如Kevjn Lim【17】说,“China views Iran as a central element in its much-touted Silk Road Economic Belt, which aims to extend Beijing's influence overland through Central Asia to the Persian Gulf and Europe”,反之,伊朗觉得中国是跟美国争斗中难得的盟友,“During Iran's withering eight-year war with Iraq, Beijing was the only major power to supply Tehran with arms (though it did the same for Baghdad)”【中国还有双吃的时候】,伊朗的核工业是中国帮出来的(呵呵)。
TEHRAN—Iran’s biggest oil shipping company has amassed the world’s largest fleet of super tankers and is in talks to sail back into western waters should the Islamic Republic strike a nuclear deal, according to senior officials.
NITC, the privatized Iranian shipping company, says it has 42 very large crude carriers, known as VLCCs, after buying 20 such China-built vessels in the past 2½ years. It is the first time the company has disclosed the size of its VLCC fleet which it expanded as sanctions cut off access to European-insured vessels,
“No other company in the world owns that number of VLCCs,” said Capt. Nasrollah Sardashti, NITC’s commercial director, in an interview in the Iranian capital. VLCCs can carry 2 million barrels of oil each.
NITC’s biggest rivals all list fewer ships, and one London-based analyst who tracks oil-tanker fleets, said he also believes NITC has the largest fleet. Competitors such as Mitsui O.S.K Lines and Nippon Yusen Kaisha of Japan and Belgium’s Euronav NV all confirmed owning fewer. No one could be reached at the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia, but the company says on its website that it owns 31 super tankers.
Iran was forced to rely more on NITC, the former state-owned shipping company, to transport crude oil after Europe imposed sanctions on Iran and banned insurers from covering ships carrying the Iranian crude.
U.S. and European sanctions took a toll on Iran’s exports, cutting them in half since 2012. But Iran still had buyers in Asian countries like China and South Korea, where NITC ships carried oil.
‘No other company in the world owns that number of VLCCs’
—Nasrollah Sardashti, NITC’s commercial director
As Iran and world powers close in on a deal that would lift sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program, Tehran has been seeking to build ties with European companies that have traditionally traded with the Persian Gulf country.
Ali Akbar Safaei, the managing director of the NITC, said in an interview that the company is in talks with insurance companies that are part of London’s International Group of P&I Clubs—a form of oil-shipping insurance coverage that pools insurers’ resources to cover high risks—as the company seeks to speed up its return to Europe.
“We have resumed our connections with partners in the maritime field” in the EU, he said. “All conditions are there to call at European ports” when sanctions are lifted.
‘We have resumed our connections with [EU] partners in the maritime field... All conditions are there to call at European ports [when sanctions are lifted].’
—NITC Managing Director Ali Akbar Safaei
Mr. Safaei also mentioned contacts with European safety-rating agencies, shipping logistics agencies and finance houses.
In addition to industrywide sanctions on Iran’s oil industry, the EU also banned dealings with NITC, though a European court deemed the decision illegal and “unreasonable” last year. But the EU subsequently reinstated sanctions against the company.
Mr. Safaei said a team of experts working for the company is now assessing the monetary value of the losses caused by sanctions and “then we will decide the course of action.”
In this file photo from December 2014, an Iranian oil worker rides his bicycle at an oil refinery south of the capital Tehran
TEHRAN—Iran wants to double its crude exports soon after sanctions are lifted and is pushing other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to renew the cartel’s quota system, a top Iranian official said.
Both developments could set up a clash with Saudi Arabia, which is scrambling to raise its own export numbers and has opposed the return of production limits on individual OPEC members.
Iran’s efforts underscore how the country’s full return to the export market would upend the status quo among leading producers if Tehran clinches a deal with six world powers that would lift sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear activities.
The latest deadline for a deal is Tuesday and officials said the elements of an agreement were falling into place over the weekend, though there were still important sticking points that could scuttle it.
Should sanctions be lifted, Iran’s deputy oil minister for planning and supervision, Mansour Moazami, said in an interview that his country’s oil exports would reach 2.3 million barrels, compared with around 1.2 million barrels a day today.
“We are like a pilot on the runway ready to take off. This is how the whole country is right now,” he said.
Iran is already in contact with former oil buyers in the European Union—traders such as Vitol Group and big oil producers such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Total SA and Eni SpA—as well as existing importers in Asia to help absorb the potential new shipments or invest in new fields if sanctions are lifted, according to the oil ministry and the companies.
Iran’s oil reserves are the fourth-largest in the world and its production capacity stands at about four million barrels a day—making it the second-biggest producer in OPEC if its output were unrestricted.
EU sanctions in 2012 banned the import of Iranian oil and prohibited most big oil companies from working with Iran, while American pressure forced Asian nations to reduce purchases.
The return of Iran’s oil would come at a sensitive time for the world’s oil markets.
The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark, has fallen by more than 45% in the past year, trading at around $61 a barrel, as supply outpaces demand by about two million barrels on any given day.
OPEC nations, especially Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have been pumping at record levels while production in the U.S.—a non-OPEC country—has shown signs of resilience.
