As tensions rise between China and the United States, Beijing continues to build a parallel international world order that challenges America’s increasingly tenuous hegemony.
Amid the world powers with whom the CCP is forming ever-closer ties is Iran. China is strengthening its diplomatic ties with Tehran and moving forward with plans to integrate the two nations’ economies with a 25-year cooperation program.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing this week in what was the first visit by an Iranian head of state to China in 20 years.
During the visit, Raisi met with China’s president, Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader vowed that his country “will unswervingly maintain its friendship and cooperation with Iran and advance China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership.”
During Raisi’s trip, it is expected that China and Iran will finalize several bilateral cooperation agreements aimed at integrating the two nations’ economies to a historically unprecedented degree.
Thus far, Tehran and Beijing have signed at least 20 agreements and documents, which outline economic cooperation in the areas of intellectual property, information technology, health, and international trade.
This comes at a time when the United States, and in particular its national security establishment, is up in arms over an alleged Chinese spy balloon that managed to make its way across the continent before the Biden administration finally shot it down. Then, over the weekend, three further unidentified flying objects were shot down over the United States and Canada.
Iran has expressed interest in such spy technology, and China might oblige in teaching its ally how to build it.
Political observers believe the new agreements are bad for the United States. The partnership will certainly make it easier for Tehran and Beijing to evade the consequences of U.S. sanctions.
Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank, told the Free Beacon that the China-Iran agreements “will be one of the toughest for Washington to offset in the next decade, as both rogues tighten economic and security ties.”
“Tightening ties between Beijing and Tehran is more proof that the Biden administration cannot afford to treat the China and Iran challenge as regional or quarantined,” continued Taleblu, adding that China “remains Iran’s economic lifeline, and has been the largest illicit and licit importer of Iranian crude oil in the past decade.”
As the Free Beacon noted:
Iranian officials say the country’s exports to China topped $12 billion during the last 10 months and that China exported around $12.3 billion of goods into Iran.
The Chinese leader celebrated the alliance with Iran in comments during a joint appearance with Raisi. The Chinese Communist Party “supports Iran in safeguarding national sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and national dignity … and in resisting unilateralism and hegemonism,” Xi said in comments carried by Iran’s state-controlled press. “In the face of the current complex changes in the world, times, and history, China and Iran have supported each other and worked together in solidarity and cooperation.”
The United States isn’t the only country struggling to deal with China’s growing dominance on the world stage. British officials are reportedly wargaming an economic response in the event that China invades Taiwan, as Britain and the West’s manufacturing dependence on the two Asian nations means their economies would certainly be impacted by such a conflict.
British MP and former Prime Minster Liz Truss on Friday is calling on her country to be more hawkish on China, advocating for the defense of a free Taiwan and urging sanctions against Beijing if it escalates tensions with Taipei.
Among the actions Truss wants to see are the creation of an “economic NATO” and regular audits by the Western-aligned powers to lower dependence on China in major industries.
As The New American has previously reported, it isn’t just China that is forging closer relations with Tehran. Russia is also partnering closely with the Middle Eastern power and is now the largest foreign investor in Iran.
According to Iran’s deputy finance minister, Ali Fekri, Russia “had brought some $2.7 billion worth of investment to two petroleum projects in Iran’s Western province of Ilam in the past 15 months,” accounting for 45 percent of all foreign investment secured by Tehran within that time frame.
The other top foreign investors in Iran for that reporting period were China, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The collaboration was punctuated by the signing in January of a free-trade memorandum between Iran and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) — a move anticipated to grow the relationship between the two countries.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s State Duma, called the mutual trade “extremely important in the conditions of sanctions pressure on our countries.”
Praising the free-trade memorandum, Volodin asserted that Moscow and Tehran should work on improving collaboration in finance and banking, and that they can achieve this, in part, by using national currencies more often in settlements.
U.S. hegemony has long rested on its economic dominance, military superiority, the reign of the dollar, and its ability to punish “disobedient” nations with crippling sanctions.
Now, all of this leverage is rapidly being challenged by a rising Russo-Sino order that is clearly playing for keeps while Washington clumsily plays catch-up.
