Iran and Russia’s Fragile Partnership

Foreign Affairs -Nov25th2024

How America Can Divide Two of Its Main Adversaries

By Maria Snegovaya and Jon B. Alterman

Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has made common cause with Iran. Russia has afforded Iran military support, diplomatic cover, and intelligence. Tehran, in turn, has provided Moscow with weapons of its own and promoted the Kremlin’s propaganda. In July 2022, for example, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described NATO as a “dangerous creature” and claimed that had Russia not taken the initiative, the West would have caused the war in Ukraine anyway.

For observers of both states, this partnership should not be a surprise. The two countries are among the West’s most implacable opponents. Since Iran’s 1979 revolution, its leaders have been virulently anti-American, claiming to be the constant target of plots to isolate and undermine the Islamic Republic’s government. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has argued that the war with Ukraine is really a war with a rapacious NATO out to destroy Russia. The countries are international pariahs, subject to grueling sanctions and in need of partners wherever they can find them. And they are both governed by personalistic authoritarian leaders with the support of an oligarchic elite largely insulated from oversight.

But despite the similarities between the countries, their partnership could prove far more brittle than it first appears. Iran and Russia share a common enemy and system of government. Yet they have a long history of conflict, one that has never quite disappeared. Economically, they are petrostates competing for the same markets. Politically, they are sparring over who should be the primary power in the Caucasus and Central Asia. They have different approaches to the Middle East, as well. Indeed, other than undermining Western hegemony, they do not share any coherent international agenda. Even when it comes to Washington, they have strategic differences. In the 2024 American presidential election, Russia sought to help Donald Trump. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, meanwhile, Iran plotted to kill him.

Washington and its partners should seize on these differences to drive a wedge between Moscow and Tehran. Doing so doesn’t require cozying up to either government. Instead, the West can pit the two countries’ economies against each other through energy policies that lower oil prices. They should remind each that in most of the world, they have competing political visions. And they should make it harder for Moscow and Tehran to cooperate in the places they want to. Otherwise, Iran and Russia may overcome their differences and forge a durable partnership. The result would be a more unstable and more violent world.

THE SOURCES OF IRANIAN-RUSSIAN CONDUCT

Russia’s problems with the West date to the very beginning of the post–Cold War era. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, pro-Western reformers introduced disruptive changes designed to rapidly liberalize the economy. But rather than producing widespread growth, the 1990s turned into a painful decade for much of society as Russia’s real per capita GDP fell by 42 percent from 1990 to 1998. The population’s poverty rate jumped to a record 35 percent. Mortality rates climbed and life expectancy fell. Russians became deeply nostalgic for the Soviet Union and resentful of the United States. Many spread conspiracy theories that the West had plotted to break the Soviet Union apart and that after its collapse, it was withholding needed economic aid and otherwise taking advantage of Russia’s weakness. Eventually, they threw their support behind Putin, who promised to restore stability and sought to resurrect Moscow’s power.

Iran’s problems with the West also have a long history. The United States supported a coup d’état in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister and empowered the country’s Western-friendly monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah launched an economic modernization drive called the White Revolution in the early 1960s, promising that it would deliver Iranians strong growth and industrial development. But many of the benefits accrued to the upper and middle classes. Millions of poorer, rural Iranians saw their safety nets collapse. The country as a whole was disoriented, which helped prompt the 1979 revolution and bring Iran’s Islamist regime to power.

Both Iran and Russia, then, share an obvious, deep-seated distrust of the Western order (and of Western-backed reforms). But the resemblances between them do not stop there. The structure of each country’s regime is also quite similar, featuring personalistic dictators, state-led economies, and strong intelligence services. In Russia, that leader is Putin. Each has a hybrid economy, with major industries such as energy and banking tightly controlled by security officers and private owners allowed to run businesses at lower levels. Iran, for its part, has been run by Khamenei and his networks for over 30 years. Its main enterprises are either state owned or state run, and they are usually under the thumb of top security officials linked to the clerical establishment. In both countries, the regime buys the support of the working class through generous subsidies and payments. It buys the support of many middle-class workers by employing them in state-run enterprises.

Washington, well aware of how these regimes are structured, has issued broad-based sanctions aimed at making their systems unsustainable. But paradoxically, Iran’s experience suggests that sanctions help reinforce them by making it hard for anyone to develop economic power outside the elites. Ordinary Iranians have become more dependent on the state for resources. The elites, in turn, evade economic restrictions by bringing in wealth through smuggling networks. Perhaps that is why the Kremlin is trying to emulate the Iranian experience. Moscow has borrowed Iran’s practice of using shell companies and ship-to-ship oil transfers in international waters. In July 2024, Moscow’s Ministry of Education even introduced the study of Iran’s economy into Russian high schools as the country geared up for possible decades of sanctions.