The mass media in the West has a perverse talent for talking about something a lot without telling you much of anything about it. Iran is an extreme case of this: we have been hearing about the country daily for weeks, and very regularly for many years before that, but the things that are said are utterly limited to three choice topics:
- Iran has a religiously led government.
- Iran has a long-standing rivalry with Israel and supports various anti-Israel armed groups.
- Most of all, Iran has been trying to get a nuclear programme underway, which it says is for making power stations, but Israel and America say is to build nuclear weapons.
The focus on nukes is so utterly singular, that for many Westerners it would be difficult to imagine what else ever gets built in Iran. Any other news about what is going on in the country doesn’t tend to reach us, even (or perhaps especially) when it could be of crucial importance to the whole world, and certainly if the timing of such an event happens to coincide with the renewed prospect of war. These are many of the reasons why so few of us got to hear about the historic opening of a new international rail line that has linked Iran to China, just last month. You could search English language news websites for some time and find virtually nothing about this. However, it’s huge news and adds a layer of meaning to the tensions between Iran and the U.S.-led world order.
Not Everywhere had a ‘Golden Age of Rail’
Only two continents have ever had true unifying rail connectivity: Europe and North America. This is a direct consequence of imperialism and colonialism. The function of the railways in metropolitan centres of empire was to facilitate transport and communication around them. In the colonised countries, by contrast, railways served a completely different function: they were machines for extracting resources from centres of primary production to seaports. There, this cargo could be shipped away to be used by the industries of the wealthy nations.
Apologists for empire often like to boast that the colonising countries ‘gave the natives railways’ but the reality is that those railways were not structured to meet the needs of the host people. This is a large component of why many Global South countries ultimately just let their colonial rail systems go to ruin after turning independent: the cost of maintaining them wasn’t justified by the benefits and the cost of adapting them to be beneficial was too high.
India and China are definitely cases in point of the extractive railway model: their systems were funded and built by Western interests looking to get the best possible returns on investment. In real terms, that meant building the most efficient means to get crops and other basic goods out of the two massive countries. In Iran, even less was built by Western industry: oil could more easily be extracted to the ports via pipelines.
International connections across Asian nations were always limited in construction because Western capitalism has never had any real need for them. Western powers have dominated the seas for five hundred years, and they still do, even though the specific dominant power has changed (from Spain, to the Netherlands, to Britain, to America) in that time.
Shipping lanes have never yet declined in importance. In our age of globalisation, they are more depended upon than ever, as our severely asymmetric logistics chains funnel ever more of the world’s natural resources into concentrated manufacturing hubs in Asia. From there, they become products that must be delivered to the entire globe.
Many of the raw resources are simply fossil fuels, and significant quantities of CO2 are emitted by ships burning their own fuel to deliver more fuel to get burned elsewhere. This is obviously bad for the environment, but it has been working for capitalism, so it is currently unlikely to stop.
However, what has become a concern for capitalism is the disruption that results from the regional wars triggered by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. The Middle East has multiple narrow straights that are crucial for world ocean freight. The governments of America and its European allies have been very focused on their ability to keep these shipping lanes open. It has not been in their interests to draw too much attention to a rival power that has been pushing for a different solution.
One Belt, One Road
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping toured central Asian countries and declared a new government policy that Anglophone journalists somewhat awkwardly translated as the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, although ‘New Silk Road Economic Belt’ was a closer translation of what he called it. The name invokes the memory of what historians refer to as the ‘Silk Road’, an ancient network of trading posts that stretched from coastal China all the way to Roman Europe. For some seventeen hundred years, this historic chain of merchant communities enabled Europeans to purchase goods, such as spices and the exquisite material, silk, and leave them to marvel at how cultures they couldn’t communicate with were producing such things. The Silk Road faded away as the capitalist world system emerged. The road was rendered irrelevant with the rise of Western shipping and passed somewhat into legend.
China’s New Silk Road is planned to recreate the route of the ancient road. In doing so, the intent has been to connect up the major population centres of Asia, which is where a majority of human beings actually live, to create a more efficient means of connecting China to the rest of the world. International responses to the policy have been mixed: some in the West have chosen to see the multi-billion-dollar project as an unalloyed good, they just love free trade that much. However, there has been rising anti-China sentiment in many Global North countries for decades at least, and nowhere is this more so than Donald Trump’s USA.
The original plan had been intended to join China to their closely matched competitor and long-term frenemy India, but a combination of domestic far-right politics in Delhi and pressure from the Americans scotched those plans. So, the Chinese have put the India link on hold and, since 2021, work has focused on just ploughing through the post-Soviet ‘stans’ and establishing the first truly trans-Asian railway.
After just four years, a functioning new rail line can be found starting from the West Chinese regional capital Urumqi. Through there, it passes through Kazakhstan’s legendary city of the orchards, Almaty. It then runs through the famously beautiful Uzbek city of Samarkand, on to Turkmenistan’s sci-fi capital Ashgabat. And from there, last week, a freight train finally pulled in at the brand-new ‘dry port’ of Iran’s capital, Tehran.
Transporting cargo between China and Iran has been reduced from a forty-day journey by sea, through politically and militarily insecure straights at Hormuz and Molucca, to one that takes just fifteen days across landlocked countries far beyond the control of Western forces. The head of the Iranian rail operator has described the undertaking as ‘steel arteries of independence’, and with good cause. For the first time, Iran can now export oil to its number-one customer, the Chinese, and neither American naval power nor economic sanctions can do much about it. China, for its part, can also now look to develop Iran as a stop-off point for goods they seek to export further West, without geopolitical conflicts, in which they don’t wish to join, getting in the way.
The apparent lack of interest in the trans-Asian freight route may, in reality, mask fear on the part of Western elites. Many of the core calculations upon which their foreign policy is predicated may be on the cusp of going out of date. This is particularly true in light of the current Israel-centric wars. America and Britan’s most direct interventions in the conflict until last week had been to fight the Yemini Ansarallah government (called ‘the Houthis’ in most of the media), in order to keep Red Sea shipping lanes open. Much of the speculation about how Iran will respond to being directly attacked has focused on if they will move to close the Straight of Hormuz. The presumption has been that the value of these factors is fixed in world trade. There was also a long-term assumption that Iran could be cut off from supplies of high-technology equipment and weapons by blocking Chinese ships.
The End of a Very Short American Century?
The section of the left to which Counterfire belongs has always argued that America’s wars of the twenty-first century have been an attempt to avert that country’s relative decline against rising powers, of which China is the most important. Although these forever wars began in Afghanistan, the U.S. shifted its attention rapidly to the Middle East and has remained utterly focused on it, because of the intersection between crucial trade routes and access to fossil fuels in the region.
Multiple factors have chopped and changed over a quarter of a century, but three of the constants have been that Israel was always America’s highly valued vassal, Iran has always been a hated renegade state, and America has always had the strategic advantage over other powers. There has been a significant rupture within the American establishment about whether their aggressive policy can, or should, be continued. What the trans-Asian railway may represent, however, is that this debate could be rendered moot. It might already be too late for them to hold off American decline relative to Chinese ascendancy for very much longer.
We can see from the recent actions of Donald Trump that he is trying to protect American domination with a combined strategy of warfare and economic leverage. So, in the week after illegally bombing Iran, he casually announces that there is now a ceasefire and he’s willing to discuss oil-trade terms with both them and the Chinese. This looks erratic, but it speaks to a strategic perspective in which he wants other governments to know that he can and will resort to violence, whilst he also acknowledges that overreliance on violence may simply accelerate a shift away from systems of trade where America has control. His social-media messaging indicates that he expects China to carry on buying shipments of U.S. fossil fuels in return for America using its military might in Asia less frequently.
As regards China itself, it needs to be stressed that the country also pursues its own interests. There is a version of left-wing thinking, which is more prevalent on the internet than in real life, that wants to think China is motivated by an inherent anti-imperialism to aid it’s ‘brothers and sisters’ in the rest of the postcolonial world. It should be noted that the Chinese government themselves do not make any such claim, and it would be a lie if they did. For all the revolutionary regalia that it dusts off at official functions, the Chinese state is thoroughly capitalist and thoroughly integrated into global capitalism. The idea that China was going to leap to the rescue of this or that oppressed people has always been fanciful: they have continued to cheerfully trade with Israel throughout the Gaza genocide and have been carrying out repression of their own in order to build the New Silk Road, notably in the Xinjiang region where Urumqi is. They are allied to Iran because it is good sense for them to be, a mutually beneficial relationship with the also capitalist Iran.
Ultimately, what this development has done is confirm a widely held view that the world America shaped and dominated is coming to an end one way or another. The most pressing task for us right now remains struggling to prevent the decline of American imperialism from being ever bloodier and more destructive, by continuing to oppose Western warmongering in the Middle East and avoiding a potentially world-ending war with China.