Biden’s Middle East agenda

SOMEHOW the Middle East just won’t let the US get away to the Indo-Pacific. This month, the US will take multiple steps to upgrade its Middle East policy through a visit of President Biden to the region as well as make a sharper effort to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to restrain Tehran’s nuclear programme, something that was wantonly abandoned by the Trump administration.

New Delhi may not be directly involved there, but it could use the I2U2 grouping to put forward its point of view.

Biden’s visit has multiple goals. Primarily, it is to walk back on his hardline approach to Saudi Arabia with the hope the latter will boost oil production and ease the global price situation. Linked to this is an effort to deepen Israel’s integration into the region. He will travel to Israel and the Palestinian territories before continuing to Jeddah to participate in a two-day summit with the GCC countries — Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar — plus three other regional countries, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan.

A third goal is to try and end the war in Yemen where a Saudi-backed government is fighting an Iran-backed rebel Houthi movement. The fourth is to hold a virtual summit of the I2U2 (Israel, India, US and UAE) grouping, also known as the western Quad, whose aims are yet to be fleshed out.

Talks to restore the JCPOA began in April 2021 in Vienna between Iran and the P4+1 — China, Russia, Germany and the UK — with indirect US participation. In March 2022, after nearly a year of discussions, the parties came close to an agreement, but last-minute disputes over the scope of sanctions that would be lifted prevented an agreement.

Now, in an effort to push through an agreement, the EU is mediating indirect talks between the US and Iran in Doha. The first round of the talks took place last month without any significant breakthrough. The Biden administration says that the JCPOA is in the interest of the US and its partners and a quick deal could also see Iranian oil depress the sky-high oil prices.

The statement on Iran issued at the recent G-7 meet was fairly tough. It accused the Iranians of not accepting ‘the opportunity to conclude a deal’ but reiterated support for diplomacy as the best option. Earlier in June, playing hardball, Iran had dismantled 27 monitoring cameras set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as part of the JCPOA and installed advanced centrifuges.

A lot of this has direct implications for India. The Gulf region is arguably the most important external region for this country. This is the region providing the country 60 per cent of its oil and gas, and this is where 7 million Indians work, sending back over $80 billion as remittances.

India seeks a balanced approach to the region and is not concerned too much about human rights issues. It seeks to narrowly focus on its national interests which means close ties with Israel for defence technologies, and with the GCC countries for oil and gas as well as attracting their investment. This has been a special area of focus for the Modi government. The PM was the recipient of Saudi Arabia’s highest civilian honour in 2016 and he has shaped a close relationship with the UAE’s new President, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan.

Ties with Iran are in a category of their own. Iran used to be a major supplier of oil to India. There has been geopolitical congruence between the two in their approach to Afghanistan and Central Asia. An outcome of this was New Delhi’s decision to invest in developing the Chabahar Port and the Chabahar-Zahedan railway. But beginning 2018, when the US walked out of the JCPOA and imposed sanctions, the going became tough. India was forced to terminate its oil imports and bilateral trade dropped to just to over $2 billion in 2020-21 from $17 billion in 2017-18. Work on the railway came to a stop.

A restoration of the JCPOA would be a major boon to India in terms of its energy security. In addition, normal ties would enable the completion of the Chabahar projects as well as the International North South Transportation Corridor that provides a tested multi-modal transportation link overland to Europe via Iran.

Today, sanctions have beggared Iran. Its per capita income was more than that of Turkey and equal to Russia in the mid-2000s, but has now declined from a peak of $18,000 (PPP) in 2011 to $13,000. With its oil and human resources (a literacy rate of 86 per cent), Iran offers a huge, varied and proximate market for India.

Last year, in a bid to reset ties, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar made two visits to Tehran in the space of a month. To some extent, this was triggered by the developing situation in Afghanistan where India and Iran had been kept out of the grouping of US-Russia-China and Pakistan dealing with Afghanistan. New Delhi has also been concerned with the growing Chinese influence manifested by the $400 billion economic cooperation deal spanning 25 years signed last year between Beijing and Tehran.

Last month’s visit of Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian to India was a positive step forward and could presage a restoration of normal ties, including oil purchases from the country. But a great deal depends on how the US and EU handle the JCPOA negotiations. New Delhi may not be directly involved there, but it could use the I2U2 grouping to strongly put forward its point of view.