With a neo-con editor who believes that “with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero”, the New Republic is the last place to find a reasoned view on Russia.  Or on Iran for that matter, considering this famously faux-liberal magazine’s hawkish anti-Islamic stance.

So imagine my surprise at finding just such an article today! Despite its traditional headline, “Putin’s Game: Why Russia won’t cooperate on Iranian sanctions” calmly and rationally  answers the quesiton of why Russia is so against Iran sanctions: national interest!

How does Russia benefit from its nuclear cooperation with Iran? Simple economics provides a compelling first answer: The Russian economy has not only reaped the benefits of the Bushehr deal, but it has also been bolstered by the sale of fuel and the potential sale of additional reactors. What’s more, the nuclear project is only one of many economic agreements between the two countries. Total bilateral trade hovers around $2 billion, as Russia supplies Iran with consumer goods, oil and gas equipment, and military technology. Russia also enjoys privileged access (along with China) to Iran’s Southern Pars gas fields.

Russia’s withdrawal of support for the Iranian nuclear program might jeopardize these other lucrative deals.

Seth Robinson also points out that Russia does not want to alienate Iran in its role as a ‘powerbroker in the Caspian oil trade’, whose “position on the Caspian Sea, which is estimated to hold more than 10 billion tons of oil reserves, makes it an important and influential partner for Russia”. Iran can be a key political ally, not just in Russia’s pipeline projects: Tehran “has pointedly refrained from criticizing Moscow’s Chechnya policy, and has held strategic meetings with Moscow on the Taliban”.

All this makes perfect sense. And it is telling that the aspect that has got the West into such a fit over an otherwise perfectly rational position, namely that “Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran provides the Kremlin with leverage over the United States”, is relegated to the final point, the icing on an economically and strategically nutritious cake.

So what should the takeaway be for the US administration? How can the US expect Russia to throw away all the tangible benefits that it reaps from its relationship with Iran just to satisfy American sanction-lust?

Indeed, far from taking the advice of the New Republic’s pycho editor Marty Peretz, Robinson recommends that “if the United States seeks true Russian support, it must find a way to compensate Moscow for the losses it will incur by forsaking Iran”.

After all, Russia is not intransigently opposed to sanctions on principle: “it is worth remembering”, writes Robinson, “that Russia has already supported multiple rounds of UN Security Council sanctions, but only those that have not imperiled its own interests”.

Such a dispassionate focus on interests and strategic alliances is the only sane way to counteract the still-prevalent tendency in the US media to treat international relations as morality plays between good and bad guys.