Iran and Russia’s Friendship Just Got a Lot Deeper

by Ted Snider

 Posted on January 23, 2025

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2025/01/22/iran-and-russias-friendship-just-got-a-lot-deeper/

By abstaining from diplomacy and relying so heavily on isolating countries and the broad stroke of sanctions, the U.S. runs the risk of creating a community of isolated and sanctioned countries. A community of sanctioned countries negates the effect of sanctions. And a community of isolated countries creates the very multipolar world the U.S. is trying to push back.

In the past couple of years, Iran has fought back against isolation and sanctions by joining the Russian and Chinese led Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, two significant international organizations intended to balance American hegemony in a multipolar world.

On January 17, though, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between their two countries, bringing Iran and Russia into a closer partnership than ever before.

Article 2 of the treaty commits the two countries to rejecting unipolarity and pursuing multilateralism, while Article 14 specifically commits them to “deepen[ing] cooperation within the framework of regional organizations,” including the promise to “interact and coordinate positions in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” In a press conference following the talks, Pezeshkian said that BRICS and the SCO are transforming the region and “represent new opportunities and potential for both countries to collaborate in the future.”

But the new strategic partnership is much more than a vague public announcement of Iran and Russia’s friendship. The detailed forty-seven article document is the product of months of intense diplomacy. The document brings the comprehensive partnership a historic new intensity. In his opening remarks at the press conference, Putin called the document “truly ground-breaking.” Dmitri Trenin, research professor at the Higher School of Economics, told me that Putin’s use of words like “breakthrough,” refer, above all, “to the very fact that the Moscow-Tehran relationship now has a treaty as a base.”

The treaty, which has caused consternation in the West, addresses U.S. and Western attempts to isolate and sanction Iran and Russia and to maintain U.S. hegemony in a unipolar world.

The document does not even wait until the first article to mention multipolarity. The preamble expresses the wish “to promote an objective process of forming a new just and sustainable multipolar world.” The pursuit of multipolarity is then the topic of Article 2 of the treaty.

Iran and Russia have both been the target of U.S. military threat and of historically unprecedented sanctions. The American imposition of “sanctions from hell” resulted in over 28,000 sanctions on Russia, perhaps the largest and most comprehensive sanctions regime in history. Article 19 of the treaty opposes “the application of unilateral coercive measures,” like sanctions. Pezeshkian said that the new cooperation “can nullify sanctions and excessive demands by the United States and Western countries.”

Putin remarked that “[n]otably, our countries have almost completely transitioned to using national currencies in mutual settlements” and that “In 2024, transactions conducted in Russian rubles and Iranian rials accounted for over 95 percent of bilateral trade.” Several articles in the treaty are devoted to developing closer economic ties and bypassing SWIFT, including Article 20, which calls for “cooperation with the aim of creating a modern payment infrastructure independent of third countries.”

Trenin said that one of the key practical Russian goals is that “economic relations with Iran will expand through the coming online of the North-South corridor and other projects.” The North-South Transport Corridor is a massive ship, rail and road network for facilitating trade between Russia, Iran, India and Azerbaijan. The “development of international transport corridors passing through the territory of the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran” and “in particular, the international transport corridor ‘North-South’,” is the topic of Article 21.

The turn toward each other highlights Iran’s foreign policy orientation and, as Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told me, “Russia’s epochal pivot to the South.”

But the agreements in the Treaty that must be the cause of the greatest concern for the West are the articles dealing with defense and nuclear energy.

The very first article of the Treaty calls on Iran and Russia to “strengthen cooperation in the field of security and defense.”

The Treaty is not a military alliance: there is no mutual defense clause. But Article 3 commits each country to “not provid[ing] any military or other assistance to the aggressor” in the event that the other is attacked. Article 12 says the two countries “shall cooperate with the aim of preventing interference in the said regions and the destabilizing presence there of third states.” And Article 5 promises “military cooperation,” including “training of military personnel” and “conducting joint military exercises.” Article 4 adds enhanced intelligence cooperation.

There is a connection between military cooperation, stopping third countries from destabilizing the region and a safe space for multipolarity. Sakwa says that just as the “Soviet-Indian Treaty of 1971 provided the security for India to develop its independent and non-aligned strategy, so, too, now Moscow’s support for Iran warned the US… that any attack on Iran risked embroiling them in a conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.” The comprehensive partnership grants Iran the safe space that India used to establish its nonalignment in a multipolar world.

The other aspect of the comprehensive partnership that must be sending shudders through the West is the Article 23 agreement to “promote the development of long-term and mutually beneficial relations for the purpose of implementing joint projects in the field of peaceful use of atomic energy, including the construction of nuclear power facilities.”

The comprehensive strategic partnership is an important treaty that builds on the last few years’ growing relationship between Russian and Iran and intensifies their cooperation to a historic new level. There is, though, one seed of doubt that has been sewn by the election of President Donald Trump. Russia’s priority right now is Ukraine. Trump has promised a diplomatic settlement to the war in Ukraine, but, Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, reminds, Trump “detests Iran.” Lieven told me that the Iranians worry that Russia could “use relations with Iran as a way of influencing Trump over Ukraine,” that Russia may “be willing to abandon Iran if Russia gets what it wants over Ukraine.”

Like recent diplomatic progress between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Iran and China, and China and India, the “breakthrough” comprehensive strategic partnership between Iran and Russia represents the growing revolt against the old U.S. led unipolar world and its ability to use sanctions and isolation as coercive weapons.