Opposition to the United States

It is not the bipolarity of the Cold War, but there is in the world today a relatively cohesive opposition to United States hegemony. Two of its leading figures, Russia and Iran, have recently had elections — presidential in the former case and legislative in the latter — that reinforce that alignment.

Those in power have won in both countries. Vladimir Putin will return to presidency in Russia, though as the prime minister of President Medvedev, he had never been much more than a primus inter pares. In Iran, followers of the lawyer Ali Khamenei have won a landslide victory over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The two couples, Russian and Iranian, are not exactly symmetrical, because Ahmadinejad — elected when he still had the approval of the Supreme Guide — had recently tried to establish an independent power base. And although Dmitri Medvedev could pretend for a while, he soon showed his true colors.

But both systems have some characteristics in common. Russia is a democracy manipulated by the Kremlin, where the limited scope of pluralism that condemns the opposition to losing elections is preserved. In the Islamic Republic, Khamenei reduces personal freedom and the opposition is in prison or hiding. Putin trusts the electoral fact to make his victory safer and greater, while Khamenei dictates the game rules to avoid getting disappointed.

In both cases, it could have been speculated that the Arab Spring, which is transforming the political scenes of North Africa and the Middle East, could be duplicated in Moscow and Tehran. Recently, the opposition — liberal, ultra and communist — made Putin believe that change was possible, but the new czar has filled the ballot boxes with fraud and brought violence to the streets. In Iran a spring wind had already been forecast in the presidential elections in June 2009; Khamenei had to tweak the vote count so Ahmadinejad, under his protection at that time, could win. In March 2011, faced with popular protests that pretended to emulate those that occurred in Cairo, the Iranian authority responded with the usual severity. Furthermore, the leaders of the opposition, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi Hussein, were imprisoned, in the view that vetoing candidates that were not chosen by the leader would solve the electoral problem. The idea of opposition in Tehran is, in any case, different from the West: The so-called Green Wave in 2009 was as Islamic as the theocratic power itself, and its uranium enrichment program would have been carried out with the same enthusiasm, if perhaps it defended some measure of pluralism within the regime.

In June 2001, Putin gave an example of how he intended to refocus the post-Soviet foreign policy with the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, comprising Russia, China and four Central Asian States of the former USSR. In addition, in 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the Asia-Pacific region is a top priority, thus raising welts on Beijing’s skin. In parallel, Tehran would not give up its nuclear program that could culminate in the production of the atomic bomb, although it continues to ensure that it is pursuing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Today, both powers have a client in common, Syria, on whose behalf Moscow vetoed one resolution against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad at the U.N. Tehran funds and uses it as a strategic corridor to supply the guerrillas of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Venezuela and subordinates are distant allies, but also very expressive. Finally, there is China, less committed, but attentive to everything that affects its oil supplier, Iran.

It is not an axis, but a mere coordination of interests between the first military power in Eurasia and the regional leader of the Gulf. The two powers lead — along with China, both inside and outside — and wait for the moment to show their formidable weight as the squad of those who do not reconcile with Washington fiat. And their means of action would be more than tested if Iran’s nuclear facilities are attacked by either Israel or the United States. The election results in Russia and Iran strengthen that unknown outcome.