Chinese-Iranian trade fueled by distrust of U.S.

United in part by their shared distrust of U.S. power, Iran and China have struck a profitable and growing alliance based on oil, arms and strategic resources.

The alliance, analysts say, could complicate two central goals of the Bush administration’s foreign policy: managing China’s rise to power in Asia and containing the Islamic regime in Tehran and its hopes for greater influence in the Middle East and Central Asia.

John W. Garvin, a China specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is completing a book on Chinese-Iranian ties, said Beijing sees Iran as a dependable source of energy and key industrial minerals to supply China’s rapidly expanding economy.

Iran, he said, sees China both as an important ally in the bitter dispute with Washington over Tehran’s nuclear policies and as an investor and customer that doesn’t attach the conditions and strings that Western European competitors demand in their deals.

A skewed hegemony

More fundamentally, “Iran and China just do not like what they see as an unbalanced post-Cold War world” dominated by U.S. military and economic power, Mr. Garvin said. “They agree that the United States is a hegemonist run amok and that this is bad for the world order,” he added.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a political scientist at Tehran University, said in an analysis published late last year that both China and Russia see Iran as a critical bulwark in the effort to contain American power, particularly after the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

“Increasingly, the image of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a sort of frontline state in a post-Cold War global lineup against U.S. hegemony is becoming prevalent among Chinese and Russian foreign policy thinkers,” he wrote.

U.S. officials openly fear that China is becoming Iran’s supplier of choice for military hardware that Tehran is barred from buying in the West. Huge new energy deals are a direct challenge to U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran and deny it the funds to finance a military buildup. China, the world’s second-largest energy importer, receives an estimated 14 percent of its oil from Iran.

China bolsters Iran

The CIA, in a report to Congress, said Chinese firms “have helped Iran move toward its goal of becoming self-sufficient in the production of ballistic missiles.”

With Middle East power relationships in flux after the war in Iraq, Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, told a congressional hearing last week that China welcomes Iran’s growing military strength.

China’s veto as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council is one reason the Bush administration has been reluctant to seek U.N. sanctions over its suspicions that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons programs.

“China is interested in a militarily stronger, even nuclear Iran that could challenge U.S. domination” in the Middle East, Mr. Luft said.

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