Russia claimed the missile


projects were the brainchild of rogue rocket scientists who had lost their jobs at the end of the Cold War. The Chinese simply denied any coopera- tion with Iran. The secret deals have come


HANDSHAKE Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, left, and President Hassan Rouhani greet President Putin during a meeting in Turkey in 2018 to discuss the Syrian civil war.


out in the open in recent years. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently revealed that when the Rus- sians sent air and naval forces to Syria to prop up President Bashar al-Assad in 2015, they summoned Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleymani to Moscow, asking him to send Iranian ground troops. Last year, Russia and Iran


extended a 10-year trade agree- ment that observers believe contains a Eurasian clearing system so the rogues can con- duct trade without recourse to the U.S.-dominated SWIFT


network, from which Russia was recently banned. Also last year, Iran signed a


$400-billion, 25-year Compre- hensive Strategic Partnership with Communist China. For the first time since the estab- lishment of the Islamic Repub- lic in 1979, the Iranian regime agreed to allow a foreign power to station troops on its territo- ry, and guaranteed massive oil shipments to China, regardless of sanctions. The Iran-Russia-China


deals will link the three econo- mies inexorably for the next two decades, as long as their re- spective regimes stay in power. Fueling it all is China’s gar-


gantuan thirst for oil. China became the world’s biggest oil importer in 2017 and today consumes more than 10 million barrels per day of foreign oil. Since the end of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Chi-


nese have been importing close to one million barrels/day from Iran in violation of U.S. and international sanctions, ac- cording to research on the clan- destine oil trade by the New York-based advocacy group United Against a Nuclear Iran. China alone accounts for two- thirds of all Iran’s oil exports to- day but would take much more if it could. Readers may recall the as-


tonishing lament of former Secretary of State John Kerry in late February, who called on Russia not to let war in Ukraine distract it from cooperating with the United States on “cli- mate change.” Kerry was not the only U.S.


official still hoping to deal with Russia. Even as Russian tanks were heading toward Kyiv, Biden administration negotia- tors were counting on Russia to negotiate a new nuclear agree- ment with Iran, Rep. Michael McCaul, R–Texas, told The Washington Free Beacon. Under the expected terms


of the deal, the U.S. would lift remaining sanctions on Iran, free up to $50 billion of frozen Iranian assets and allow Iran to transfer $500 million to Rus- sia’s nuclear energy company Rosatom, according to former State Department Iran expert Gabriel Noronha. More importantly, sanctions


relief for Iran could give Mos- cow a back door into the global financial system and allow Iran to sell Russian oil to China. That, in addition to the alter-


native trade mechanism Russia has established with Iran and China, would render Western sanctions on Russia useless.


Ken Timmerman’s insider’s account, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, is now available as an e-book from Amazon.


62 NEWSMAX | APRIL 2022


MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV\TASS VIA GETTY IMAGES


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