I like this offer by the Saudis to India...
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Stratfor Dispatch: Increasing Complications in India-Iran Relations
June 14, 2011 | 1820 GMT
Analyst Kamran Bokhari examines the pressure put on relations between New Delhi and Tehran due to U.S. sanctions on Iranian energy exports at a time when the looming U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has both countries concerned.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Iran’s national security chief, Saeed Jalili, will soon be paying a visit to India, and this visit comes at a time when there is a lot happening between the two countries in terms of both bilateral relations and regional geopolitics.
Jalili’s visit to New Delhi comes at a time when relations between Iran and India are not as comfortable as they have been in recent years. The primary reason for that is that India is unable to pay Iran for the crude imports it gets from the clerical regime because of the international sanctions that have basically done away with the old mechanism that the two countries used to use in the form of a regional clearinghouse. That is an issue that has been lingering on for months and needs to be resolved.
The fact that there is this payment issue between India and Iran has allowed Saudi Arabia to enter into the dynamic where there are reports that Saudi Arabia is willing to increase its crude exports to India such that New Delhi would no longer need to import from Tehran. That issue has an unsettling effect on the Iranians even though they are just reports. Therefore this issue of the Saudi offer is likely to figure high on the agenda in the negotiations that will take place between the Iranians and the Indians. And especially now that the United States and its NATO allies are moving toward a drawdown strategy for Afghanistan, countries like India and Iran are especially concerned about their security given that the Taliban are likely to benefit from a Western military withdrawal from their country. And of course by extension, it also brings Pakistan into the equation which is a concern more so for New Delhi than it is for Tehran, but nonetheless there are shared concerns on the part of both the Iranians and the Indians and they would like to be able to prep for the coming drawdown.
Jalili’s trip will thus be about a host of issues, some long-standing, that actually bring India and Iran together, and others that are more contemporary and can become of a contentious nature because of the U.S.-led sanctions on Iran.
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