The self-proclaimed champion of anti-imperialism is now sugarcoating an imperial war.

By Kourosh Ziabari, a journalist and Asia Times correspondent

Foreign Policy

While the United States and its allies cobble together package after package of punitive measures on Russia to drive home that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine will have grave consequences for his country and catapult it into global isolation, and as the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the blitzkrieg is consuming resources and shifting global consciousness, the eccentricity with which Russia’s southern Caspian Sea neighbor and ally Iran has responded to the crisis has mostly remained unnoticed.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was one of the first world leaders to pick up the phone and call Putin to pledge allegiance as soon as the news of the war flashed over TV screens on Feb. 24. In the phone conversation, Raisi told Putin that “the expansion of the NATO is a serious threat to the stability and security of independent countries in different regions” and expressed his hope that “what is happening” ends up benefiting the “nations and the region,” according to a readout of the call.

The reception of the war in Iran’s state media and the reactions of Iran’s foreign ministry and other top authorities have been nothing short of a celebration of a coercive muscle-flexing by a mighty kingpin. Toeing the Kremlin line prescribed to the Russian media, Iran’s state broadcaster has refused to refer to the onslaught as a “war” or “invasion,” instead soft-pedaling it as “special military operation,” the very terminology concocted by Putin to explain away his war of choice.

The dominant talking point is how the United States has functioned as an agent provocateur that forced Ukraine into the current maelstrom by inciting Russia. Ignoring how ruinous the war has proved to be so far, official media in Iran have unanimously pinned the blame entirely on the “NATO provocations” without bothering to critically debate Russia’s violation of international law and the vehemence of its military campaign begetting massive loss of life and an unprecedented exodus in Eastern Europe.

The rationale sustaining this narrative is both understandable and simplistic. First, Russia is an ally, so it’s cost-effective for Iran to condone its war of aggression. Putin will remember Iran as a partner that didn’t grimace at his unwarranted interventionism and buried its head in the sand while Russia razed Ukrainian cities to the ground.

In return, Tehran hopes to receive augmented economic exchanges, possible Russian vetoes of prospective United Nations Security Council decisions against Iran, and a range of other incentives the Kremlin can deploy from its playbook to support what is mutating into an Iranian vassal state. Also, Ukraine is a European country backed by the United States, so why not depict the confrontation as a battle of good vs. evil in which a comrade (Russia) is defending its interests in the face of Western imperialism and sell it to the Iranian public as yet another example of American villainy?

For years, the United States has served as a convenient whipping boy that Iran been able to put on trial in absentia for every major paroxysm of misfortune and violence in the world and in its neighborhood.

Iranians are also constantly told that “U.S. imperialism” is about to decline soon and that the failures of the Western hegemony are mushrooming daily. Iranian officials are thus exploiting the Russian invasion of Ukraine to demonstrate how U.S. policies are backfiring and threatening global peace. Heaping opprobrium on the United States for every national security adversity or economic malady in the region and the world is not a novelty for the Iranian leadership, nor is it an extreme oddity.

But Tehran’s glaring refusal to denounce the war and expressly condemn Russia, and its decision instead to echo Russian state media propaganda in whitewashing the crimes being committed in Ukrainian cities, signal a stark departure from many of the principles the Islamic Republic of Iran has been espousing since its inception.