Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (11 page)

“Washington is looking to China to rein in the North Koreans. Unfortunately, Beijing has been busy giving the Kim regime the means to rock the world,” China scholar and security expert Gordon Chang writes. Case in point: the KN-08, an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
²³
The KN-08 presents a special threat to the U.S. While it lacks the range of some other missiles in Pyongyang’s arsenal, it does not require the weeks of transport, assembly, and preparation of those longer-range missiles. Rather, it is mounted on mobile vehicles more difficult to destroy before they fire their missiles.

“And guess what?” Chang asks. “It is China that recently transferred to North Korea those mobile launchers, a clear violation of UN Security Council sanctions.”
²⁴
When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in March 2013 that the Obama administration would deploy 14 additional interceptor missiles in Alaska, he cited the KN-08. In effect, as Chang and others have pointed out, in selling this system, the Chinese have given the North Koreans the means to target American cities. China’s transfer of the KN-O8 to North
Korea makes clear that Beijing really has no serious intentions of restraining Kim.
²⁵
Those who see the Chinese as a willing partner with the U.S. in the effort to rein in the outlaw Pyongyang regime must contend with this consistent pattern of behavior. The U.S. should not be surprised. Beijing did not move against Pyongyang in 2010, either, when the regime sunk a South Korean frigate, the
Cheonan
, killing 46, and when it shelled Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island. The Chinese response in both cases was to stand by North Korea, its longtime ally. And in February 2014, China blasted a UN report on North Korea’s systematic human-rights violations, indicating that it would use its Security Council veto to prevent any legal action against North Korea or its leaders.
²⁶

Clearly, China wants the North Korean regime to survive more or less intact. Why? China’s support for North Korea is purely strategic and self-interested. Keeping the Korean Peninsula divided, and remaining an ally of North Korea, helps China maintain its authority in the region. Keeping Pyongyang in business not only staves off the possibility of facing a democracy on the border (or worst of all, a unified, pro-Western Korea), it also avoids regime collapse, which would lead to a host of problems China wishes to avoid: a refugee crisis at its doorstep, for one; the possibility that nuclear material would fall into the hands of the black market or terrorists, 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 regimes
³⁷

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. Benjamin Netanyahu justifiably called the agreement “the deal of the century” for Iran.
³⁹
Somehow American negotiators saw fit to allow Tehran to continue enriching uranium and proceed with major components of its nuclear program—centrifuges, weaponization, and ballistic missiles—all while Iran continues to deny access to its military sites, particularly the Parchin base, where weapons work is believed to have taken place.
⁴⁰
Yet the United States is moving ahead with its $7 billion in sanctions relief.

But the Russians see things differently. For them, Iran is a bulwark against American meddling and influence. Tehran’s intransigence and its challenge to U.S. regional prerogatives force the Americans into enormous expenditures of capital, resources, and diplomatic energies. As Russian scholar Alexei Arbatov notes, Moscow views Iran as a growing “regional superpower” that can balance the power of Turkey and American military and political encroachment in the Black Sea/Caspian region and the Middle East.
⁴¹
Vladimir Putin also places Iran at the center of American plans to intervene in the Middle East. He believes, according to former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov, that the U.S. is actually trying to destabilize the region, and he is convinced that the best policy is to bolster Iran and assure its leadership that it will not meet Libya’s fate.
⁴²

The Russian-Iranian relationship has many components. Economically, the two countries have a trade relationship worth about $4 billion annually, much of it military trade. Russia is Iran’s biggest source of foreign weapons, supplying $3.4 billion in arms sales since 1991. The trade has helped Iran modernize its defenses while serving
as a shot in the arm for Russia’s military-industrial sector, helping it survive many lean years.
⁴³

Putin and the former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not only collaborated to protect the Assad regime in Syria, they also worked “to dominate Iraq—Russia, by signing oil and arms contracts; Iran, by bribing politicians and tribal chiefs and maintaining sleeper cells in the Shiite-majority provinces,” argues Amir Taheri. He points out that Iran hosted a Russian naval task force that was making a “goodwill” call on the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a quarter of the world’s oil. If Russia and Iran together gain the upper hand in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, they could secure “a contiguous presence from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.” All of this would also put more pressure on NATO ally Turkey and weaken the West in the region.
⁴⁴

But the nuclear alliance is most worrisome. The Russian-Iranian nuclear relationship began in the 1990s, when a troubled Russia began transferring nuclear technology and expertise to Iran. Russian scientists were soon traveling to Iran as part of an extensive, clandestine network, offering the Iranians assistance with missile and nuclear-weapons programs. A mid-2000s CIA report issued this finding: “Despite some examples of restraint, Russian businesses continue to be major suppliers of WMD equipment, materials, and technology to Iran. . . . Specifically, Russia continues to provide Iran with nuclear technology that could be applied to Iran’s weapons program.” The head of Israeli intelligence accused the head of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry of using Iran as a source of employment for Russian nuclear scientists and also as a source of foreign reserves, desperately lacking in Russia at the time.