Читать книгу Return to Winter - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 12

CHAPTER 2

Rogue Regimes: How the Axis Uses Proxies to Win

“I’ve been known to be an optimist, but here are the Russians sending [the Syrians] up-to-date missiles, continued flights of arms going into Syria. Putin keeps our secretary of state waiting for three hours. . . . It doesn’t lend itself to optimism, all it does is delay us considering doing what we really need to do. The reality is that Putin will only abandon Assad when he thinks that Assad is losing. Right now, at worst it’s a stalemate. In the view of some, he is succeeding.”

—JOHN McCAIN¹

“China should be named and shamed for its role in enabling North Korea to remain and grow as a threat. North Korea is one of the most sanctioned countries on the planet, but Beijing (with only brief exceptions) has effectively watered down and otherwise dulled the impact of international sanctions on North Korean ‘stability.’”

—STEPHEN YATES²

“Moscow has formed partnerships with China, Iran, and Venezuela to prevent the U.S. from consolidating a regional order under its auspices. Like the USSR, its predecessor and inspiration, today’s Russia pursues key allies in the Middle East and Latin America, such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, with whom it can jointly frustrate American and Western efforts to consolidate a peaceful regional order.”

—ARIEL COHEN AND STEPHEN BLANK, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION³

“For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program.”

—GORDON G. CHANG⁴

The setting was elegant: the dining room of New Century, the richest equestrian club in Moscow. The fare was extravagant: smoked trout, duck liver, venison soup, rhubarb sorbet, veal cheeks, and pear soup with caramel. The audience was distinguished: a gathering of members of the Valdai Club, a group of international academics and journalists that had flown in for the annual dinner with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and future president. It was December 2011, and Putin was poised to retake the reins of power, once the formalities of the March 2012 elections were completed.⁵

Putin conducted a wide-ranging discussion with his audience, covering everything from the Russian government’s loss of public trust to his own indispensable leadership. He lambasted the United States’ plan to build a missile-defense system that, in his view, posed a deliberate threat to Russia’s national security. “You ask me whether we are going to change,” he said, directly addressing the Americans at the event. “The ball is in your court. Will you change?” Then Putin said something that could not help but make headlines around the world.

The only reason the United States had any interest at all in relations with Moscow, he said, was that Russia was the only country that could “destroy America in half an hour or less.”⁶ It would be difficult to find a statement more revealing about Putin’s true position regarding the United States.

By this, we do not mean to suggest that Putin has any intention of launching a nuclear attack on America. We refer to his general disposition toward the United States: We are not only an adversary; we are an enemy. Moreover, as Putin well knows, one can pursue the destruction of one’s enemy without initiating an Armageddon. And perhaps the most effective means of doing so is to facilitate and support the tactics, policies, and general well-being of rogue nations hostile to the United States. As the record of the last few decades shows, Russia and its Axis partner China have become expert at doing just this.

For many years now, Russia and China have directly facilitated the interests of North Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations such as Syria and even, in America’s backyard, Venezuela. Notwithstanding moves like that of the Russians to write the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons or that of the Chinese to rein in North Korea on nuclear testing, both nations believe it is in their long-term good to undermine American interests and power.

They do this under the cover of a doctrine they call “non-interference”: States should be able to do what they wish, whenever they wish, inside their own boundaries. The two nations that benefit most from this seemingly high-minded doctrine are Iran and North Korea, both of which enjoy extensive economic, political, and military ties with the Axis nations—Russia in particular with Iran, and China in particular with North Korea. As this chapter will show, the Axis nations have played an ongoing role in strengthening and facilitating the interests of these regimes.

Making matters even worse, Russia and China, by supporting these rouge states, have also facilitated terrorism. It is beyond dispute that Hezbollah has gotten weapons from Iran—in many cases, almost certainly Russian-made weapons. North Korea almost certainly sent to Syria the technology that built the nuclear plant that Israel destroyed in 2007. The non-interference doctrine has made it much easier for traffic in arms and military technology to flourish between these regimes. As if Russian backing of Iran and Chinese support for North Korea weren’t bad enough, there is also compelling evidence that Iran and North Korea, in concert with their sponsors and independently, have begun working together on developing nuclear-weapons technology.

In short, whether around the world or closer to home, Russia and China have done the bidding of forces inimical to U.S. interests, democratic values, and international stability. This chapter will explore how each key rogue regime has thrived with Axis backing and will examine the motivations that drive Russian and Chinese support of them.

NORTH KOREA

China wanted a “new type of great power relationship” with the United States, said Chinese president Xi Jinping in June 2013, as he prepared to meet President Obama for the “shirtsleeves summit” in Los Angeles. Xi wanted to make clear, he said, that China, as the world’s rising power, could work constructively and profitably with the U.S., the world’s established power. In part, his message was cautionary: He wanted the Americans to take China seriously and to understand that the relationship between the two nations had to be forged on mutual respect—not the mutual fear that, he said, had often led to wars between established and rising states.