Oil-market analysts have expressed skepticism that Iran could increase production as quickly as it says it will.
A senior OPEC delegate said some rival producers doubted Iran has the production and export facilities to reach its previous production levels of 4.2 million barrels a day.
Dr. Moazami said he didn’t expect prices to fall because global economic growth would drive demand higher. He said Iran’s own forecast for oil prices is now $70 a barrel by the end of 2015.
Dr. Moazami said Iran was pushing OPEC to return to individual production allocations or quotas. OPEC discontinued quotas in 2011 because they caused friction and member countries didn’t respect them anyway.
It replaced quotas with a collective ceiling—currently at 30 million barrels a day. But even that is seen as more of a guideline than a limit these days, OPEC officials have said, as the group is currently producing more than 31 million barrels a day.
Restoring quotes would need unanimous approval by the organization, something that is unlikely at this stage given the Saudi opposition.
“Their mechanism right now is not proper. It has to return to its past ability and capacity,” Dr. Moazami said of OPEC.
At its last meeting on June 5, Iran’s oil minister Bijan Zanganeh informed other OPEC ministers his country’s production would increase if sanctions are lifted and offered to reinstate the quotas.
But the proposal was brushed off by his Saudi counterpart, Ali al-Naimi, who said the output boost shouldn’t be discussed until it materializes and ruled out the return of production allocations, according to Gulf Arab and Iranian officials.
The senior OPEC official said the organization would return to quotas only if it “is absolutely necessary” and the recent price crash didn’t warrant such a decision.
China views Iran as a central element in its much-touted Silk Road Economic Belt, which aims to extend Beijing's influence overland through Central Asia to the Persian Gulf and Europe.
Although China has long been Iran's largest oil customer, international sanctions recently relegated the Islamic Republic from third to sixth place among Beijing's suppliers -- a list consistently topped by Iranian rival Saudi Arabia. Similarly, while China's bilateral trade with Iran reportedly expanded to around $50 billion by late 2014, it remains dwarfed nearly elevenfold by its trade with the United States.
Given these figures, why does Iran play a seemingly disproportionate role in Beijing's regional calculus, often to the puzzlement of its much larger energy and trade partners in Riyadh and Washington? Diplomatic brinksmanship aside, much of the answer lies in Iran's geostrategic value as a key hub in China's westward overland thrust, which Beijing views as essential to countering both Washington's eastward pivot and U.S. naval superiority.
BACKGROUND
China and Iran's durable ties stretch back as far as the Han and Parthian empires, when the two civilizations were trade partners on the ancient Silk Road. When the Arabs invaded Iranshahr in the seventh century, Peroz III, scion of the swansong Sassanian monarch Yazdgird III, sought and was offered refuge in Tang China by the Emperor Gaozong. In modern times, despite substantive ideological differences, Ruhollah Khomeini and Mao Zedong instilled both countries with revolutionary legacies that rejected imperial hegemony and foreign exploitation, putting them on the same side against the U.S.-led status quo.
Over time, China has become Iran's least unreliable -- not to say most reliable -- major power ally and a key pivot for counterbalancing the United States. During Iran's withering eight-year war with Iraq, Beijing was the only major power to supply Tehran with arms (though it did the same for Baghdad). And in 1985, the two governments signed a stealth nuclear cooperation deal during a visit by then parliamentary speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Cooperation went from strength to strength until 1997, when U.S. pressure over the previous year's Taiwan Strait crisis spurred China to suspend nuclear and missile assistance to Tehran. By then, however, years of Chinese and North Korean technical assistance had already helped Iran establish a homegrown missile production industry, a key pillar of its defense posture.
On the economic front, Beijing has reduced its oil imports from Iran in recent years to preserve the U.S. sanctions waivers it enjoys. Owing to Iran's sanctions-induced reductions, however, it continues to buy half of Iran's crude exports. In addition to the lower prices Tehran is offering because of sanctions, Iranian supplies matter greatly to Beijing because the Gulf's other major energy producers are U.S. partners.
EMPHASIZING THE EURASIAN HEARTLAND
China has been pushing west in the context of the Silk Road Economic Belt (Sichouzilu jingjidai) introduced by President Xi Jinping in September 2013. This "westward march" had already been advocated in 2011 by Wang Jisi(北京大学国际关系学院院长王缉思), one of the country's most lucid strategic minds, with the aim of meeting and counterbalancing President Obama's eastward pivot. Under the Xi administration, Beijing's immediate Silk Road priorities appear to be threefold:
Securing the overland flow of energy from neighboring Central Asia (and Russia) to offset the risk of maritime interdiction, especially at two sensitive waterways: the Strait of Malacca (through which 80 percent of Chinese oil transits) and the Strait of Hormuz (through which about two-fifths of its oil imports pass).
Leveraging development projects to pacify the restive but energy-rich western province of Xinjiang, where Uyghur separatists advocating the establishment of an East Turkestan state have repeatedly taken up arms against the Han Chinese.
