Iran Wants More Maritime Cooperation With Russia, China to Bust Through Sanctions

The Islamic Republic has ramped up cooperation with Russia and China dramatically in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation pact with Beijing in 2021, and putting the finishing touches on a similar agreement with Moscow earlier this year. Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in July, and acceded to the BRICS bloc on Thursday.

Closer maritime cooperation between Iran, Russia and China will help Tehran break through the West’s "cruel sanctions" blockade, Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander and advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said.

"In order to counter the cruel sanctions imposed by the US and its allies, Iran must promote the strategy of sea-oriented economy and boost its maritime power with the presence of its trade and military fleet in the oceans and seas and by using the network of South-North and East to West corridors in cooperation with the Russian Federation and China," Safavi said, speaking at a national conference on maritime affairs.

"We need to connect the maritime and ground geostrategic domains. This is a new strategy as Iran’s geographical location gives us such a capacity," the official said.

Defining Iran’s role in the "geometry of the new world order" without a strengthened presence in the world’s seas and oceans would be impossible, Safavi stressed.

The Islamic Republic has dramatically increased its economic, trade, and security cooperation with its powerful Eurasian neighbors in recent years, and become a major economic, scientific and military power in its own right, testing out its ‘sea legs’ in 2021 and again in 2023 with high-profile deployments of mini-armadas on round-the-world journeys.

Expanding trade ties with China via the East Asian nation’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, and with Russia through the so-called North-South Corridor, Iran, which ordinarily jealously guards its military independence, has nevertheless moved to ramp up cooperation with the two nations in large-scale naval drills, which Iranian officials have said help challenge the US-led world order.

Iran has been under US sanctions since the Revolution of 1979, with successive US administrations seeking to smother the country economically and militarily. The restrictions have failed to stop Iranian economic development, and have even served as a major catalyst for turning the country into a major developer and producer of advanced weapons including drones, ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, advanced radar and defense electronics. The same goes for civilian technologies and industries, with Iran now the largest industrial power in the Middle East, and the country with arguably the most advanced civilian space program in the Islamic World.