The first rail cargo left Moscow railway station into India on 27th June as a significant message from Moscow to the West in spite of the imposed US tight sanctions.
The first freight train started its journey into Iran from Chekhov railway station of Moscow on 27th June carrying 39 containers. This train passed the route of Russia-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan into Iran within 14 days and estimated to arrive Bandar Abbas Port within 6 days by start of its journey from Sarakhs rail border located in North-eastern of Iran.
This is the first train of the International North – South Corridor (INSTC) which has started its journey from the eastern branch of the mentioned rail corridor while Rostam Qasemi, the Minister of Roads and Urban Development of Iran has promised to activate the middle and western branches of this corridor in near future.
The fast warming relations between Tehran and Moscow
According to the officials of Iran and India, the INSC corridor route is 30% cheaper and 40%shorter than the traditional linkage between Russia and India passing Suez Canal while there is no threat like pirates of Somalia on the route.
Regardless of the mentioned commercial benefits of INSTC, there is significant message from Russia and its regional allies like Iran to the Washington and EU: ”We try to counter imposed economic sanctions”.
While President Obama achieved the first worthy agreement with Iran after Islamic revolution, president Trump as his successor selected the wrong way to dismantle JCPOA and maximum pressure campaign toward Iran in order to get more points from Tehran while he never paid attention that JCPOA could be the start of a great way to enjoy geopolitical and economic relations with Tehran by opening the cooperation window between the two sides. What president Trump expected from the agreement was reaching maximum benefits from it in minimum time and keeping Tehran under pressure at the same time.
This policy pushed the US government into exit from the JCPOA as President Biden called this wrong action many times. The result was clear: moving into deepening strategic relations between Tehran and Moscow within short time especially after implementation of Ayatollah Khamenei’s “turning into the East” macro policy after US exit from the agreement.
After expansion the Russia – Ukraine war and imposing heavy economic sanctions against Russia, the transit routes were among the first targets of these sanctions while the EU goal was putting high restriction on Russia in supplement of its needs from abroad. But once again the West forgot a significant element for Russia accessibility to the free waters: ”Iran”.
After US exit from the JCPOA, the foreign policy of President Rouhani as the initiator of the agreement fully collapsed under pressure of the anti-US and JCPOA tenacious critics. The deal opponents asked the Rouhani’s government to replace Russia and China with 5+1 group as soon as possible while the nature of Rouhani’s cabinet and ruling party didn’t allow this policy to be implemented during his term. In the other hand, Moscow as one of the main political partners of Iran was not liked to join partnership with Tehran in fear of the West sanctions against Iran in practice.
By this introduction, we can understand the main reason behind the fast growing relations between Moscow and Tehran during past months now: ”the both sides are in the same boat now and there is no longer need for scaring from the Western sanctions”.
The significance of INSC route for Russia and Iran
After end of Iran-Iraq war, Moscow signed many agreements with Tehran in various infrastructural fields while some of them like construction of Garmsar – Incheh Borun as the first light rail of Iran with 465 km length never executed because of imposed sanctions against Iran and its banking system.
But now, it seems many things are changed in Russia after entering war with Ukraine. Russia even has stated its readiness to construct the Rasht – Astara rail route instead of the Republic of Azerbaijan who never started the project on the pretext of the sanctions and impossibility of transferring the 500 million USD required budget to construct the project while this route is the only missing link of the Western branch of the INSC. The question is why Russia has changed its foreign policy toward Iran? The answer is simple: Iran is the shortest, cheapest and safest linking route between Russia and the warm waters of the Persian Gulf according to the Peter the Great recommendations while Sir Halford John Mackinder also ratified the geopolitical significance of Iran calling the country as the heartland.
While INSC could link Russia to India as one of its main Asian partners through Nhava Sheva Port, the southern waters of Iran enable Russia to be linked to the important industrial ports of China like Shanghai which are the main freight hubs of the world and can fulfil many of the required raw materials and strategic products for Russia as President Putin rightly noted during his speech in BRICS Summit on 7th of June.
