Iran Just Took a Strategic Step Closer to China https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2021/10/iran-just-took-a-strategic-step-closer-to-china/

October 5, 2021 | Jonathan Spyer
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On September 17, a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) approved the Islamic Republic’s accession as a member. Iran first applied to join in 2008, but was rejected. Jonathan Spyer explains the significance of this development in light of tensions between the U.S. and China:

The SCO, established by China and Russia in 2001, is an economic, political and security alliance. It currently includes eight states—China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Together, these states account for 20 percent of global GDP, and include 40 percent of the world’s population.

For China, Iran is a powerful, stable, non-threatening state. Tehran’s anti-U.S. stance is of use to China in that it ensures that there is no chance of the country hedging its bets in the emerging strategic contest between Washington and Beijing. China does not of course share Iran’s governing ideology, but the fact that this ideology is Shiite means that Iran does not constitute a potentially disruptive source of appeal to China’s own, overwhelmingly Sunni, restive Muslim populations.

[Moreover] China is unlikely to be indifferent to the fact, still improperly acknowledged by naïve Western observers, of Tehran’s domination of the entire land mass between the Iraq-Iran border and the Mediterranean Sea, and consisting of three nominal states—Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

The SCO is not yet anything close to a China-led strategic alliance arrayed against the West. Its members include India, a rival of China and a Western ally. Nor is the SCO aligned with Iran in its defiance of the international system regarding its nuclear program. . . . Nevertheless, and with all the appropriate cautions against oversimplification, a general direction to events can be discerned. And it points towards closer alignment between Beijing and Tehran, on the basis of hard, shared long-term interests. Iran’s accession to the SCO does not cement this process. Rather, it is a signpost along the way.

Read more on Jonathan Spyer: https://jonathanspyer.com/2021/09/26/iran-china-alliance/