It’s always advisable to take Iranian claims of potential commercial agreements in its energy sector with a gran of salt. But the recent South Africa-Iran trade talks do seem to point to what Nikolas Gvosdev identified as the weak link in the whole League of Democracies concept floated during the U.S. presidential election. Namely, that the South-South perspective in particular, and emerging powers’ interests more broadly, don’t necessarily correspond with the American agenda to isolate “rogue” nations. Not surprisingly, sovereignty and non-interventionism are pretty important issues to countries that identify as much with the intervenees as with the interveners.