According to the Iranian officials, the annual income of this country from INSTC is estimated around 20 billion USD while the total oil income of Iran is announced 43 billion USD by its Ministry of Oil. Plus financial benefits, Iran could re-enjoy its geopolitical significance after about 20 years of sanctions pressure. This ability increases the negotiation power of the Iranian officials in regional and trans – regional role playing like joining SCO.
US sanctions and the future of Tehran – Moscow relations
As mentioned before, US economic and political sanctions against Tehran and Moscow not only couldn’t push the foreign policy of Tehran and Moscow into defensive mode, but the sanctions made some inclusive opportunities for the two states and threatened the energy security of EU. Iran easily attracted the support of Russia to enter its infrastructural projects thanks to increasing pressure of West on Moscow. In the other side, Russia succeeds to capture many mega infrastructural projects of Iran in absence of the Western famous companies after collapse of the JCPOA. That is estimated that the commercial and political relations between Tehran and Moscow will be expanded during coming months parallel to probable increasing US sanctions against the two capitals.
Just taking a simple look to this circle demonstrates why President Biden always calls US withdrawal from JCPOA as wrong action.
JCPOA, the only tool to balance Tehran – Moscow relations
It seems the only way to reduce the speed of the fast increasing relations between Tehran and Moscow is re-joining of Washington to the JCPOA as soon as possible. To understand the significance of this issue, it is better to think what will happen if Washington doesn’t accept to re-join the deal with Iran.
The first consequence is clear: deepening the relations between Tehran and Moscow as vulnerable issue. This issue helps both Iran and Russia to fulfil their basic needs without relying the West. We should never forget that Russia is one of the main suppliers of food and strategic agricultural products like wheat or vegetable oil and limiting export of such agricultural products have fallen the world food security in a dangerous condition as UN has warned many times.
Second, the time is great and no actor in international system is allowed to lose it. Increasing the national income and its GDP, will put Tehran in better position and decreases its current facing limitations. Thus, postponement of joining JCPOA by Washington just makes the work harder to achieve any good deal with Tehran.
Third, while India was participating in QUAD Summit beside of US, Israel and UAE, the New Delhi officials are in serious negotiations with Moscow on expansion of its market in Russia as President Putin also ratified this issue during his speech in BRICS Summit. While the West is challenging its economic inflation and recession, its Asian allies like India are seeking for more opportunities in Russia to capture the considerable part of its market which was in hands of the American and European companies till few weeks ago. In this regard, we can expect more presence of Indian companies in the markets of Iran and Russia without any competition with Western companies thanks to INSTC that is able to carry huge amount of Indian freight toward Iran and Russia eager market.
Fourth, by expansion of Digital Economy concept, we are witnessed for many financial innovations like blockchain technology which makes Iran and the other sanctioned states like Russia and Venezuela more comfort to bypass the financial limitations. For example, it is better to take a look to the Russian governmental blockchain called ”CELLS” that is designed and developed by ROSTEC state company based on digital Rubble and more countries are expected to join it according to the Russian officials. Moscow believes that CELL could be replaced to SWIFT for its international financial transactions with its allies. While the financial issues have been always the Achilles Heel of the sanctions, nobody knows what will happen to efficiency level of them if such alternative choices of SWIFT get operational.
RFK Jr. Was/Is Right: The Syrian War Is About Pipelines
Vahid Pourtajrishi is an expert at planning unit of the department of the international affairs of the Railways of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has worked as journalist at correspondent of Mehr News Agency.
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This was confirmed recently by an expert on the Middle East who was interviewed by the leading reporter on the Middle East, Steven Sahiounie.