As a sign of his good faith, he pointed to the “big gift” he had recently given Washington: his public pressuring of the North Korean regime to enter nuclear talks, very much against Pyongyang’s wishes.⁷ Xi’s intervention with the North Koreans was indeed welcome, as far as it went. But even the wording Xi used—a “big gift”—gives away that from his perspective, reining in North Korea is an American interest, not a Chinese one. More crucially, Xi’s apparent change of heart about Pyongyang and his assurances to Washington are part of a long historical pattern in which both China and Russia say one thing to America’s face and then turn right around and resume their support of rogue regimes.

It is well known that only one country can exert any serious influence on the behavior of the North Korean regime: China. The alliance between the two nations dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when Mao famously described the relationship as being as “close as lips and teeth.”⁸ Since then, it’s gone through its share of bumpy patches, but China has never fully abandoned Pyongyang—and it has a decades-long track record of supplying the North Koreans with weaponry, economic aid, and diplomatic cover. If every rogue nation had that kind of support from its sponsor, the world would be more unstable than it is currently. At best, China acts as a braking influence on Pyongyang, and even then, only when the North Koreans’ behavior becomes so volatile that it threatens China’s broader interests. For the most part, this happens when the Kim regime acts recklessly on the nuclear issue, as it did repeatedly in 2013.

In February 2013, the Hermit Kingdom launched its third nuclear test, this time of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously.” In April, the regime ratcheted up its threats against the United States and its “puppet,” South Korea, with a series of moves. It warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea so they wouldn’t be caught in a “thermonuclear war.” The country’s KCNA news agency predicted that once war broke out, it would be “an all-out war, a merciless, sacred, retaliatory war to be waged by North Korea.”⁹ That warning followed on the heels of the North’s decision to suspend the activity of its 53,000 workers at the Kaesong industrial park that it runs with South Korea, the last vestige of cooperation between the two countries. Kim also threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and to abandon the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Then in April and May, Kim’s regime launched a series of short-range missiles into the East Sea (just off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast) and at least one missile into the Sea of Japan.¹⁰ The regime even released a hysterical, but disturbing, fictional video depicting missile strikes on the White House and the Capitol in Washington. From its graphics to its music and almost parodic voice-over, the video was absurd; it might even have been funny, in a Team America sort of way. As another manifestation of the regime’s madness, though, it left few observers laughing.

Kim’s behavior got so out of hand that in March, China and the U.S. co-authored UN sanctions against Pyongyang covering banking, travel, and trade.¹¹ Xi’s foreign minister, Yang, stood alongside Secretary of State John Kerry in April 2013 and said, “China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula.”¹² In May, Xi told the North Koreans to return to diplomatic talks about their nukes.¹³ As Xi put it bluntly: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world in chaos for selfish gain.”¹⁴ His tough words made clear how exasperated the Chinese had become with North Korea—what some call China’s “Pyongyang fatigue.”

The U.S. was encouraged. But a closer look at China’s North Korean track record makes clear that the Chinese never truly move against North Korea. Xi’s gestures notwithstanding, they continue to support the regime in all the ways that really matter. Without the Chinese, Pyongyang couldn’t even keep its lights on. Beijing supplies nearly all the fuel for the outlaw regime and 83 percent of its imports: grain, heavy machinery, consumer goods, you name it. The Chinese also supply the luxury goods, including pleasure boats and glamorous vehicles for the North Korean elite. Despite its leading role in authorizing the 2013 UN sanctions, China has kept this trade going—much of it in violation of those same sanctions. In light of all this, it’s hard to see China’s decision to cut off the North Korean bank accused of weapons dealing, mentioned in Chapter 1, as much more than a throwaway gesture.¹⁵

The North Koreans, if anything, are “doubling down,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in April 2013, on their Chinese dependence, suggesting that they have confidence in the steadfastness of their Beijing sponsor. Almost all of the nation’s recent economic development, such as it is, is owing to Chinese support, including deals signed by Chinese mining firms eager to get in on North Korea’s largely untapped mineral wealth, which some recent reports estimate may be worth as much as $6 trillion. Other Chinese investments have included transportation, power generation, and infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s joint ventures with foreign partners are Chinese.¹⁶

“North Korea’s lifeline to the outside world,” says the Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, is the port city of Dandong, on the Chinese border.¹⁷ About 70 percent of the $6 billion in annual trade between the two countries flows through Dandong. The black-market economy, meanwhile, may be even larger than the official trade. Even after the 2013 sanctions, trade continued unimpeded in Dandong, despite China’s shuttering of the Kwangson Bank, which had channeled billions in foreign currency to Pyongyang.

