In international law, States have something called fundamental rights. All States enjoy these imprescriptible rights. It is these rights that provide States with international legal personality. They are inalienable and indefeasible.
Among these rights is the right to sovereignty. Sovereignty refers to the authority of the State over its territory, including over land, persons and resources.
Preserving sovereignty is an absolute right of states governed by international law, conventions and the Charter of the UN. Unless they infringe on the sovereign rights of other nations, states are free to exercise their sovereignty.
The previous introduction seemed worthwhile to me to clear up the rules governing IRs. It struck me as relevant in the light of behaviour or regimes that continue to interfere in the affairs of other countries. This is not only through the use of coarse or military force.
There is also the logic of hegemony and tutelage, totally unacceptable in IR, an area where mutual cooperation and the consideration of common interests and good neighbourliness are the order of the day.
In this vein, I was much surprised by a systematic verbal attack campaign that kicked into gear recently. The mullahs’ regime in Iran and Turkey are carrying out a deliberate offensive against the UAE against the backdrop of the UAE’s sovereign decision to forge relations with Israel.
The Iranian president spoke a few days ago about Iran’s positive role in the Gulf region. Its military capabilities are likely to bring added value to its regional neighbourhood, he had said. But he suddenly changed his rhetoric to a patronizing and presumptuous tone, the basis of the mullahs’ thinking about the Arab and Gulf neighborhood.
“[The UAE] have committed a huge mistake” getting into relations with Israel, he said. “We hope they will realize this and abandon this wrong path” and we warn them against allowing Israel to “foothold in the region,” Rouhani said. “They have committed a huge mistake” and “great betrayal of the Palestinian people” of Muslims and Jerusalem, he added.
The Iranian foreign ministry said the UAE-Israel agreement was a “strategic stupidity from Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv that will undoubtedly strengthen the resistance axis in the region.”
Former head of the powerful Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezaei, said on Twitter: “No Muslim zealous warriors and no Arabs betray Palestine, only nerveless stabs from behind.” The spokesman of the Iranian Guardian Council, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaee, tweeted that the decision means Israel “occupying the UAE.”
In Turkey, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that he was considering severing ties with the UAE following this announcement, even though Turkey has had strategic partnership agreements with Israel for more than two decades. The first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel is none other than Turkey.
However, the Turkish regime takes the Palestinian question as a means of rapprochement with the Arab and Islamic worlds. This translates into an apparently trenchant verbal discourse towards Israel. But it is keen to maintain all channels of cooperation and strategic interests between the two sides.
The problem of the Iranian and Turkish regimes lies in the self-growth complex of their leaders who are driven by expansionist colonial projects.
In the case of Iran, this complex takes on a sectarian character. In the case of Turkey, it is a traditional colonial vision that evokes the whiff of a disastrous past, that of Ottoman relations with the Arab people.
Regional leaders seek to preserve the strategic interests of their countries by taking decisions of a national nature and in the exercise of sovereign affairs, creating a network of alliances and cooperative relations with regional and international parties.
However, these decisions are coming up against the drift of Iranian-Turkish authoritarian intentions and moves, the driving force of which is the tendency towards hegemony and domination that holds sway over the Iranian mullahs and the Turkish sultan.
Expansionist regimes have a hard time understanding the right of states to exercise their national sovereignty so long as they do no harm to other states’ interests. The Iranian mullahs and the Turkish Sultan are perpetuating the logic of hegemony and tutelage over some Arab neighbors through instruments of pressure and disruption.
However, the UAE, both the leadership and the people, have self-confidence and the desire to take advantage of every opportunity to deepen research and scientific cooperation and exchange experiences with all countries. The UAE, regardless of absurd positions that go beyond rationality, logic and international law, is moving forward.