The American and Syrian reporter, Sahiounie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Discourse, and I have found him to be the most unprejudiced and the most reliable and geostrategically aware of all journalists who specialize on the Middle East. He has made his online news organization into the best of all that report on international affairs concerning that region of the world. To the extent that he personally has an agenda, I have found that it’s in favor of the welfare of the interests of all of the residents in that region, and this orientation naturally means that he rejects the U.S. Government’s Middle-Eastern polices, which are 100% allied with the racist-Jewish theocracy that rules Israel and that consequently are against everyone there who opposes the Middle Eastern policies of the Government of America and Israel. Sahiounie is, in other words, ideologically a populist-leftist, or progressive, and this means that he’s committed to democracy, against any type of aristocracy, regardless whether theocratic, atheistic, or any other type of an alleged ‘elite’. Sahiouni is against any type of political supremacism, at all. I have, in fact, never found Sahiounie to ‘shade’ the truth in his reporting — never to be publishing propaganda, but only truth, and from a 100% democratic perspective, no aristocratic one. When he reports an interview with a person whom he has selected as being an expert on a particular topic, I have never found any reason to reject that person as being, indeed, an expert on the given topic, regarding which that person is being interviewed. In short: I have always found Sahiounie’s sources to be top-notch, for truthful reporting, from a democratic perspective.
On July 17th, Sahiounie headlined “‘The last choice to remain safe for the Kurds is to head towards Damascus’, according to Dr. Ahmad Alderzi”. The overall focus of the article was what would likely be the best option now for the formerly U.S.-backed-and-funded Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) organization that have fought against Syria’s Government in order to create a separate Kurdish nation in Syria’s northeast, and who have been targets for destruction by Turkey’s military because the SDF are an extension from the separatist-Kurdish movement (called “YPG” and labelled by Turkey as being “terrorist” as separatists) that would take territory away from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, in order to create their “Kurdistan”. Alderzi argues there that their continued Kurdish separatism in Syria would cause them to be slaughtered there, because America is no longer protecting and arming them there; so, the Kurdish separatists in Syria should accept the longstanding all-inclusive non-sectarianism of Syria’s Government, and simply go back to being peaceful citizens of Syria, as they had been in Syria before America’s CIA had organized them into the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” so as to overthrow Assad’s Government there. The U.S. has lost the war in Syria, but now is determined to keep Syria as a failed state, and not even Kurdish separatists want to be in a failed state. The entire interview is interesting, but what especially struck me was this part of it:
#1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): The Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has recently paid a visit to Aleppo for the first time in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan is threatening to start a military operation in northern Syria. In your opinion, does Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo constitute a political message to Erdogan?
Ahmad Alderzi (AA): Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo took place in highly grave and complicated international and territorial circumstances for Syria. It was intended to carry a set of local, territorial, and international messages. Locally, it was intended to imply the return of the pre-war policies, in which Aleppo constituted a central concern for the president, Al-Assad, that made it claim its ordinary position as the most important economic city in Syria, and that the aftermath of the war policies, that prevented Aleppo and its industrial men from reclaiming their positions have come to an end. It also denoted that the next phase will witness a dramatic change concerning how to deal with the doomed city and that suitable circumstances and conditions for this return will be achieved, which made the people of Aleppo grasp that message and rush, as they are full of hope, to receive him.
Territorially, the message to Erdogan’s Turkey, which is still working on taking over Aleppo again, is clear; any new attempt to reoccupy Aleppo should witness a different way of military dealing, based on the positions of the Russian and Iranian allies, who firmly stood together with it [Syria] against any new Turkish military movement.
Internationally, the sent message to the United States and the European Union, is that Syria’s position towards them will not change and that the Aleppo region, through which the Arab gas pipeline was supposed to pass in 2010, will not let the Israeli gas pipeline pass through it as well.
Back on 25 February 2016, RFK Jr. (son of Robert F. Kennedy) had headlined “Syria: Another Pipeline War”, and he delivered a breathtaking history of the CIA’s and U.S. Government’s Syria policy, ever since U.S. President Truman started the CIA in 1947. Here are excerpts:
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.
Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. …
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. …
RFK Jr. added some relevant Kennedy-family records:
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA’s failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
Kennedy’s speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.
Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA’s clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s denials.
The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America’s international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms.”
