Chabahar Port, Iran, File Photo
God giveth and God taketh away, the Bible says. The US State Department announcement to reimpose sanctions on India’s Chabahar Port project in Iran fits into the Biblical maxim, although from a theological viewpoint, Job might have uttered those words at a moment of great distress having suffered devastating losses, including his wealth and children, but not yet realising the full scope of the spiritual battle he was in.
For India, Chabahar Port is “more than an investment project”, as the pro-government news magazine Swarajya has written. The right wing journal explains that “Since it bypasses Pakistan, the port is a vital access point to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and is integrated with the International North-South Transport Corridor reaching Russia and Europe. India has already used it to send food aid and supplies to Afghanistan.
“The port also plays into India’s competition with China. Chabahar sits barely 140 km from Gwadar, the Pakistani port developed by Beijing. Limited access here could reduce India’s ability to counterbalance Chinese influence in the Arabian Sea region…
“By revoking the exemption now, the US has left India facing the difficult task of protecting its financial stake while managing relationships with Washington, Tehran, and other regional partners,” Swarajya wrote.
However, what is at stake here as Trump 2.0 retracted from the Trump 1.0 decision of November 2018 to give a sanctions waiver for Indian operations at Iran’s strategic Chabahar Port is a fundamental shift. Although Washington flags it as a “maximum pressure” strategy towards Iran, the point is, Trump 2.0 has taken another overtly unfriendly stance of “secondary sanctions” towards India
Perhaps, the centrality of Afghanistan in the US regional strategy has waned in comparison with 2018. It is no longer a vassal state, which was in ICU and needed access to the world market. Ironically, the Pentagon commanders quietly promoted the idea of India maintaining communication link to Afghanistan via Chabahar and even promoted a trilateral consultation forum between Iran, Afghanistan and India.
Today, on the contrary, the matrix has radically changed — the US has been kicked out of Afghanistan and is looking in; Delhi has dealings with the Taliban and, more importantly, has jettisoned the pro-US tilt in its Afghan policy, and rebooted its coordination with Tehran and Moscow at a juncture when Iran-Russia ties have assumed an unprecedented strategic connotation; and, it is entirely conceivable that Chabahar may become a lynchpin in India’s Eurasian integration.
Most certainly, Chabahar Port will be a key agenda item in the forthcoming visit by Iran’s national security advisor Ali Larijani (the éminence grise of Iranian politics) to Delhi. Larijani, an astute statesman, was recently received by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin — and, so indeed his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval. Shades of a Russia-Iran-India condominium?
In the backdrop of the recent Russia-China mega deal for a gas pipeline (dubbed Power of Siberia-2), regional observers paid attention to the ramifications of the Russia’s ‘Look East’ energy strategy and visualised an eventual gas pipeline grid of regional states that connects the vast Indian market as well via Central Asia and Iran. Indeed, it can be a formidable event in geo-strategy — a grid connecting the world’s energy superpower with the two biggest energy markets which gives ballast to the Asian Century and rewrite the algorithm of world politics.
A recent paper on this topic dated September 5 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. is titled How the Power of Siberia 2 Deal Could Reshape Global Energy.
At its most obvious level, the US sees Russia as a rival to its energy exports to the Asian market. A CRS Report by the US Congress titled Power of Siberia 2: Another Russia-China Pipeline says, “However, if China were to increase its pipeline supply of natural gas, it could limit further LNG contracts [with US oil companies.] While China accounts for around 4% of total US LNG exports, PS-2 [Power of Siberia-2] could strengthen China’s bargaining position with LNG suppliers, including US suppliers, including the United States. With a steady supply of pipeline natural gas from Russia, it could be difficult for US suppliers to negotiate profitable terms for long-term LNG contracts.”
Replace China with India, and the emerging scenario of the Russian presence in the burgeoning Asian energy market becomes extremely disconcerting for the White House strategists who are still pinning hopes on fastening India in the American stables firmly. The American strategists estimate Power of Siberia-2 to be a signpost that Russia is well on the way to strategising its intention to give primacy to the Asia-Pacific energy market while turning its back on the Europeans who have been historically the mainstay of Russia’s energy exports since the Soviet era in the 1970s.
Power of Siberia-2 is Putin’s last laugh as it will transport in the first stage 50 billion cubic meters annually, from Russia’s Yamal Peninsula to northern China via eastern Mongolia, which were gas fields that were originally earmarked to supply the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Europe but was destroyed by the Biden administration in 2022 in a covert operation with Ukrainian agents to disrupt Russia’s strategic axis with Germany and make European Union’s superpower a consumer of US LNG.
Suffice to say, Big Oil is estimated to have garnered a windfall profit exceeding $300 billion by selling gas to the European market through the 3-year period of the Ukraine war pegged at an incredible price level three times higher than the price at which they sold to the US domestic consumers! Unfortunately, the Indian strategists are behaving like lotus eaters. They blithely ignore US’s long-term geopolitical strategy to become India’s main energy supplier.
With the removal of the 2018 sanctions waiver on India’s Chabahar project, the Trump administration aims to complicate India-Iran relationship and to eventually stymie the prospects of a land route to India’s extended neighbourhood for Russian / Iranian energy supplies, given the problematic ties between India and Pakistan. It, therefore, becomes a vital part of Trump’s strategy to pressure India to buy more of US energy.
Needless to say, the US sanctions on Chabahar virtually paralyse India’s capacity to be an effective presence in Central Asia in partnership with Russia and Iran. It is an unfriendly move not consistent with Trump’s bombastic claims of friendship with Prime Minister Modi at a personal level and, curiously, it comes at a time when the US-Indian trade talks are reportedly reaching the home stretch.
The Americans have made this move hardly within a month or two of India proposing at the Russian-Indian joint economic commission meeting in Moscow the expeditious conclusion of the ongoing negotiations for a free trade agreement between India and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Notably, Jaishankar’s visit to Moscow in end-August was noted as a pivotal moment in India’s strategic autonomy and commitment to the maintenance of robust ties with Russia despite external pressures.
Taking into account the recent Saudi-Pakistani defence pact, which has been noted approvingly by the US Central Command, the sanctions on India-Iran partnership can only be seen as a calculated step in a containment strategy aimed at blocking India’s access to the vast Eurasian hinterland that could provide it with strategic depth and isolate it in the South Asian subcontinent.