FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
The fate of what remains of the Ayatollahs' regime is destined to have an impact that reaches far beyond the Strait of Hormuz...
On the first night of Pesach, the Jewish holiday of Passover, millions of Israeli families celebrated the traditional Seder dinner amid a barrage of warnings about missiles fired by Iran, while dinner table discussions often revolved around Donald Trump’s choice between a ceasefire and military escalation with the Islamic Republic. While an escalation of the war could mean the arrival of Marines on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, the negotiating stage shifts from Pakistan, bringing with it one of the most strategic and least known parts of this conflict: the presence in Iran of significant quantities of highly sought-after rare earth metals.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar is a key figure in the effort to reach a Washington-Tehran deal, and to achieve this, he and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi have drawn up a five-point plan that combines the end of military operations with the beginning of economic cooperation. And this is where rare metals come into play, because Iran not only has oil reserves estimated at 157 billion barrels, 9-10 percent of the world's total, but also 7 percent of the minerals essential for high technology, concentrated between Yazd, Bafqat and Saghand.
While Iranian crude oil goes mainly to China, India, and Europe, and the United States has no need for it, Washington’s interest in rare earths is undeniable. This is for the simple reason that 17 minerals essential for the production of new technologies are now largely under Chinese control, on its own soil, but also in many African countries, while the United States is engaged in an uphill race to secure the remaining deposits. It is no coincidence that the issue of rare earths appeared on the White House agenda during the attempt to conquer Greenland, which has significant amounts of them underground, and is now back on the Iranian agenda for the simple reason that, here too, these are largely unexplored resources because Tehran lacks the technologies necessary to extract them, nor does it have access, due to sanctions, to the international supply chains to export them.
Iran is thus an unfinished mining power because it possesses one of the largest mineral bases, between 37 and 60 billion tons of proven resources, but its presence on the market is very limited. In the regions of Yazd, Bafq and Saghand in central Iran, rare earth metals are associated with deposits of phosphate, ferroapatite and mineral sands containing monazite. These are not large deposits, but a widespread mineralization system. One of the few proven deposits concerns the Saghand site, which contains approximately 500,000 tons of rare earth metal oxides with an average concentration of 0.5%. Added to this is a network of 30-40 large deposits and numerous geological anomalies. This structure has two consequences: it increases the overall potential, but makes industrial transformation more complex. Furthermore, Iranian rare earth metals are mainly light, essential for many industries, but less strategic than heavy ones.
Specifically, according to Iranian studies known to Washington, the heart of the deposits is located in the Yazd region, where the Revolutionary Guard dug into a mountain to build an underground ballistic missile facility from which they launch long-range missiles with the heaviest nuclear warheads against Israel and the Gulf states. According to some sources, the Khorramshar-4 launchers launched against the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean also originate from the bowels of Yazd, where the most protected bunkers of the ballistic missile program coexist with the unexplored treasure trove of rare metals.
From here to Pakistani mediation is a short step because Islamabad is closely tied to Beijing, from military supplies to intelligence cooperation to the infrastructure of the New Silk Road, and Xi Jinping has an interest in being part of the Gulf War resolution as part of broader strategic negotiations with Donald Trump, which will see the two leaders meet in mid-May. Trump and Xi initially clashed over rare earth metals, even threatening China to block their exports to the US, but they later became a key element in the trade deal for the simple reason that Washington still holds the lead in the production of microchips, for which rare earth metals are essential, thanks to California's high-tech giants and its privileged relationship with Taiwan.
In short, if during Trump's first year in office, rare metals were the main topic of negotiations between Washington and Beijing, now the possible scenario of a ceasefire in Iran sees these same raw materials returning to the forefront within a negotiation with two overlapping dimensions: the regional US-Iran and the global US-China. Because Washington and Beijing, bitter rivals on numerous strategic fronts, actually also have a common interest in finding a new global balance. All this explains how the fate of what remains of the Ayatollahs' regime is destined to have an impact that reaches far beyond the Strait of Hormuz./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "La Repubblica"
Lini një Përgjigje