Encouraging greater regional stability and integration by locking China's western neighbors into a zone of prosperity extending to Europe, with Beijing at its political and economic nexus.
China is the world's largest net importer of oil. Given the risks of maritime interdiction, the need for overland energy conduits is particularly important. Accordingly, two new pipelines came onstream in 2006 and late 2009. The first pumps oil mostly from Kazakhstan's northern Caspian region of Atyrau through China's Xinjiang province and toward the coast, amounting to roughly 4 percent of the 6.2 million barrels per day that China imported in 2014. The other pipeline brings natural gas mainly from the Saman-Depe field in Turkmenistan, which has been China's largest supplier since 2012. In 2013 terms, Turkmen gas accounted for about half of China's 53 billion cubic meters in annual gas imports and about a sixth of its overall gas consumption. Ashgabat plans to more than double these exports by 2020.
In accordance with the Chinese saying "if you want to prosper, first build roads" (yao xiang fu, xian xiu lu), Beijing has also been modernizing the vast network of roads and railways crisscrossing Central Asia, financing its efforts through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund. In 2012, it completed a rail line extending from Khorgos to Zhetygen, Kazakhstan, and onward to Western Russia and Europe, paralleling an existing line from Xinjiang's provincial capital of Urumqi through China's Dzungarian Gate (Alashankou) and into Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty. This east-west corridor may eventually cleave through Iran to the Gulf. According to strategist Gao Bai, Beijing has sought to offset U.S. naval superiority by building a high-speed railway capable of projecting power from China's eastern seaboard into the Eurasian interior -- a continental hedge of sorts in the event of maritime trouble. And despite the challenges that a China-bound Eurasian order could pose to Russia, President Vladimir Putin reportedly gave Xi Jinping his blessing in October 2014 after the latter agreed to include the Trans-Siberian and BAM railways in the Silk Road Economic Belt.
IRAN'S GEOSTRATEGIC VALUE
So where does Iran fit into all this? Tehran is not a dominant actor in Central Asia, partly because of its deference to Moscow, and also because the countries in question remain wary of Iranian soft-power penetration. Even its trade with the Central Asian republics is conspicuously modest. Rather, Iran fills a geostrategic role as their most convenient non-Russian access route to open waters, and the only east-west/north-south intersection for Central Asian trade. In May 1996, Iran and Turkmenistan forged this missing link by inaugurating a 300-kilometer railway between Mashhad and Tejen. And in December 2014, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran inaugurated a railway from Uzen (Zhanaozen) to Gorgan and onward to Iran's Gulf ports.
Meanwhile, Turkmenistan and Iran completed a gas pipeline in 1997 linking Korpeje to Kordkuy, followed in 2010 by the Dauletabad-Serakhs-Khangiran pipeline. Turkmenistan supplies about 14 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Iran, as well as a large proportion of the country's imported electricity. Similarly, Kazakh oil sent via Caspian Sea tankers has powered Iran's hydrocarbon-deprived northern provinces, in a swap arrangement that sees Tehran selling equivalent amounts on Astana's behalf via the Persian Gulf. In addition to the shorter export pathways it offers, energy relations with Iran are tempting given Russia's long history of price extortion with its Central Asian vassals. Nevertheless, such relations have not been entirely smooth -- bureaucratic disagreements have emerged with Tehran over transit fees, fuel prices, payment methods, and the like.
For Beijing, Iran's geostrategic value is enhanced by its position astride one of China's two overland bridges to the west. The other bridge skirts the northern coast of the Caspian through Kazakhstan and southwestern Russia near the Caucasus region, but Iran arguably presents the more important route because it connects with both Europe and the Gulf. Given this continental anchor, the Islamic Republic has taken on an importance in Beijing that exceeds the size of its domestic market or its role as energy purveyor.
NEXT STEPS
If a nuclear agreement with the United States brings sanctions relief to Tehran, China will no doubt intensify its presence in Iran's economy. Likewise, it will encounter fewer obstacles in extending its road, rail, and pipeline networks through the land bridge that is the Iranian plateau. A nuclear deal could also pave the way for Iran's full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a request that has been rejected since 2008 on the grounds that Tehran is under UN sanctions. The SCO, whose full members include China, Russia, and all of the Central Asian republics except Turkmenistan, is widely perceived as a counterbalance to NATO and the United States, so Iran almost certainly regards it as an additional layer of insurance in the event of future hostilities with the West.
Against this backdrop, Washington has admittedly precious little room for maneuver. Containing both China and Iran is a surefire way to drive them together. And counteracting Iran while accommodating China -- or, more improbably, vice versa -- would leave loopholes that either could exploit. The more the White House is distracted by Persian imponderables, the less robust its "rebalancing" of resources toward Asia will be, which eminently suits Beijing. The Middle East and Iran in particular are Washington's more immediate priorities, but China represents its most important long-term foreign policy challenge. How Beijing and Tehran interact in the meantime will have significant consequences for America's grand strategy.
Kevjn Lim is an independent researcher focusing on foreign and security policy in the Middle East, where he has been based for nearly a decade.