Iran-China deal will force West to rethink foreign policy: Expert

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (R) and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi are seen in Tehran on March 27, 2021 during a ceremony entitled to signing of a historic partnership agreement between the two sides.

The historic partnership agreement signed between Iran and China will force the West to revisit its foreign policy that has persistently relied on intervention and exploitation, a commentator says.

“I think cooperation between Global South countries like China and Iran will force the political elite in the Western capitals to sit back and re-evaluate their policy,” Carl Zha, investigator and content producer on the political, cultural, and historical issues that center around China, told Press TV on Tuesday.

The Global South is a rough term coined to refer to, what some call, “developing countries” as opposed to certain Western and Western-allied states.

He said the West’s trademark foreign policy towards the supposed Global South nations has for long consisted taking interventionist approaches towards them so it can comfortably extract their resources.

As an instance of the manipulative attitude, Zha cited the US’s making oil trade dependent on the dollar, and using that petrodollar system to become the so-called “center of the world’s finance.”

“But they have to realize the time is changing. US hegemony is coming to an end. With China becoming increasingly more important – China is already the world’s second-largest economy and is soon to be the world’s top economy – the Global South can function without US intervention,” he said. “And they can do so by working together amongst themselves. The Iran-China deal just shows that both countries don’t necessarily need the US.”

The comprehensive strategic partnership agreement was inked by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his visiting Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Tehran on Saturday.

The deal served to officially document the Sino-Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that had been announced during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Tehran in 2016. It sets the outlines of the historic allies’ cooperation in political, cultural, security, defense, regional, and international domains for the next 25 years.

Zha, meanwhile, underscored that Iran’s geopolitical whereabouts lying next to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz turned the Islamic Republic into a “very strategic partner” for China.