توحید اسدی

Having deep historical roots, the relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of India have been shaped by a multitude of factors, encompassing domestic, regional, and international developments. The influence of major powers on the contemporary ties of these two countries stands out among the international factors. Drawing on the analytical framework developed by Erzsébet N. Rózsa (2021), this paper aims to examine the role of the United States (US) in transforming the dynamics of Iran-India relations. The central argument put forth is that the foreign policy behavior of both countries towards each other in recent years is driven by national strategic interests rather than historical connections. The study employs a three-tiered analysis, examining the bilateral, regional, and global levels. Each level focuses on particular prominent aspects, such as trade flows and the energy market, developments in Southwest Asia, and the nuclear issue, respectively. This article contends that at all three levels, the importance of forging a strong bilateral relationship between India and Iran cannot be overlooked, given their numerous converging interests. However, the US foreign policy towards Tehran, notably through the maximum pressure campaign initiated by former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s failure to reverse unilateral sanctions, has indeed had a significantly detrimental impact on the ties between the two countries in the post-JCPOA period.

Following the independence of 1947, India adhered to a mixed model of nationalist and socialist policies in the early years, with protectionism and closed-borders attitude dominating its approach to foreign relations and global economy. In the aftermath of the economically precarious circumstances during the 1980s, and the subsequent economic crisis in the early 1990s, paradigmatic reforms, widely known as liberalization, were officially announced. However, considering Indian liberalization as a gradually evolving process, rather than a one-off project, this paper intends to take a political economy approach and employ historical analysis in order to scrutinize the pre-1991 contextual trajectory through which India underwent liberalizing its economy. The paper explicates the implemented economic approaches by studying the key primary sources, the Five-Year Plans in particular, and the relevant secondary sources. The authors propound the notion that India, since its independence till the early 1990s, appears caught in a cycle of oscillations between protective measures on one hand and attempts to move towards a liberalized economy on the other. The statist model of development that overwhelmingly disfavored interaction with the global economy at the outset was gradually replaced by a decentralized model that sought to open up the Indian economy to the world.

Signing a preferential trade agreement between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has created a suitable context for the expansion of trade interactions between the countries of this region. With respect to this context, this paper examines food trade potentials between Iran and Russia as two neighbors with significant economies. Product codes are chosen from the 21 categories of the integrated tariff system based on the global definition of food. Data analysis is based on four trade criteria including the Allen cosine measure, the Revealed Comparative Advantage measure, the simple estimate of trade potential measure, and the Drysdale index over the years 2001–2017. These indices illustrate that Iran and Russia have high trade capacities for some items in certain food groups, and that they can facilitate the process of economic integration through reinforcing regional interactions and intra-region trade expansion, while safeguarding national interests and improving national security. The paper concludes that Iran’s food exports to Russia in a particular set of commodity codes enjoy the potential of expansion due to structural similarities between the countries’ food exports, the increasing trend of Iran’s food export potential to Russia, the increasing advantage of these commodity codes in Iran’s export to the world, and the increasing trade expansion opportunities from Iran to Russia.