Only the Chinese can enforce what the UN has put in place. But, as Moore writes, North Korea’s elites continue to get whatever they need in Dandong: “Their shopping list includes luxury food and fine wine, Apple iMacs for Kim Jong Un, 30, as well as Chinese-built missile launchers and components for their nuclear arsenal.”¹⁸ Trucks leave the city every day transporting grain, fertilizer, and consumer goods to North Korea.

The 2013 UN sanctions also stipulated weapons seizures. But as one Western diplomat put it, “that will remain a largely ineffective measure until the Chinese implement it.”¹⁹ Don’t bet on that happening. North Korea still makes money off its lone export—weapons. The regime sells Soviet-era technology on the black market, especially to some bankrupt African nations. Although this trade is often intercepted during inspections of North Korean ships, some of it gets through, and it almost certainly couldn’t do so without Chinese acquiescence.²⁰

In September 2013, Beijing released a 236-page list of equipment and chemical substances banned for export to North Korea—“fearing,” as the New York Times noted, “that the North would use the items to speed development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb on top.”²¹ This seemed an encouraging sign of Beijing’s willingness to clamp down on Kim’s regime and his nuclear ambitions, especially as Western officials have long known that sanctions cannot work without Chinese enforcement. But the list also revealed just how extensive Beijing’s knowledge is of the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s one thing to make a list, another to enforce it. Finally, these embryonic gestures of cooperation, if cooperation it is, must be balanced against a much longer and ongoing track record of adversarial behavior. (Just two months later, the New York Times reported on a U.S. study detecting new construction at a North Korean missile-launch site—including satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea may have begun producing fuel rods for its recently restarted five-megawatt reactor.²²)

“Washington is looking to China to rein in the North Koreans. Unfortunately, Beijing has been busy giving the Kim regime the means to rock the world,” China scholar and security expert Gordon Chang writes. Case in point: the KN-08, an intermediate-range ballistic missile.²³ The KN-08 presents a special threat to the U.S. While it lacks the range of some other missiles in Pyongyang’s arsenal, it does not require the weeks of transport, assembly, and preparation of those longer-range missiles. Rather, it is mounted on mobile vehicles more difficult to destroy before they fire their missiles.

“And guess what?” Chang asks. “It is China that recently transferred to North Korea those mobile launchers, a clear violation of UN Security Council sanctions.”²⁴ When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in March 2013 that the Obama administration would deploy 14 additional interceptor missiles in Alaska, he cited the KN-08. In effect, as Chang and others have pointed out, in selling this system, the Chinese have given the North Koreans the means to target American cities. China’s transfer of the KN-O8 to North Korea makes clear that Beijing really has no serious intentions of restraining Kim.²⁵ Those who see the Chinese as a willing partner with the U.S. in the effort to rein in the outlaw Pyongyang regime must contend with this consistent pattern of behavior. The U.S. should not be surprised. Beijing did not move against Pyongyang in 2010, either, when the regime sunk a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan, killing 46, and when it shelled Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island. The Chinese response in both cases was to stand by North Korea, its longtime ally. And in February 2014, China blasted a UN report on North Korea’s systematic human-rights violations, indicating that it would use its Security Council veto to prevent any legal action against North Korea or its leaders.²⁶

Clearly, China wants the North Korean regime to survive more or less intact. Why? China’s support for North Korea is purely strategic and self-interested. Keeping the Korean Peninsula divided, and remaining an ally of North Korea, helps China maintain its authority in the region. Keeping Pyongyang in business not only staves off the possibility of facing a democracy on the border (or worst of all, a unified, pro-Western Korea), it also avoids regime collapse, which would lead to a host of problems China wishes to avoid: a refugee crisis at its doorstep, for one; the possibility that nuclear material would fall into the hands of the black market or terrorists, for another.²⁷

Would China prefer to deal with a more stable actor in Pyongyang? Certainly. But China benefits even from today’s unwieldy North Korean regime, which keeps its neighbors off balance while presenting a constant challenge to U.S. influence in Asia. From China’s perspective, these benefits offset a multitude of sins. China’s history makes clear that it does not share Western goals with regard to North Korea.

Unfortunately, policymakers in Washington still seem unable to recognize this. As U.S. State Department spokesman (now assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia) Victoria Nuland put it in 2012: “[Kim] Jong Un can plot a way forward that ends the isolation, that brings relief in a different way of life and progress to his people, or he can further isolate them. . . . He can spend his time and his money shooting off missiles, or he can feed his people, but he can’t have both.”²⁸

But Nuland is precisely wrong: Chinese support makes it possible for Kim Jong Un to “have both”: to threaten the world while also getting what he needs to stay in power. Kim’s regime “is like a honeybee,” Michael Totten writes. “It can sting only once, then it dies. But it’s like a honeybee the size of a grizzly bear.”²⁹ That it can do so owes entirely to Chinese facilitation, influence, and support—all of which continue, despite cosmetic gestures and words.

