Iran's last resort for survival
Iran was overtaken with merriment and relief when the long-awaited nuclear deal was inked in July 2015 by the Islamic Republic and six world powers, spelling a happy ending to a diplomatic impasse that had been an unnerving fixture of media headlines and an unvarying talking point of world leaders for nearly two decades.
Iran was extricated from the bludgeoning sanctions that had maimed its economy and turned it into a hermit kingdom, and the international community obtained robust assurances that Tehran's nuclear program would not deviate toward weaponization. A genuine diplomatic breakthrough was clinched, and then-US president Barack Obama lauded it as "the strongest non-proliferation agreement ever negotiated."
The heyday of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), however, did not last long, as in May 2018, President Donald Trump mandated the US withdrawal from the deal, wrongfooting both Iran and the other signatories that, even in their most cynical calculations, had not envisaged the unraveling of the scrupulously drafted 159-page agreement in such an abysmal fashion.
What ensued was a US campaign of "maximum pressure" comprising a mélange of backbreaking sanctions and diplomatic isolation molded to bring Iran back to the negotiating table for a new, broader deal.
Whether the Trump administration earnestly sought a fresh round of engagement with Iran or merely fancied countermanding the JCPOA because it had Obama's signature on it is a mystery, as nobody is inside Donald Trump's head, and even his close acolytes find it difficult to comprehend his worldview.
But evidently, jettisoning the Iran deal by the United States, while it has five other signatories plus the European Union as a broker that all say they are committed to conserving it, has put the landmark accord on life support, and by extension, the Islamic Republic's economy in a chokehold.
Iran is desperate for a way out. Laya Joneydi, Iran's vice-president for legal affairs, estimates that Trump's dumping of the JCPOA has cost the country US$110 billion.
On the surface, the Islamic Republic hasn't kowtowed to the pressure, saying no to new talks with the Trump administration, but it is witness to a compounding social crisis and its people languishing under hyperinflation, declining purchasing power and poverty, erupting in street protests from time to time to demand the truncation of this cycle of misery.
Facing the resignation of allies and partners abandoning it one by one, Iran is now in dire need of clients for its oil piled up in refineries to burnish its crumbling petroleum-dependent economy, investors that can overhaul its derelict infrastructure, and reliable friends to shield it from the barrage of pressure by the United States.
Signs are emerging that Tehran has identified that savior as China, and is maneuvering on concluding a 25-year strategic partnership deal with Beijing to ensure it can carve out some escape from the labyrinth of isolation it is entangled in.
Notwithstanding the oil
Iran manages to smuggle to other nations, China is nominally the only country that is defying the US secondary sanctions and purchasing limited amounts of crude from Iran. Chinese customs data indicate that between January and July, China shipped in nearly 77,000 barrels per day of oil from Iran, even though that figure is a whopping retrenchment from the 552,000bpd it imported from Iran in 2016, one year after the JCPOA was signed.
The strategic partnership agreement, about which few details have been disclosed by Iran, involves preferential cooperation in political, cultural, judiciary, security and defense areas over a 25-year period, as reported by the Iranian government. Yet the most imperative facet of the cooperation is an economic and infrastructural synergy. China is expected to invest up to $280 billion in Iran's energy and petrochemical sectors and another $120 billion in the country's transportation and manufacturing fields.