336 { China’s Quest
Asian security equation. The shah saw a strong Pakistan as a buffer between
Iran and India as vital for maintaining stability on Iran’s eastern borders,
allowing Iran to focus on the Gulf, which the shah saw as Iran’s natural sphere
of influence. Pakistan then faced growing insurgencies in its southwestern
province of Baluchistan and in its Pashtun-populated Northwest Frontier
Agency—insurgencies supported by India and Iraq, both Soviet-aligned re-
gional powers. In April 1973, the shah declared that Pakistan’s security was
vital to Iran’s own security. He also ordered helicopter-borne Iranian coun-
terinsurgency forces into Pakistan’s Baluchistan to help suppress the seces-
sionist movement there. Iran, like China, was doing what it could to keep
Pakistan strong.^48
Pakistan played a key role in bringing China and Iran together. In February
1971, Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto passed on to Mao the information that
Iran’s Princess Ashraf (one of the shah’s younger sisters) was interested in vis-
iting China as an official guest of the Chinese government. The next month,
while the US ping-pong team was still in Beijing, Zhou Enlai issued such an
invitation. Visits by two different royal princesses followed in quick succes-
sion. Several months later, Iranian and Chinese ambassadors in Islamabad,
Pakistan, negotiated the terms of a new relationship. On August 16, the two
governments agreed to establish diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial
level. The next month, Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and Empress
Farah visited Beijing. Talks between Abbas and Zhou clarified the wide range
of convergent interests between the two sides.
Beijing cut off material and propaganda support for Marxist insurgents
in Oman’s southern province of Dhofar as part of its rapprochement with
Tehran. Chinese support for those rebels had begun in 1969, even though the
rebels were supported primarily by Soviet-backed South Yemen. (This was in
line with CCP competition with the CPSU for support of the world’s revolu-
tionary forces.) Iranian forces, on the other hand, were involved in support of
Oman’s legitimate (royal) government in suppressing the rebellion. Iran’s role
in Dhofar and Pakistani Baluchistan were part of the shah’s drive to establish
Iran as the major power in the Gulf area. Beijing’s dropping of the Dhofari
rebels to eliminate friction with Iran was, in effect, a shift from competition
with Moscow for global revolutionary credentials to alignment with Iran to
check Moscow’s use of revolution to expand the Soviet global position.
Formation of the Sino-Iranian entente in the 1970s must be seen in terms
of a broader regional structure of power. Britain, the long-dominant power
in the Persian Gulf and, indeed the entire Indian Ocean, announced in 1968
its determination to withdraw all its military forces from “east of Suez.” That
created a power vacuum to be filled. As noted earlier, the Soviet Union was
vigorously trying to fill it with its navy and its alliances. The United States,
for its part, moved to acquire a naval base at Diego Garcia in the middle of
the Indian Ocean via agreement with Britain in December 1966.^49 But the