Encouraged by China's firm resistance to “crippling sanctions,” and the resonance this view has found among regional heavyweights, including Brazil, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Iran is reasserting its long-held view that the era of western dominance, led by the United States, is entering its terminal phase. After sending mixed signals for some time on Iran, India has also firmly spelt out its opposition to fresh sanctions. Speaking on March 15 in Washington at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said: “It continues to be our view that sanctions that target Iranian people and cause difficulties to the ordinary man, woman and child would not be conducive to a resolution of this [Iran] question.”
Iran has taken three major steps in recent weeks to show doubters within its own establishment and in the rest of the world that the Americans and some of their key allies, caught in the quagmire of global recession and still feeling their way for an honourable exit from Iraq and Afghanistan, are beginning to morph unambiguously into full-blown paper tigers.
The Iranian establishment has also arrived at the conclusion that within the framework of a global power shift, West Asia is transforming rapidly. There is a growing perception in Tehran of an emerging power vacuum in the region. This situation, in Tehran's view, has arisen mainly on account of the growing weakness of Israel, especially after the debacle it suffered at the hands of the Iran-backed Hizbollah in the 2006 summer war in Lebanon. Iran firmly believes that eventually it would be joined by Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, and possibly Saudi Arabia, which is already working with Syria to stabilise a polarised Lebanon, to engender a new security order in the region. Many in the Iranian establishment are of the view that China and Russia are poised to emerge as the new global players in West Asia.
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