The other half of the Axis does its fair share to support North Korea as well. Russia is pursuing a wide-ranging plan to boost its economic presence in Asia, which includes a proposal to build a gas pipeline through North Korea, providing the isolated country with $500 million in transit fees each year. In September 2012, Russia agreed to write off nearly all of North Korea’s $11 billion in debt, accrued during Soviet times when the Kremlin worked overtime to bolster ties with its neighbor. Years in the making, the deal will forgive 90 percent of the debt and reinvest $1 billion as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care, and educational projects in North Korea. Free of debt, North Korea will also be able to engage in more commerce with Russia.

Russia’s status as the world’s other nuclear superpower, and North Korea’s unquenchable interest in nukes, makes Moscow’s relationship with Pyongyang a crucial issue to U.S. security. Some, like the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer and Michael O’Hanlon, see U.S. pursuit of nonproliferation agreements with Russia as essential to ensuring that these weapons don’t wind up in North Korean hands. “Pursuing one more U.S.-Russia bilateral treaty,” they write, “can further reduce long-range or strategic nuclear systems to perhaps 1,000 deployed warheads on each side.”³⁰ Perhaps, but Russia has a poor record of compliance with such agreements. The U.S. must understand that Moscow is no more interested in reining in Pyongyang than China is.

IRAN

“I would rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran,” scholar Georgy Mirsky once heard a Russian diplomat say.³¹ If there is a single phrase that sums up the Axis attitude toward Tehran—especially the Russian attitude—this is it.

Those words describe more eloquently than any diplomatic communiqué or policy brief how Russia sees its interests when it comes to Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons showdown with the United States. Along with its partner China, Russia has steadily argued against a military strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure while thwarting the effectiveness of UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions that Moscow itself has voted for.³² Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, even published a 2012 study in a Russian security journal titled “Further Sanctions Against Iran Are Pointless.”

That’s a handy self-fulfilling prophecy: Sanctions against Iran have proved as pointless as Russia and China can make them. Neither power supports sanctions that would genuinely force the Iranian regime to reconsider its nuclear policies; they block sanctions that would impose embargoes on energy or arms. Instead, Russia and China put their stamp of approval only on narrowly tailored penalties that would supposedly prevent Iran from weaponizing its nuclear energy.³³ Yet even this goal has not been achieved.

“Today is a historic day and will be remembered in history,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization in August 2010, as he marked the start-up of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a core component of Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program.” As Salehi spoke, trucks rumbled into the site, carrying tons of uranium to be loaded into the reactor, signaling the beginning of its operational capacity. Over the next two weeks, the trucks loaded 80 tons of uranium fuel into the reactor core.³⁴ The 1,000-watt reactor began providing electricity to Iran in 2011.

The Bushehr reactor, situated on the Persian Gulf coast, wouldn’t exist today without Russia. Its construction, development, and operation are the product of nearly two decades’ worth of Iranian cooperation with the Russian business and scientific establishments. And Russia is considering whether to help the Iranians build a second reactor there.

Meanwhile, clandestine Russian involvement has been essential to Iran’s development of a heavy-water reactor in Arak, which at full capacity will be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. Russian support for the Iranian program is so extensive that some Iranian facilities are simply adapted from Russian designs. This is the case for the Arak reactor, based on a design by NIKIET, the same firm that designed the Soviet Union’s first reactors. The Arak reactor, and the enlarged version of it planned at Darkhovin, will be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.³⁵

Iran has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors’ requests for information about the Arak reactor’s design and other specifications while insisting that it has no intention of weaponizing these capabilities.³⁶ The United States is asked to take such claims on faith—despite Iran’s long history, especially under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of making threats to annihilate Israel and otherwise confront the Western democracies.

The Russian-Iranian alliance is rich in irony, given a long history of antagonism between the two nations that lasted until the end of the Cold War. After the Cold War, however, the old adversaries came to realize that they had more goals—and more fears—in common than not. Today, three core concerns hold the alliance together:

• A mutual wish to reduce American influence in Central Asia, where both countries would like to increase their clout—a goal that seems more attainable with the U.S. strategic retreat under President Obama

• A mutual interest in opposing radical Sunni movements, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Though these organizations are best known for their opposition to the West, their historical and religious roots make them anti-Shia (Iran is a predominantly Shiite nation) and anti-Russian as well.

