All of the above makes total sense in New Silk Road terms, as Iran is a key Eurasian crossroads. High-speed rail traversing Iran will connect Urumqi in Xinjiang to Tehran, via four of the Central Asian "stans" (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) all the way to West Asia, across Iraq and Turkey, and further on to Europe: a techno revival of the Ancient Silk Roads, where the main language of trade between East and West across the heartland was Persian.
The terms of aerial and naval military cooperation between Iran and China and also Russia are still not finalized -- as Iranian sources told me. And no one has had access to the details. What Mousavi said, in a tweet, was that "there is nothing [in the agreement] about delivering Iranian islands to China, nothing about the presence of military forces, and other falsehoods."
The same applies to -- totally unsubstantiated -- speculation that the PLA would be granted bases in Iran and be allowed to station troops in Iranian territory.
Last Sunday, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stressed Iran and China had been negotiating "with confidence and conviction" and there was "nothing secret" about the agreement.
Iranian, Chinese and Russian negotiators will meet next month to discuss terms of the military cooperation among the top three nodes of Eurasia integration. Closer collaboration is scheduled to start by November.
Geo-politically and geo-economically, the key take-away is that the US relentless blockade of the Iranian economy, featuring hardcore weaponized sanctions, is impotent to do anything about the wide-ranging Iran-China deal. Here is a decent expose of some of the factors in play.
The Iran-China strategic partnership is yet another graphic demonstration of what could be deconstructed as the Chinese brand of exceptionalism: a collective mentality and enough organized planning capable of establishing a wide-ranging, win-win, economic, political and military partnership.
It's quite instructive to place the whole process within the context of what State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed at a recent China-US Think Tanks meeting, attended, among others, by Henry Kissinger:
"One particular view has been floating around in recent years, alleging that the success of China's path will be a blow and threat to the Western system and path. This claim is inconsistent with facts, and we do not agree with it. Aggression and expansion are never in the genes of the Chinese nation throughout its 5,000 years of history. China does not replicate any model of other countries, nor does it export its own to others. We never ask other countries to copy what we do. More than 2,500 years ago, our forefathers advocated that 'All living things can grow in harmony without hurting one another, and different ways can run in parallel without interfering with one another.'"
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