Why is Ahmedinejad going to Russia?

Ahmadinejad supporters rally in Tehran on June 14 (Majid/Getty)

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, fresh off his reelection victory, is headed to Russia, of all places. The occasion is the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Yekaterinburg. And while Ahmedinejad delayed his visit by a day (he’s just going Tuesday, the second day of the two-day meeting), that he is still planning to go at all is pretty remarkable given the pressing situation he has to deal with in his own country.

Says Reuters:

After weekend protests in Tehran and other cities over the result of Friday’s vote, Ahmadinejad may want to show a business-as-usual face by attending a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit…

But this is not just a PR stunt. Iran has high hopes for the SCO, a new regional security organization, led by Russia and China, that is a sort of anti-NATO of the East. And Ahmedinejad’s visit at this critical time underscores how important Iran sees its relations with countries that can help it against the U.S.

Iran is an observer to the SCO but has been trying to gain full membership for a few years. It is apparently interested in the SCO’s mutual assistance agreement, where other members vow (somewhat vaguely) to come to each others’ aid in case of an emergency. Whether that would include an attack by the U.S. or Israel (or internal strife based on disputed election results) is not clear, but it does appear that the current SCO members believe that bringing in Iran would cause more trouble than it is worth. The SCO’s secretary general, Kazakh diplomat Bolat Nurgaliyev, said that Iran would not be admitted for full membership, at least not this year:

“[The] admission of new members to the SCO should strengthen the organization, but not cause new problems. We would like to preserve the positive image of the SCO gained over the eight years of its functioning.”

No one is quite sure what the SCO is all about, given how new it is, the opacity with which it operates and the fact that its two dominant members, China and Russia, appear to have divergent opinions about what it should be. Russia seems most interested in forming a bloc to keep the U.S. out of Central Asia (the SCO, for example, played a key role in getting the U.S. kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan in 2005). China, though, is more interested in internal security, especially in gaining cooperation with the Central Asian ’stans to extradite ethnic Uyghurs who are using Central Asia as a rear base to conduct their “splittist” activities. Those two goals are probably causing enough internal strife in the organization without adding in Iran. Says an analysis by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute:

[B]oth Russia and China have been reluctant to grant Iran full membership in the SCO for fear that this would turn the organization in an explicitly anti-American direction and encourage Western states to increase their pressure on China and Russia to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.

And that was before a disputed election.