Kourosh Ziabari – Asia Times: Reports about the delivery of 1.5 million barrels of gasoline to Venezuela by Iran in early June once again threw the saga of relations between those two countries into relief. Media, commentators and scholars have been heatedly debating the enigmatic Iran-Venezuela partnership ever since, and how this alliance can challenge the global dominance of the United States, which has long punished both countries with merciless sanctions.
Geographically, there is little that Iran and Venezuela share. They are nearly 12,400 kilometers away from each other. Culturally, contemporary Iran subscribes to a conservative religious tradition, which manifests itself in different aspects of daily life, while Venezuela is part of the vibrant Latin American civilization.
And as to their historical evolution, Iran and Venezuela have trodden completely different paths to become what they are today.
It is even the case that Iran and Venezuela might have good reasons to be at loggerheads.
Communism is alive and well in Venezuela, as evidenced by the continued primacy of the Partido Comunista de Venezuela, the oldest continuously existing party there, while socialism is the overarching socioeconomic doctrine of the state. On the other side, the rigid version of Islam practiced in Iran is fundamentally opposed to socialism and hardline Shiite jurists consider communism a major “enemy” of Islam.
All the same, hostility toward the United States and resisting its “imperialism” constitute the backbone of the marriage of convenience between two revolutionary governments that might otherwise be rivals for palpable reasons: ideology and ambition.
History of Iran-Venezuela relations
Relations between Iran and Venezuela date back to early 1940s. In 1960, they joined forces, along with three other oil-rich nations, to establish the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
After the 1979 revolution in Iran, it was the pro-reform president Mohammad Khatami who expanded relations with Venezuela, visiting the South American country three times while he was in office.
In March 2005, Khatami inaugurated the joint venture Veniran Tractor Company in Ciudad Bolivar. The same year, the two countries inked their first free-trade agreement. And the Venezuelan president at the time, the late Hugo Chavez, conferred his country’s highest distinction, the Collar de la Orden del Libertador, on his Iranian counterpart.
Khatami’s firebrand successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elevated the connections, and cultivated a special personal relationship with Chavez. Both presidents were stalwart anti-American apostles and conceived the growth of the Tehran-Caracas relationship as a pathway to sidestep the growing list of US sanctions against both countries and a driving force for the initiation of a transcontinental anti-American bastion.