The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America’s reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
RFK Jr. is a Democrat, and so his account emphasizes Republican perfidies. However, he portrays the entire matter as having resulted not from evilness on the part of the U.S. Government (its relevant top officials) but instead as having been merely errors — as if it were NOT the result of what America’s billionaires collectively demand from their politicians (which they own). To RFK Jr., the U.S.-and-allied pipeline wars in Syria resulted from errors, instead of from carefully laid plans, whose source was U.S.-and-allied billionaires — the people who buy U.S. Presidents and Congress-Members. He said:
It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
That ‘blundering’ is only a way to sugar-coat the reality of what the U.S. Government — BOTH of its political Parties, each of which is controlled by its respective billionaires, who are motivated virtually ONLY by their unlimited greed — has been, and is. “The million refugees now flooding into Europe” aren’t the result of U.S.-and-allied “blundering” but of consistent and very longstanding U.S. Government policy ever since at least 1949 but which Obama raised fo fever-pitch by starting in 2009 to go all the way to finally grabbing Syria for the Sauds but failing in the effort, and then using Europe to deal with the escapees from the hells that America and its allies were creating in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. (In fact, the U.S. regime had set up the first round of ‘peace talks’ in Geneva between Syria’s Government and its ‘opposition’ so that the Sauds would select the entire ‘opposition’ delegation there, to ‘negotiate’ with Syria’s Government.) The U.S. Government has been like this non-stop, ever since Truman, on 25 July 1945, reversed FDR’s anti-imperialistic foreign policies and committed this country to the opposite: taking over the entire world. It’s what has controlled America nonstop, now, for almost 78 years, under BOTH of its political Parties. The U.S. Government has been plain evil, ever since 1945. These aren’t ‘blunders’. To allege that they are is false. The motivation for that falsehood is usually to convey the impression that, if ONLY America had more COMPETENT leaders, America’s Government wouldn’t be so harmful. Barack Obama was perhaps the most skillful U.S. President in decades, but he was at least as bad as any of the U.S. Presidents after 1980 has been. Especially because of his 2014 coup in Ukraine, which now threatens to bring on World War Three, I consider him to be America’s second-worst President, Truman having been the all-time worst. The main difference between Obama and Biden is that Biden is far less competent. That doesn’t necessarily mean Biden is an even worse President than Obama was. Only time will tell (if he brings on a nuclear WW III).
The former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said it best, on 28 July 2015, when he was asked about the corruption in America’s Government:
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.
It’s NOT mere ‘blundering’. It is what the Truman-created U.S. Government now is: an aristocracy (or “oligarchy”). That’s how it works: one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. And, so, now, America’s Presidents are s‘elected’ by the billionaires, not “elected” by the public. That’s what Carter was saying. But it started with Truman, and rose to full fruition only with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1981. The American Government today is only what America’s aristocracy want it to be — and that ISN’T blunders, but instead is the carefully formulated policies of the hired agents of that group of around 1,000 people (regardless of whether their s‘elected’ President is competent like Obama, or incompetent like Biden). That’s why there has been continuity in America’s Syria-policy ever since at least 1949, when the CIA first tried to grab that country for the Sauds, in order to enable the Sauds to pipeline their oil into Europe so as to help to cripple the Soviet Union, and, subsequently, Russia. It’s NOT a “blunder.” It’s U.S. policy, ever since 25 July 1945. Only the circumstances surrounding it have been constantly changing. This neoconservatism — craving for U.S. “hegemony,” or top prioritization on achieving an all-encompassing global American empire — has become embedded into the U.S. Government’s DNA. It IS today’s U.S. Government, because it long has been.
I2-U2, the Indo-West Asian quad, has boasted its first success with the acquisition by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani of Haifa Port.
The acquisition was announced days after an I2-U2 virtual summit during US President Joe Biden’s visit last week to the Middle East.
The acquisition by a close associate of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a joint bid with Israeli company Gadot, constitutes success in US-backed efforts to counter China’s first starter advantage as its infrastructure-driven, multipronged Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seemingly stalls.
