulf where foreign firms can access upstream resources directly.) The willingness of Chinese energy companies to move beyond MOUs and other preliminary agreements to conclude actual investment deals in Iran indicates that governmental and corporate decision-makers in Beijing calculate that China can now “get away with more” in the Islamic Republic without provoking a serious U.S. backlash. Among other considerations, these decision-makers are increasingly (and justifiably) confident that Washington is not about to impose secondary sanctions on Chinese companies over investments in Iranian energy projects.

In this context, Dennis Ross’s idea to facilitate Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Tehran by having Saudi Arabia “replace” the oil that China currently imports from Iran is completely detached from the reality of the Islamic Republic’s growing importance for China’s energy security interests.

• China is not about to agree to such a significant reduction in the diversity of its oil supply sources in the Gulf. Likewise, Beijing will not abandon its interest in Iran as a potential suplier of natural gas to international markets–a role that Saudi Arabia will not be able to assume.

• Riyadh may let Chinese and other foreign companies explore for non-associated natural gas in Saudi Arabia (not for export, but for domestic use inside the Kingdom). However, Saudi Arabia is not about to let Chinese or other foreign companies into its upstream oil sector.

• Moreover, Chinese military officials are focused on the potential for Iranian hydrocarbons to come to China through pipelines running across Central Asia, rather than through seaborne routes vulnerable to American naval interdiction. Iran is the only Gulf country that can offer China such diversification of transit routes as well as supply sources.

Beyond the cricital issue of energy security, China also has important geopolitical interests at stake in its relationship with the Islamic Republic. While, as we noted above, Chinese leaders are not inclined to challenge American hegemony in the Middle East directly, Beijing does have an interest in deflecting overly assertive exercises of that hegemony. Chinese leaders simply do not believe arguments advanced from Washington that American leadership has contributed to peace and stability in the Gulf and the “greater Middle East”. From a Chinese perspective, China’s interest in the stable and uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil has more often been hurt, not helped, by the exercise of American power.

In this context, Beijing has long seen Iran as a putative regional power–not only in the Persian Gulf, but also in Central Asia. Shared opposition to U.S. hegemony in both of these critical regions makes the Islamic Republic a potentially important ally for China.

Thus, China is not going to endorse anything coming close to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s frequently invoked threshold of “crippling” sanctions against Iran. If push comes to shove, China might at some point agree to a modest expansion of existing sanctions–but that is the most it will do. Unfortunately, by continuing to pursue the fatally flawed “dual track” approach to Iran that it inherited from the George W. Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has rooted its Iran policy in a delusion.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Today, the ongoing competition for regional influence between the United States and Iran is the Middle East’s most strategically significant fault line. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict is now subordinated to the U.S.-Iranian struggle—not, as some would suggest, because regional players care less about Arab-Israeli issues, but because it is now impossible to achieve negotiated settlements on the unresolved tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict without a more productive U.S.-Iranian relationship.

Iran’s “rise” makes the Islamic Republic’s choices regarding its alignment toward key international players an increasingly critical factor in regional and global power balances. As a result, the Islamic Republic has become a strategic focus not only for the United States, but for important countries in and outside the Middle East. As the hegemonial struggle between the United States and Iran plays out, both established and rising powers—China, Europe, India, Russia—are seeking to influence this competition in ways that will promote their economic and strategic interests. Likewise, major Middle Eastern states—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey—must deal with the impact of Iran’s rise and the evolving dynamics of U.S.-Iranian relations on their own places in the regional balance of power.

Taken together, we call these two interlocking geopolitical contests—one between Washington and Tehran over strategic dominance in the broader Middle East, and the other among major international and regional players for influence over the Islamic Republic’s strategic orientation—the “race for Iran”. (This phrase was first used by Flynt Leverett in a June 2006 Op Ed in The New York Times.) So defined, the “race for Iran” will have determinative influence over the structure of international relations—and, in particular, for America’s longstanding hegemonic position in the Middle East—throughout the first half of the 21^st century.

We are launching this blog to track and understand the “race for Iran”, in all of its myriad dimensions. In practical terms, The Race for Iran seeks to serve three main purposes.

First, The Race for Iran will present cutting-edge analyses of Iran and its geopolitics. Substantively, we will cover Iranian foreign policy in all of its dimensions, as well as the policies of the United States and other major regional and global players toward Iran. Many of the analyses presented here will come from us, but we will also provide a platform for other commentators, writing from their own intellectual and national or regional perspectives.

Second, The Race for Iran will serve as a “clearing house” for essential material on Iran and its geopolitics. With the support of Ben Katcher, an outstanding political analyst with the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program, we will assemble and frequently update documents and publications in multiple categories—UN Security Council resolutions pertaining to Iran, International Atomic Energy Agency reports on Iran’s nuclear activities, Iranian proposals for dealing with the nuclear issues and other regional and international controversies, U.S. and Western proposals for dealing with such issues, material on Iran’s economy (including its enormous hydrocarbon reserves), and resources on U.S. policy—for easy reference.

Third, The Race for Iran will provide a forum for an ongoing conversation about Iran and its geopolitics, for interested persons all over the world.

We are excited to embark on this journey, and invite you to come along with us.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett