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Tehran, Iran – Iran’s bid to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) was approved after almost 15 years by the bloc’s seven permanent members on Friday.
After the technical and legal process concludes – which could take up to 2 years – Iran will formally join a gaggle that accounts for about one-third of the world’s land and exports trillions of dollars annually – because it counts China, Russia and India, additionally to many Central Asian states, among its members.
Following his return from a summit in Tajikistan’s Dushanbe, President Ebrahim Raisi termed the approval a “diplomatic success” meaning linking Iran to the economic infrastructures of Asia and its vast resources.
During a speech at the two-day summit, he had denounced “unilateralism” by the us and involved a concerted effort to fight sanctions.
President Raisi held a string of high-level bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the SCO summit. Among other things, they led to the signing of eight agreements with Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon.
The two set a target of $500m for annual bilateral trade, which is on the brink of 10 times above the present levels.
Rather than major political or economic gains, Iran’s main takeaway from this success within the short term could also be limited to a lift in prestige and diplomacy.
The main issue with Iran’s approach towards the SCO is that it’s at it as a “concert of non-Western great powers” instead of a contemporary world organization , and views it in an anti-Western or anti-US setting, says Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).
This is despite the very fact that countries like Pakistan and India are US’s close partners, and even Russia and China haven’t been willing to openly challenge the US on the worldwide scene,” Azizi told Al Jazeera.
“The combination of those two misunderstandings, and also Iran’s self-perception as a natural hegemon in West Asia, would make the entire thing appear to the Iranian leaders as Iran joining other anti-Western great powers to make a robust coalition that’s getting to challenge the US hegemony.”
Azizi added that SCO members are reluctant to entangle themselves in Iran’s rivalries, which can be why, on Friday, they also admitted Saudi Arabia , Qatar and Egypt as “dialogue partners” during a balancing effort.
From a diplomatic perspective, the approval is critical .
The country had been an “observer member” since 2005.
Last month, Iran’s security chief Ali Shamkhani announced on Twitter that the “political obstacles” to full membership were removed.
As well as in Farsi, he published the message in English, Arabic and Hebrew, signalling that it had been also a message for the region and therefore the West.
Iran’s previous bids for SCO membership were blocked because it had been under United Nations sanctions, and a few members, including Tajikistan, were against it thanks to Tehran’s perceived support for the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan.
This marks the primary time Iran becomes a full member of a serious regional bloc since its 1979 revolution, said Abas Aslani, a search fellow at the middle for Middle East Strategic Studies in Tehran.
“Iran is subject to unilateral sanctions. this suggests that SCO members don’t recognise those as international sanctions and that’s why they’ve accepted Iran’s request for full membership,” Aslani told Al Jazeera.
He added that Iran is eyeing political and economic gains, especially with China, with which Iran signed a 25-year comprehensive cooperation agreement in March, and Russia, with which Iran is looking to expand a pre-existing cooperation agreement.
“Moreover, Iran could gain significant access to the Central Asian region, which may be considered a marketplace for exports of Iranian goods,” Aslani said, adding that only time will show what proportion of these potentials Iran can realise.
Aslani believes that US sanctions could convince be roadblocks on the thanks to achieving those potentials should they persist, but won’t halt Iran’s economic progress.
Iran and world powers have conducted six rounds of talks in Vienna to revive the country’s 2015 nuclear deal, which, if successful, would see US sanctions lifted.
The talks are on hold since late July to permit Raisi to make his administration, but are expected to resume soon.
“If the nuclear deal is revived, it might only be one wing. the opposite is that the increasing development of ties with the East, which might happen no matter whether talks with the West are successful,” Aslani said.
‘Marginal direct benefits’
The SCO, which grew from the “Shanghai Five” pact of the mid-1990s, is governed by consensus, which limits the scope of major cooperation between its member states.
It also functions more as a venue for discussion and engagement where high-level dignitaries from across the region can gather to confer, instead of an alliance just like the EU, whose members have a standard currency, or NATO.
“Iran’s grandiloquent narratives about ‘non-Western’ powers and organisations just like the SCO in precipitating a shift within the balance of power faraway from the US belies the very fact that the SCO lacks the power to foster deeper integration between these regional and great powers,” said Nicole Grajewski, a search fellow with the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and world affairs .
“There is not any Russia-China-Iran axis with formalised commitments like an alliance, and therefore the SCO certainly won’t provide the institutional structure for such an alliance,” she told Al Jazeera.
Grajewski said the SCO membership will provide a forum for closer engagement with the region for Iran, but that was something Tehran already enjoyed as an observer state.
She added that the quantity of trade with national currencies of Iran, Russia and China has been modest whilst they need discussed de-dollarisation for many years , and that they aren’t on the brink of launching an alternate financial messaging service to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) global financial network.
The SCO is especially a geopolitical and security organisation with limited infrastructures to pursue economic integration and Grajewski said “the direct economic benefits from the SCO are marginal” but member states could pursue bilateral agreements.