The port deal, in which Mr. Adani has a 70 per cent stake, puts the duo in charge of the port until 2054.
Under US pressure, Israel backed away from allowing China to manage Haifa Port, which the US Sixth Fleet frequents. The port also straddles the exit from an adjacent naval base that hosts Israel’s submarine fleet, believed to have a second-strike nuclear missile capability.
The acquisition also suggests that the United Arab Emirates, one of China’s closest partners in the middle and a member of I2-U2 alongside the United States, Israel, and India, is playing both ends against the Middle East. However, the UAE is the partner that appears to be hedging its bets most.
The hedging stems from Gulf uncertainty and Mr. Biden’s failure to convince the United States’ allies that Washington would be a reliable security partner in the future. The Gulf states want to see binding defense arrangements rather Mr. Biden’s verbal reiteration during his visit that the United States remains committed to Gulf security.
Confidence in US reliability has been undermined in recent years by the identification of China as the United States’ main strategic challenger prompting Washington to seemingly attribute less importance to the Middle East. In Gulf minds, that translated into a US failure to respond robustly to attacks on critical Saudi and Emirati infrastructure by Iran and/or its allies.
For its part, the UAE distanced itself from the security-focused anti-Iran tenor in Mr. Biden’s talks with regional leaders. Instead, the Emirates said it wished to cooperate rather than target the Islamic republic and was seeking to return its ambassador to Tehran.
In Haifa, the port competition with China is most immediate. Shanghai International Port Group, which operates the Chinese metropol’s deep-water port, the world’s largest container cargo harbour, has a 25-year management contract for a privately owned port in Haifa Bay.
The port is close to Haifa Port, that the government is privatising with the sale to Mr. Adani and Gadot.
I2-U2 aims to increase entrepreneurial cooperation between the four countries through joint investments in water, energy, transportation, space, health, and food security. In a statement, the four countries also said that they intended to “modernise infrastructure.”
The acquisition of Haifa Port fits the mold of the quad and an Indian Middle East policy that, in the words of analyst C. Raja Mohan, “is imbued with greater realism,…discard(s) inherited ideological inertia, avoid(s) the temptation of seeing the Middle East through a religious lens, and strive(s) hard to realise the full possibilities awaiting India in the region.”
Mr. Adani was quick to acknowledge the geopolitical significance of his acquisition allegorically.
“Delighted to win the tender for privatization of the Port of Haifa in Israel with our partner Gadot. Immense strategic and historical significance for both nations! Proud to be in Haifa, where Indians led, in 1918, one of the greatest cavalry charges in military history!” Mr. Adani said on Twitter.
The billionaire was referring to the capture of Haifa by the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade made up of troops supplied by Indian princely states in the waning days of World War One as Allied forces pushed back the Ottomans in Palestine and the Sinai.
Mr. Adani’s US$1.18 billion bid for the port was 55 percent higher than the second highest bid and far more than the Israeli government had expected. “It’s as if Adani is saying: ‘Step aside, this is a strategic purchase – and for us the price is less important,’” said journalist Avi-Bar Eli.
The acquisition follows the conclusion in February of a free trade agreement between India and the UAE. A similar agreement between Israel and India is in the works.
Haifa is Mr. Adani’s first port venture outside of India, where he operates 13 sea terminals and controls the flow of 24 per cent of maritime commerce.
The acquisition also follows initiatives to co-produce Israeli arms in India, in which Mr. Adani was a partner in the initial manufacturing of small arms. Cooperation has since expanded into the production of missiles and drones.
The port acquisition bolsters what analysts Gokul Sahni and Mohammed Soliman describe in a co-authored article as the rise of an Indo-Abrahamic bloc that is gradually solidifying the creation of a West Asian system.
The analysts argue that the bloc “establish(es) a balance of power against the region’s dynamic independent powers, Iran and Turkey, and stabilis(es) the region in an era of great power competition.”
