by Prof. Hillel Frisch
Trade between the US and its allies dwarfs trade between Iran and its allies – over $3 trillion compared to $73 billion for Iran.
Screen capture of girl in Iran showing displeasure at Iranian president Hassan Rouhani,
via @ArminNavabi
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 703, January 2, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The chants being
shouted in Mashhad and Tehran to protest the regime’s dissipation of
resources on distant battlefields – “No to Palestine,” “No to Gaza and
Lebanon – Only Iran is Worth Dying For” – underscore the fact that the
US is the only major power to have many allies whose strategic
importance is matched by mutual economic benefits.
Sometimes relatively minor events reflect facts of
global importance. The chants in Mashhad and Tehran, “No to Palestine,”
“No to Gaza and Lebanon – Only Iran is Worth Dying For” to protest the
regime’s dissipation of resources on battlefields a thousand kilometers
and more from Iran’s borders, rather than allocating them to the
hard-pressed citizens back home, are among them.
These demonstrations underscore a major overlooked
truth in the global balance of power: namely, that the US is the only
power to have many allies whose strategic importance to the US is
matched by mutual economic benefits.
All other challengers are saddled with allies that
do nothing but drain their treasuries. Hence the demonstrations and
slogans in Iran. Tehran is trying to project power abroad at the cost of
arousing domestic opposition, a dangerous prospect. Non-democratic
states, even when powerful, are not supple enough to absorb such
opposition.
Compare Iran to the US in this regard.
The US was engaged in $3.6 trillion of trade in
2014, or just over one-fifth of its GNP. Thirteen of its twenty biggest
trading partners are states formally allied to the US as part of the
NATO alliance (Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and others), or those
that have in recent years become strong informal allies, such as India
and Vietnam. The latter was even a warring enemy in the past.
Significantly, the three largest trading partners
of the US in the Middle East are Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates. The Iranian-led alliance perceives these three countries
as its deadliest foes.
Trade between the US and its allies dwarfs trade
between Iran and its allies – over $3 trillion compared to $73 billion
for Iran. Even more significant, however, is the relative economic
importance of such trade to the economy of the US and its allies
compared to Iran and its allies. Whereas trade between the US and its
allies represents over half the total trade between the US and the
world, Iran’s $12.3 billion trade with its allies (overwhelmingly with
Iraq) represents less than 20% of its total trade with the world. (It
is important to note that not all agree with the Carnegie report of $12
billion in trade between Iran and Iraq; the figure might be much
smaller).
For Iran, Syria and Yemen are battlegrounds that
drain resources with little or no offsetting economic benefits. The $300
million trade between Iran and Syria, mostly to Iran’s benefit, hardly
offsets the costs of subsidizing the regime. Actual figures are
impossible to get, but the CIA in 2012 reported an $11 billion surplus
at the outset for Syria, which during the first year of the civil war
was reduced by slightly over $2 billion to finance the Assad regime. By
extrapolation, one can infer that after the fifth year, Iran began
stepping in to prop up the regime. Such a sum is more than Iran spends
on its own public health system. And this does not include the costs of
direct Iranian involvement or subsidies to Hezbollah, the Iraqi
militias, and Afghani mercenaries.
Tehran’s economic predicament in Yemen is even
more one-sided. There are no figures on Iranian-Yemeni trade because
they have been so insignificant. Today they are probably nonexistent.
The relationship repeats itself in the case of
China and Russia. China’s only staunch allies, North Korea and Pakistan,
drain Chinese resources with little economic advantage accruing to the
greater power. China, unlike Iran, is a major leader in international
trade and economic growth, which allows it to bear the costs of
subsidizing these states. It also does not bear the costs of actual
warfare.
For Russia – the economy of which is roughly equal
to that of Italy and smaller than that of Canada – its allies are more
costly relative to its economic power. Syria and Moldova are hardly
economic partners whose benefits offset the costs of Russian support.
Putin might find himself in the same predicament as the Iranian
leadership.
A common thread linking all the US’s failed
foreign adventures, including Iraq, was that the allies and battlefields
drained resources well beyond the economic benefits the US derived from
them. In Iraq, the US spent at least $100 billion on average between
2003 and 2011, when the revenues of Iraqi oil (which went to financing
the Iraqi state) never reached this figure – and in any case never found
their way to US Treasury coffers.
Only the US has so many allies whose economic
benefits augment their strategic value. Some of these states – Japan,
the richer members of NATO –might be free-riding on the American
security umbrella rather than fully paying for it, but the costs of such
free-riding are a fraction of the benefits derived from trade and
scientific interchange.
The protests in Mashhad and Tehran not only
encourage those regional inhabitants who fear the volatile mix between
Shiite extremism and imperial ambitions, but also reflect the continued
strength of the Western alliance.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/iran-protests-us-alliances/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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