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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