The coiner of the phrase, Indo-Abrahamic, Mr. Soliman, argues that it is better labeling than I2-U2 because “regional peace and stability in West Asia are not guaranteed through the unilateral military presence of the United States but through a balance of power that will eventually moderate the ambitions of rising states in the region. Furthermore, the original Indo-Abrahamic term allows the forum to expand to potentially include other states,” such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.
I2-U2 may contribute to a rejiggered West Asian system. However, winning the balance of power game could be a long shot. So far, it has failed to reign in Iran and China or stop Russia from invading Ukraine.
There are many and varied methods of China in promoting its policies on social media, expressing the official Chinese government’s viewpoint. What is remarkable here, is the success of these Chinese methods in attracting Arabs, despite the delay in their presence on Arab media to clarify China’s policies towards all actual moves and reveal the facts from an official Chinese point of view in the first place.
Here, a remarkable activity has recently been observed by Chinese Arabic-speaking journalists, media persons and activists on social networking sites, especially “Twitter”, from the official point of view of China.
China has succeeded in building a vast digital infrastructure that allows it to control and monitor all social platforms, and to display the official views of the Chinese state and its ruling Communist Party.
Here, the new official Chinese electronic propaganda methods rely on advanced programs, according to the Chinese government’s procurement documents, and these programs allow the Chinese authorities to conduct advanced research on public records and data related to all personal information about the targets and their whereabouts.
Chinese digital propaganda is part of Beijing’s broader campaign to counter negative images of it. All Chinese agencies, including China’s state-owned state media, propaganda departments, police and military, and electronic regulators, have procured several new and more advanced data-collection systems.
The Chinese State Media Program has also succeeded in creating a database of foreign journalists and academics via (Twitter and Facebook for social networking globally), with a presentation of the official Chinese views with it.
What defines China’s policies towards the Internet in general is the principle that there is no complete freedom, and the authorities of the ruling Communist Party in China set (seven red lines), which has been agreed upon at the (Chinese Internet Summit) which has been held in 2013 in (Gongguo City, capital of Hunan Province). Those red lines that should not be violated or endangered on the Internet, are represented in: law, socialism, political system, state interest, the rights of others, social systems, ethics, information health.
There are more than 300 Chinese diplomats around the world, present in more than 120 countries, and each of them has an account via social networks of “Facebook or Twitter”, equivalent to more than 500 official accounts on those networks. The task of these accounts is to retweet, publish or like their posts by themselves or through other followers, which ultimately leads to the dissemination and expression of China’s viewpoint globally on all issues.
The most famous and most important person who used social networks to publicize the efforts of the Chinese government abroad was the former Chinese ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming, who resigned in 2019, and was one of the most famous and most important Chinese diplomats in using Chinese propaganda in the evolving battle on the Internet globally. . Ambassador Liu Xiaoming joined Twitter in October 2019, as dozens of Chinese diplomats flocked to Twitter and Facebook, presenting and expressing China’s views in all countries of the world.
Ambassador Liu Xiaoming succeeded in his mission and gained more than a quarter of a million followers, and promoted a model for China’s new diplomacy, known as “wolf warrior”, a term borrowed from the title of a highly profitable Chinese movie. It means that China is one of the wolves, because there are wolves in the world, and you need warriors to repel them.
The Chinese government has concluded agreements with a group of social media influencers in the world to improve China’s image in the world, attract tourists, confront counter-propaganda, and introduce the world to the tourist attractions there. The Chinese authorities use more than 200 influencers on social media and social media globally, to promote China in more than 40 different languages, followed by more than 60 million people to promote tourism, culture and various positions of the Chinese government. The activities of these influencers range from singing, cooking, travel, tourism and friendship between China and countries of the world.
Here, China is working to create a counter force, to confront everything that is written about it globally from a point of view contrary to Beijing. Therefore, China is spending very large sums to invite many African, Arab, Latin American, Asian and other Australian journalists to visit Beijing and form a view of Chinese society, to publicly present the views of the Chinese state on various issues, such as the issues of (Uyghur Muslims, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan), and others.
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