China will conduct a joint naval exercise with Iran and Russia this week, days after Tehran rejected US president Donald Trump’s call for nuclear talks. The drills in the Gulf of Oman come amid speculation in Washington that Mr Trump’s embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin could drive a diplomatic wedge between Moscow and Beijing.
This is the fifth time since 2019 that the Chinese, Russian and Iranian navies have conducted a joint exercise; similar drills last year involved more than 20 ships, combat boats, support carriers and navy helicopters. This week’s exercise will take place off the Iranian port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman, between the Strait of Hormuz and the Indian Ocean, a key shipping route for oil.
“The exercise plan includes drills on striking maritime targets, damage control, as well as joint search and rescue. The aim is to strengthen military mutual trust and foster pragmatic co-operation among the naval forces of the participating countries,” China’s defence ministry said on Sunday.
Iran’s supreme leader said on Saturday that calls for negotiations by “bully states” were not aimed at resolving issues but at dominating others and imposing their own solution. He was speaking after Mr Trump said he had written to him proposing fresh talks over Iran’s nuclear programme, which international experts say is close to the threshold for developing nuclear weapons.
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“There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily or you make a deal. I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran,” the US president told Fox News last week.
“I said, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate, because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran,’ and I think they want to get that letter – the alternative is we have to do something, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
The US, along with China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union, in 2015 signed a deal with Iran that put restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. The agreement came into force in 2016 but Mr Trump withdrew from it two years later and reinstated banking and financial sanctions.
[ Trump’s foreign policy risks ‘regress to the law of the jungle’, China warnsOpens in new window ]
Germany, France and Britain established Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex), a special purpose vehicle designed to facilitate transactions with Iran that did not use the US dollar or the Swift payments system. But European countries terminated Instex, which the US saw as a threat to the dominance of the dollar, in March 2023 after it had been used to make just one transaction.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio warned last week against allowing Russia to become a “permanent junior partner” to China, although he said he was not sure Washington could “ever be successful completely at peeling them off of a relationship with the Chinese”.
China’s president Xi Jinping will travel to Moscow in May to attend an 80th anniversary commemoration of the end of the second World War, and Mr Putin is expected to attend a commemoration in Beijing later this year. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi told journalists attending the Two Sessions legislative meeting in Beijing last week that no matter how the international landscape evolves, the partnership between Beijing and Moscow would not change and its internal force would not diminish.
“The two countries have found a path of ‘non-alliance, non-confrontation and not targeting any third party’ in developing their relations. It is a pioneering effort in forging a new model of major-country relations, and has set a fine example for relations between neighbouring countries,” he said.
“A mature, resilient and stable China-Russia relationship will not be swayed by any turn of events, let alone be subject to interference by any third party. It is a constant in a turbulent world rather than a variable in geopolitical games.”