• A mutual desire to oppose and defeat secessionist movements—in Iran, from the Kurds, and in Russia, from the Chechens—and to clamp down on internal dissent against their own regimes³⁷

Understanding these shared interests is crucial if the United States is to grasp fully why the Russians act as they do. From the U.S. perspective, Iran is simply a rogue regime: It is working to develop nuclear weapons, despite UN sanctions; it is the world’s leading nation-state sponsor of terror, especially of Hezbollah in Lebanon; it is the staunch ally of the Assad regime in Syria; and it oppresses and even kills its own people when they attempt political expression. To be sure, President Rouhani has made substantial headway in dispelling this image of Iran. In pitching a new, moderate Iran, Rouhani told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013, “No nation should possess nuclear weapons, since there are no right hands for these wrong weapons.”³⁸ He made a sharp contrast with his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to New York last year to criticize Israel, deny the Holocaust, and suggest that the 9/11 attacks were the handiwork of Americans. That said, Rouhani called on Israel to give up its nuclear weapons and sign the Nonproliferation Treaty while insisting on Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear program.

The Obama administration has tried repeatedly to get Moscow’s help in increasing pressure on Iran. And although the Russians cooperated at the negotiating table in connection with the November 2013 Iranian nuclear accords, the agreement, as we noted in Chapter 1, is fatally flawed and will do nothing to halt or even hamper Iran’s nuclear program. Benjamin Netanyahu justifiably called the agreement “the deal of the century” for Iran.³⁹ Somehow American negotiators saw fit to allow Tehran to continue enriching uranium and proceed with major components of its nuclear program—centrifuges, weaponization, and ballistic missiles—all while Iran continues to deny access to its military sites, particularly the Parchin base, where weapons work is believed to have taken place.⁴⁰ Yet the United States is moving ahead with its $7 billion in sanctions relief.

But the Russians see things differently. For them, Iran is a bulwark against American meddling and influence. Tehran’s intransigence and its challenge to U.S. regional prerogatives force the Americans into enormous expenditures of capital, resources, and diplomatic energies. As Russian scholar Alexei Arbatov notes, Moscow views Iran as a growing “regional superpower” that can balance the power of Turkey and American military and political encroachment in the Black Sea/Caspian region and the Middle East.⁴¹ Vladimir Putin also places Iran at the center of American plans to intervene in the Middle East. He believes, according to former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov, that the U.S. is actually trying to destabilize the region, and he is convinced that the best policy is to bolster Iran and assure its leadership that it will not meet Libya’s fate.⁴²

The Russian-Iranian relationship has many components. Economically, the two countries have a trade relationship worth about $4 billion annually, much of it military trade. Russia is Iran’s biggest source of foreign weapons, supplying $3.4 billion in arms sales since 1991. The trade has helped Iran modernize its defenses while serving as a shot in the arm for Russia’s military-industrial sector, helping it survive many lean years.⁴³

Putin and the former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not only collaborated to protect the Assad regime in Syria, they also worked “to dominate Iraq—Russia, by signing oil and arms contracts; Iran, by bribing politicians and tribal chiefs and maintaining sleeper cells in the Shiite-majority provinces,” argues Amir Taheri. He points out that Iran hosted a Russian naval task force that was making a “goodwill” call on the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a quarter of the world’s oil. If Russia and Iran together gain the upper hand in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, they could secure “a contiguous presence from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.” All of this would also put more pressure on NATO ally Turkey and weaken the West in the region.⁴⁴

But the nuclear alliance is most worrisome. The Russian-Iranian nuclear relationship began in the 1990s, when a troubled Russia began transferring nuclear technology and expertise to Iran. Russian scientists were soon traveling to Iran as part of an extensive, clandestine network, offering the Iranians assistance with missile and nuclear-weapons programs. A mid-2000s CIA report issued this finding: “Despite some examples of restraint, Russian businesses continue to be major suppliers of WMD equipment, materials, and technology to Iran. . . . Specifically, Russia continues to provide Iran with nuclear technology that could be applied to Iran’s weapons program.” The head of Israeli intelligence accused the head of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry of using Iran as a source of employment for Russian nuclear scientists and also as a source of foreign reserves, desperately lacking in Russia at the time.

At the urging of the U.S., Russia scaled back some of its work with Iran in the late 1990s, cancelling a number of technology-related contracts. And as more information came to light about Iranian intentions to acquire a nuclear bomb, Russia became more hesitant—at least in public—about its support. Iranian nuclear engineers continue to train in Russia, but under tighter protocols.⁴⁵

Still, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees here. By the time Russia began scaling back its support of Iran, it had already transferred significant quantities of information to Tehran. The ongoing work at Bushehr proceeds under the older contracts, and the Iranians have accumulated enough expertise to carry it on for years. Moscow trained hundreds of nuclear scientists to operate the plant, despite the urging of the U.S. and other Western nations to abandon the project. Hundreds of Iranians have been trained in Russia.⁴⁶ The Russian nuclear-energy firm Rosatom operates the Bushehr plant today, supplies all fuel from Russian sources, and recovers all spent fuel, which is processed and disposed of in Russia.⁴⁷ The Russians have no intention of walking away from Bushehr. If anything, they will expand their presence: Rosatom suggested in May 2012 that it would consider Iran’s request to help construct a second reactor there. In April 2014, Iran announced that it has signed a protocol with Russia to start construction of the second reactor.⁴⁸

