On January 21, 2022, China, Iran, and Russia held naval drills.
A public relations official from the Iranian military initially announced this move on January 20 on ISNA news agency.
According to a Reuters report, the exercise is called the “2022 Marine Security Belt” exercise and was conducted north of the Indian Ocean.
According to Mostafa Tajoldin, this is the third joint naval drill the three countries have conducted.
After coming to power in June 2021, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has undertaken a “look east” policy to deepen connections with China and Russia.
In September, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security alliance China and Russia are spearheading.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian recently visited China last week and Iran’s president met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on January 20, 2022.
China, Russia and Iran began joint naval drills in 2019, and will continue to carry them out in the future, Tajoldin stated.
“The purpose of this drill is to strengthen security and its foundations in the region, and to expand multilateral cooperation between the three countries to jointly support world peace, maritime security and create a maritime community with a common future,” the Iranian official said to ISNA.
Naval units from Iran’s armed forces and Revolutionary Guards participated in the drills, which consisted of several tactical exercises like rescuing a vessel that caught fire, releasing a hijacked vessel, and firing live rounds at air targets during night time.
As the geopolitical landscape changes worldwide, Russia, Iran, and China will continue to build their relationships and form a competing bloc to the Anglo-American dominated security apparatus.
This emerging security bloc is the result of a bungled US foreign policy that tries to alienate these countries through sanctions, saber-rattling, and stationing of military assets in these countries’ respective spheres of influence.
While China poses the biggest security challenge to the US of the three aforementioned countries, this challenge can be addressed through restricting immigration from China (which is usually weaponized to facilitate massive corporate and national security espionage), limiting trade between the two countries, and allowing traditional allies like Japan to remilitarize and potentially go nuclear.
That said, the US needs to rethink its overall approach to national security and foreign policy. These newly emerging competing security blocs in Eurasia are a form of foreing policy blowback against the US government’s overreach abroad.
Instead, a sober, national populist foreign policy strategy would focus on border security and security cooperation with Latin American nations to keep mass migration in check.
American foreign policymakers should take this into account when re-assessing their foreign policy moves.
