Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The important thing takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state go to to Beijing goes method past the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements…

This can be a essential inflection level in an absorbing, advanced, decades-long, ongoing historic course of: Eurasia integration.   

Little surprise that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking College earlier than receiving an honorary educational title, burdened “a brand new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterised by “actual multilateralism, most synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.

And the epicenter of the brand new world order, he asserted, is Asia.  

It was fairly heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Historic Silk Highway, not solely by way of commerce but in addition as a “cultural bond” and “connecting completely different societies collectively all through historical past”.

Raeisi might have been speaking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the nice middleman Silk Highway buying and selling energy for hundreds of years between China and Europe.

It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese language President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “individuals to individuals exchanges” utilized to the New Silk Roads. 

After which President Raeisi bounce minimize to the inescapable historic connection: he addressed the Belt and Highway Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key companion.

All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after these arguably wasted years of making an attempt an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the destiny of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried after which, final yr, all however condemned throughout achieve.

A case could be made that after the Islamic Revolution 44 years in the past, a budding “pivot to the East” at all times lurked behind the official authorities technique of “Neither East nor West”.

Beginning within the Nineties that occurred to progressively enter in full synch with China’s official “Open Door” coverage.

After the beginning of the millennium, Beijing and Tehran have been getting even deeper in synch. BRI, the main geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, was proposed in 2013, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

Then, in 2016, President Xi visited Iran, in West Asia, resulting in the signing of a number of memoranda of understanding (MOU), and not too long ago the wide-ranging 25-year complete strategic settlement – consolidating Iran as a key BRI actor.  

Accelerating all key vectors

In observe, Raeisi’s go to to Beijing was framed to speed up all method of vectors in Iran-China financial cooperation – from essential investments within the vitality sector (oil, fuel, petrochemical business, pipelines) to banking, with Beijing engaged in advancing modernizing reforms in Iran’s banking sector and Chinese language banks opening branches throughout Iran.

Chinese language firms could also be about to enter the rising Iranian business and personal actual property markets, and shall be investing in superior know-how, robotics and AI throughout the commercial spectrum.

Refined methods to bypass harsh, unilateral US sanctions shall be a serious focus each step of the best way in Iran-China relations. Barter is actually a part of the image in terms of buying and selling Iranian oil/fuel contracts for Chinese language industrial and infrastructure offers.

It’s fairly potential that Iran’s sovereign wealth fund – the Nationwide Growth Fund of Iran – with holdings at estimated $90 billion, might be able to finance strategic industrial and infrastructure tasks.

Different worldwide monetary companions could come within the type of the Asian Infrastructure Growth Financial institution (AIIB) and the NDB – the BRICS financial institution, as quickly as Iran is accepted as a member of BRICS+: that could be determined this coming August on the summit in South Africa. 

The guts of the matter of the strategic partnership is vitality. The China Nationwide Petroleum Company (CNPC) pulled out of a deal to develop Section 11 of Iran’s South Pars fuel area, adjoining to Qatar’s part.

But CNPC can at all times come again for different tasks. Section 11 is at the moment being developed by the Iranian vitality firm Petropars.

Power offers – oil, fuel, petrochemical business, renewables – will increase throughout what I dubbed Pipelineistan within the early 2000s.

Chinese language firms will definitely be a part of new oil and fuel pipelines connecting to the present Iranian pipeline networks and configuring new pipeline corridors.

Already established Pipelineistan consists of the Central Asia-China  pipeline, which connects to China’s West-East pipeline grid, almost  7,000 km from Turkmenistan to the japanese China seaboard; and the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline (2,577 km, from northwest Iran to the Turkish capital). 

Then there’s one of many nice sagas of Pipelineistan: the IP (Iran-Pakistan) fuel pipeline, beforehand often called the Peace Pipeline, from  South Pars to Karachi.

The People did every little thing within the ebook – and off the books – to stall it, delay it and even kill it. However IP refused to die; and the China-Iran strategic partnership might lastly make it occur.

A brand new geostrategic structure

Arguably, the central node of the China-Iran strategic partnership is the configuration of a fancy geostrategic financial structure:  connecting the China-Pakistan Financial Hall (CPEC), the flagship of BRI, to a two-pronged Iran-centered hall.

This may take the type of a China-Afghanistan-Iran hall and a China-Central Asia-Iran hall, thus forming what we could name a geostrategic China-Iran Financial Hall.

Beijing and Tehran, now on overdrive and with no time to lose, could face all method of challenges – and threats – from the Hegemon; however their 25-year strategic deal does honor traditionally highly effective buying and selling/ service provider civilizations now outfitted with substantial manufacturing/ industrial bases and with a critical custom in superior scientific innovation.

The intense chance of China-Iran lastly configuring what shall be a model new, expanded strategic financial house, from East Asia to West Asia, central to twenty first century multipolarity, is a geopolitical tour de pressure.

Not solely that can utterly nullify the US sanction obsession; it’s going to direct Iran’s subsequent levels of a lot wanted financial growth to the East, and it’ll increase the entire geoeconomic house from China to Iran and everybody in between.

This entire course of – already taking place – is in lots of points a direct consequence of the Empire’s “till the final Ukrainian” proxy conflict in opposition to Russia.  

Ukraine as cannon fodder is rooted in Mackinder’s heartland principle:  world management belongs to the nation that controls the Eurasian land mass.

This was behind World Struggle I, the place Germany knocking out Russia created worry among the many Anglo-Saxons that ought to Germany knock out France it might management the Eurasian land mass.

WWII was conceived in opposition to Germany and Japan forming an axis to manage Europe, Russia and China. 

The current, potential WWIII was conceived by the Hegemon to interrupt a pleasant alliance between Germany, Russia and China – with Iran as a privileged West Asia companion.

The whole lot we’re witnessing at this stage spells out the US making an attempt to interrupt up Eurasia integration.

So it is no surprise that the three prime existential “threats” to the American oligarchy which dictates the “rules-based worldwide order” are The Three Sovereigns: China, Russia and Iran.  

Does that matter? Probably not. We have now simply seen that whereas the canines (of conflict) bark, the Iran-China strategic caravan rolls on.