Just as China’s scolding of North Korea by no means suggests a fundamental shift of policy, Russia’s role in brokering the Iranian nuclear accords should not be read as a serious rupture in the Russia-Iran nuclear alliance, which has endured many bumps in the road. Perhaps the low point came in 2010, when, under President Dmitri Medvedev, the Russians voted for another round of UN sanctions against Iran. But as noted earlier, those sanctions were weak and watered-down at Russian insistence.⁴⁹ And even this agreement came only with enticements from the U.S., including the lifting of bans on Russian arms exports and an agreement not to block sales of Russian arms to Iran.

The 2010 sanctions, along with the Russians’ agreement not to sell Iran the SS-20 missile-defense system, represented the high-water mark for the U.S.-Russian “reset.” Since then, and especially since Vladimir Putin retook presidential power in 2011, the Russians have resumed their strong support for Iranian nuclear and military procurement while making only occasional complaints. In January 2011, the Russians did voice disapproval over reports that the Iranians were enriching uranium at Qum. The foreign ministry said that Iran was “continuing to ignore the international community’s demands on dispelling concerns about its nuclear activities.”⁵⁰

But these toothless public statements cost the Russians nothing, and they generally do nothing to interfere with Iranian nuclear pursuits. The Russians can gesture toward international cooperation on Iran, as they have recently, but as we’ve noted above, the accords do not necessarily mean that Iran’s nuclear program will be diminished—let alone destroyed—by the new rules and regulations. It follows that Russia’s real attitude is well summarized by Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Moscow-based Middle East Institute. The Russians are frustrated, he says, because their cooperation with various Western initiatives in the past produced nothing positive, from Moscow’s perspective. “The West has no credibility here anymore,” he writes. “The view is that Russia must chart its own course based on its own interests; if we don’t look out for ourselves, who will?”⁵¹ Indeed, after the Russians repossessed Crimea in early 2014, and the Americans levied sanctions in response and then expanded their scope, Moscow made clear that it would look out for itself. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that if the West didn’t back off, the Russians would link their cooperation on Iran negotiations with the Ukraine situation. “If they force us into that,” Ryabkov said of Western officials, “we will take retaliatory measures.”⁵²

*****

“China will not hesitate to protect Iran, even with a third World War,” said Chinese Major General Zhang Zhaozhong in 2011.⁵³ The general’s stunning statement came during the same month that China provided Iran with the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles the nation had ever obtained, along with the technical expertise needed to operate them.⁵⁴ Where most American observers tend to think of Russia as more closely aligned with Tehran, they can no longer overlook the substantial and growing Chinese-Iranian alliance—particularly on military and economic matters.

According to Gordon Chang, Chinese companies have violated international treaties and UN rules by selling equipment and materials to Iranian companies. Indeed, Beijing regularly exploits its dual role as Iranian benefactor and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Since 1991, China has sold more than $2.2 billion of arms to Iran.⁵⁵ China’s exports to Iran include fighter jets, main battle tanks, and naval vessels, as well as roadside bombs, landmines, air-defense systems, and armored personnel carriers.⁵⁶

The most disturbing interchange involves nuclear materials. China remains Iran’s top source of nuclear and missile technology.⁵⁷ Chang traces the trade back to 1974, when China began helping Pakistan develop an atomic weapon as a hedge against Indian nuclear ambitions. Chang believes that Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan sold China’s nuclear technology to rogue states—including Iran and North Korea—almost certainly with Beijing’s knowledge. Indeed, a North Korean engineering team took up residence at Khan’s lab and stayed for years, with the approval and assistance of senior Pakistani military and political leadership. And an Iranian team of scientists, returning from a visit to Beijing, paid a visit to Khan’s lab in 1995, which strongly suggests Chinese involvement in facilitating personal contacts between Pakistan and its customers. Moreover, Chinese companies played a leading role in Pakistan’s development of the P2 centrifuge, the core mechanism of enrichment technology in Iran and North Korea.

In 2012, Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, attended the SCO summit, where Iran has observer status, to emphasize economic and strategic ties and to appeal for political support as Iran dealt with pressure from the U.S. and the West over its nuclear ambitions.⁵⁸ Ahmadinejad found a receptive audience. Much like Russia, China sees an anti-U.S., potentially nuclear-armed Iran as strategically useful in balancing American regional ambitions in the Middle East.⁵⁹ As with Russia, China’s role in the P5+1 negotiations over the Iranian nuclear deal amounts to less than meets the eye.

