Ahmadinejad – No Great Bargain for a Struggling

Chávez

Since the initial election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has become one of Venezuela’s most durable allies. But as this self-described «Axis of Unity» has developed, a predictable group of detractors has emerged. In a widely noted September op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, long-standing Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau argued that this alliance between “two of the world’s most dangerous regimes” has supplanted Iraq and North Korea as the new Axis of Evil. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has somewhat more cautiously echoed Morgenthau’s diagnosis, describing the relationship as “quite disturbing,” and not in the U.S. national interest. These responses continue to employ a black and white logic of friend and foe that defines the ties between Venezuela and Iran solely as a function of their opposition to the U.S., effectively reducing them to allies, and nothing else, in a zero-sum game of competing geopolitical interests.

However, others might argue that Washington can no longer afford to view the two countries through the Manichean lens of the Bush Doctrine, which dictates “You are either with us or you are against us.” It is easy to make the error of defining Presidents Chávez and Ahmadinejad in terms of their proximity or distance from U.S. interests, without offering a more nuanced and substantive understanding of the individual social and political projects on which they can be better judged. Only a deeper analysis of the motivations behind the budding relationship between Venezuela and Iran will allow policy makers to constructively engage them as growing regional powers, with rational goals that make sense for their own national interest.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Ethan Katz