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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.