伊朗的外交政策展望与俄罗斯，中国和印度的作用（英文）

Working Paper SWP Working Papers are online publications within the purview of the respective Research Division. Unlike SWP Research Papers and SWP Comments, they are not reviewed by the Institute. MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA DIVISION | WP NR. 01, APRIL 2020 Forced to Go East? Iran’s Foreign Policy Outlook and the Role of Russia, China and India Azadeh Zamirirad (ed.) 2 Contents Introduction 3 Azadeh Zamirirad Iran’s Energy Industry: Going East? 6 David Ramin Jalilvand Russia: Iran’s Ambivalent Partner 13 Nikolay Kozhanov Iran and China: Ideational Nexus Across the Geography of the BRI 18 Mohammadbagher Forough Indo-Iranian Relations and the Role of External Actors 23 P R Kumaraswamy Opportunities and Challenges in Iran-India Relations 28 Ja’far Haghpanah and Dalileh Rahimi Ashtiani The European Pillar of Iran’s East-West Strategy 33 Sanam Vakil Implications of Tehran’s Look to the East Policy for EU-Iran Relations 38 Cornelius Adebahr 3 Introduction Azadeh Zamirirad The covid-19 outbreak has revived a foreign policy debate in Iran on how much the country can and should rely on partners like China or Russia. Critics have blamed an overdependence on Beijing for the hesitation of Iranian authorities to halt flights from and to China—a decision many believe to have contributed to the severe spread of the virus in the country. Others point to economic necessities given the drastic sanctions regime that has been imposed on the Islamic Republic by the US administration. In early 2018, when it became clear that Washington would most likely opt out of the nuclear deal, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared the “East" a foreign policy priority. It was not the first time Tehran had pondered an eastward orientation. Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has often relied on its eastern neighbourhood in political, economic and military affairs. In Iranian political discourse, the East has not been conceptualized solely in ge-ographical terms but rather in vastly different ways, at times referred to as an ide-ological bloc or seen as an anti-hegemonic movement. Overall, the East has been regarded as a space distinctly separate from the “West” and even anti-Western on occasion. Today, Iran's eastern policy primarily focuses on nation states and almost exclusively on Asia, most notably on Russia, China and India. At first glance, an ex-plicit orientation towards the East seems to contradict Iran's revolutionary doc-trine of "Neither East nor West, but the Islamic Republic". Throughout the Cold War, Iran stressed its independence by rejecting eastern and western “hegemonic superpowers” alike, declaring itself non-aligned—principles that were incorpo-rated into the constitution itself. This explicit rejection of both East and West has repeatedly raised the question in Iran of whether an outspoken orientation to-wards the East is even compatible with long held beliefs as laid out in the constitu-tion. However, even in the early years of the Islamic Re