China’s support for Tehran goes well beyond the nuclear issue. China’s main rationale for supporting Tehran, even more than political self-interest, is economic self-interest. For China, energy security is paramount, and energy has become the foundation of Chinese-Iranian relations. In 2011, China was the largest importer of Iranian crude oil, taking in 543,000 barrels per day.⁶⁰ The oil connection is particularly vital: The Iranians have enough oil to remain a key China supplier for years to come. Meanwhile, due to its limited oil-refining capacity, Iran is also heavily dependent on China for refined oil and gasoline imports. China has proved loyal, making up sanction-induced shortfalls in Iranian gasoline imports. For instance, in the summer of 2010, when the U.S. and EU sanctions lashed Iranian gasoline imports, China upped its gasoline sales to Iran, providing the regime with half of its gasoline imports for July—approximately 45,000 barrels per day.⁶¹

In recent years, China has become Iran’s largest trading partner.⁶² Between 2001 and 2010, Chinese exports to Iran grew almost sixteen-fold, to $12.2 billion, while Iranian exports to China in 2010 totaled $16.5 billion.⁶³ China has also ramped up its economic investments in Iran. About 70 Chinese companies now operate in the country. As of 2010, China was financing $1 billion worth of city-improvement projects in Tehran, including the expansion of its subway and highway system.⁶⁴

The Chinese economic powerhouse has proved vital to Iran’s survival as the West’s crippling sanctions—which include expelling Iran from the global banking network—have pushed the regime to what some see as an impending breaking point. Iranian oil sales, which account for 80 percent of the government’s revenue, have been cut in half by the sanctions. Since the sanctions permit Iran to use its oil-sales revenue to buy products only from those nations to which it sells, a flood of cheap Chinese products has inundated the country.⁶⁵ Without those cheap products, Iranian consumers would doubtless be struggling even more. At the same time, the situation plays right into China’s hands, increasing Beijing’s political influence and economic power within Iran.

“THE AXIS OF PROLIFERATION”: THE IRAN–NORTH KOREA–PAKISTAN PIPELINE

“It’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries,” a senior American official told the New York Times early in 2013—the other country being Iran. He spoke after an Israeli publication ran an article, “Why Iran Already Has the Bomb,” which argued that North Korea and Iran were working together to develop nuclear weapons. By this line of thinking, North Korea’s successful nuclear test meant that, for all intents and purposes, Iran had acquired a nuclear weapon as well.

Sound far-fetched? Not to close observers of the situation.

Iranians have been present at every North Korean nuclear and missile test.⁶⁶ Iranian engineers attended the North’s April 2012 launch of the Unha-3 long-range missile. That launch failed, but the Iranians helped analyze the failure and address the problems.⁶⁷ “For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program,” says Gordon Chang. And North Korea “almost certainly provides missile flight-test data to Iran.”⁶⁸

Are the Iranians using North Korea as a conduit for their own nuclear ambitions? Hard evidence so far is lacking, but the connections and circumstances all point to the fact that North Korea is selling the Iranians nuclear technology in a mutually beneficial relationship that gives the Iranians the know-how they need while providing Pyongyang with economic and political assistance. Despite some advancement on this front, at least vis-à-vis Iran, an Iran–North Korea nuclear-proliferation nexus would negate American efforts to restrict Iran’s weapons-development programs, because North Korea already has a nuclear weapon and could transfer it at will.⁶⁹

The likely Iran–North Korea collaboration underscores an important point: The United States is up against a series of Axis relationships, not just that involving Russia and China or those involving their rogue-state clients. The rogues themselves work together, both in concert with and independent of their sponsors.

In 2011, Al Jazeera reported on a leaked UN report indicating that “North Korea and Iran have been exchanging ballistic-missile technology in violation of UN sanctions.” The report suggested that the two countries transferred prohibited technologies “on regular scheduled flights of Air Koryo and Iran Air.” Even more explosively, it indicated, through several diplomats who insisted on anonymity, that a third country had served as an outlet for the transfers—China.⁷⁰

The growing Iran–North Korea partnership masks the fact that, on the surface at least, the two nations appear about as different from each other as can be imagined. North Korea is an impoverished, secular dictatorship in Asia, while Iran is a Middle East theocracy with a growing middle class. The basis of their relationship is not history or culture, but rather a common enemy and a willingness to work with each other in spite of international isolation. Iran provides North Korea with foreign currency, which, due to oil sales, it has in reasonable abundance, while North Korea sends Iran missiles and other weapons technologies unobtainable elsewhere.⁷¹

It is this nexus that Claudia Rosett refers to as the “axis of proliferation.” As Rosett points out, the two nations make nearly perfect partners:

Iran, with its visions of empire, has oil money. Cash-hungry North Korea has nuclear technology, an outlaw willingness to conduct tests, and long experience in wielding its nuclear ventures to extort concessions from the U.S. and its allies. Both countries are adept at spinning webs of front companies to dodge sanctions. Both are enriching uranium. The stage is set for North Korea, having shopped ever more sophisticated missiles to Iran, to perfect and deliver the warheads to go with them.⁷²

In September 2012, a North Korean delegation traveled to Tehran to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit. During the summit or shortly afterward, North Korea and Iran signed a Scientific Cooperation Agreement, described by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency as covering “cooperation in science, technology, and education.” The agreement strongly resembled the one North Korea signed with Syria in 2002, which led directly to the Syrians’ development of a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. That reactor, based on the North Korean one in Yongbyon, was nearly finished by 2007, when Israel destroyed it with an air strike.⁷³

At the NAM summit, North Korea was represented by the same official—head of North Korea’s parliament, Kim Yong Nam—who headed the North Korean delegation to Syria in 2002. Parties to the agreement signed between the two countries included not only Iran’s former president, Ahmadinejad, but also the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani—blacklisted by the UN in 2007 for his involvement in “nuclear or ballistic missile activities.”⁷⁴ As the agreement was signed, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, told Kim Yong Nam: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea have common enemies since the arrogant powers can’t bear independent governments.”⁷⁵ No one needed to be reminded of who the arrogant powers were.

Troubling as all of this is, it gets worse: Strong evidence points to both countries’ participation in what Rosett calls “the evolving global webs of illicit proliferation activities.” Both countries were involved, for example, in the nuclear-proliferation network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. These proliferation webs depend heavily on Chinese influence, and Beijing has facilitated these procurement efforts in multiple ways, whether as direct provider or middleman.

There is also compelling, if not yet confirmable, evidence that Iran and North Korea have shared expertise on tunnel construction for military purposes. In 1974, South Korean forces discovered a highly sophisticated system of massive tunnels located under the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Equipped with railroads, electricity, and vehicle transports, it was 35,000 meters long.⁷⁶ A generation later, in the wake of the Israeli–Hezbollah war of 2006, Israeli forces discovered large networks of tunnels close to the Israeli border that were extraordinarily similar to those constructed under the Korean DMZ. As part of its schemes to bring in foreign capital, North Korea in the past has been known to lend out its tunneling expertise for a price.

Ronen Bergman, a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who defected, said, “Thanks to the presence of hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians, and experts from North Korea who were brought in by Iranian diplomats . . . Hezbollah succeeded in building a 25-kilometer subterranean strip in South Lebanon.” Indeed, Beirut officials believe it likely that Iranian sources passed the tunnel-construction blueprints on to Hezbollah, having obtained them first from North Korea.⁷⁷

Barring an almost impossible coincidence, the tunnels in Lebanon were based on North Korean plans—meaning that either the North Koreans built the tunnels or Iran passed the plans on to Hezbollah. Either way, the tunnels episode makes clear how Iran and North Korea, already dangerous enough themselves, can serve as enablers of technology proliferation for still more dangerous, unpredictable third parties. In this case, the technology involved only tunnels. Next time, it might involve nukes.

SYRIA

“We have never changed our position on Syria and we never will”—thus Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, summarized Moscow’s outlook in December 2012, just as the international community seemed to be moving toward a consensus that Assad’s days as Syria’s president were numbered. Like the Russian diplomat who said he’d rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran, the statement reveals Russia’s true priorities and loyalties. They may talk encouragingly and make a few half-helpful gestures, but in the end, they will stay on the side of their ally and client.

Recent developments—including Russia’s move to author the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons—don’t change the reality of Lukashevich’s words. The resulting UN resolution contained no threat of force if Syria failed to comply with the disarmament terms. And while Assad will have to surrender his chemical weapons, Putin also took steps to keep the Syrian regime well armed otherwise. A major Reuters report in January 2014 reported that Russia had “stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including armored vehicles, drones and guided bombs, boosting President Bashar al-Assad just as rebel infighting has weakened the insurgency against him.” The supply of arms from Moscow came shortly before peace talks were scheduled to begin in Switzerland.⁷⁸

Such behavior has been par for the course for Putin. He continues to insist, for instance, that the chemical-weapons attack in August 2013 may not have been the work of Assad. He said: “We talk all the time about the responsibility of the Assad regime if it turns out that they did it, but nobody is asking about the responsibility of the rebels if they did it. We have all the reasons to believe it was a clever provocation.”⁷⁹

Neither the U.S. nor the UK and France have expressed the slightest doubt that Assad perpetrated the attack. Russia’s ties to Syria make it difficult to take Moscow’s skepticism seriously. Putin has brilliantly used the crisis to paint himself as international peacekeeper. He also tapped into American war exhaustion. “At the time we tried to talk to the UK prime minister about our doubts on Iraq, but they didn’t listen, and look at the result,” he said. “Every day dozens of people die. Do you understand? Every day. What’s the result?”⁸⁰