The shape of things to come

There is another development in the UN. There was the five-yearly Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The conference sat for a month in New York. It failed to produce a declaration or even an enumeration of what it has been discussing. The whole conference broke up, underlining a serious deadlock. The impasse is between the five recognised powers by NPT -- together with three other nuclear powers that remain un-recognised, viz. Israel, Pakistan, and India -- and the rest of non-nuclear powers. The latter wanted the original five recognised powers to act on their pledged word on which the whole treaty is based.

This promise requires the five recognised nuclear powers to take credible steps toward nuclear disarmament. That none of the nuclear haves is prepared to do. Instead, they simply insist that the rest of the world should not fabricate nuclear weapons, even though the treaty was predicated on the promises of the five nuclear powers. The basic idea was that nuclear weapons are bad for everyone and no one should have them. Now, the position is that the nuclear-haves want to keep their nuclear arsenals intact while they want the rest of the world to remain non-nuclear. The non-nuclear world thinks that the major powers are cheating them, though no one is planning to have nukes except two suspected cases of Iran and North Korea.

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A third major development is the Russo-Chinese response to American moves in Asia. They have bestirred themselves and are trying to dam up the spreading American influence in Central Asia. Already the US has made big inroads in all the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. In many of them -- Kyrghystan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, maybe Kazakhstan and in the Caucasus, America has or will soon have military bases -- Russian influence is rapidly being replaced by American.

The Russians are actually frightened; they do not trust the American intentions vis-a-vis the Russian Federation itself. It is thought that the Americans are interested in Ukraine-like revolutions in all the former Soviet territories. The Chinese are siding with them and the two together have reactivated the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement known as Shanghai Six. Recently the Russian FM invited Chinese and Indian FMs for a conference.

Insofar as Russia and China are going to coordinate their efforts and take measures to stop the expanding American influence, it would be a significant development that may before long start or restart the East-West cold war. In passing, it should be possible to take note of some older factors in the situation. Among them is the unending War on Terror the US initiated four years ago. What were seen to be short, sharp surgical operations -- the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have evolved into quagmires for American military and diplomacy. Islamic extremism, the denominated enemy, is actually becoming a force, though it poses a much greater danger to the Muslims countries themselves than to the major western powers that are now fighting it.

To revert to the European "no," it is also linked to recent American initiatives. One of which was to insist on the continued survival of Nato, a military pact that was intended to serve a specific purpose of defence against the specific threat from Soviet Union in the 1940s. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the pact should have been scrapped. But the Americans made sure that it should not only exist but it should increase its membership, expand the area of operation, chiefly to lighten the burden on American manpower. Nearly all the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe were made its members.

American influence in the former pro-Soviet republics of Eastern Europe amounts to a sphere of influence. They have not only been made members of NATO, which is commanded by the US, but were also forced into the EU. With the help of the UK, the EU has been bamboozled into accepting a very large number of new members. The membership of EU now stands at 25. More await. Most of the new members are especially close to the US and listen to its advice. The whole flavour of the EU is now being heavily diluted.

This is one reason why the French and the Dutch have decisively rejected the new constitution. They think that this is a measure through which the EU would be subverted and made to serve the purposes of Anglo-American capital by forcing down European throats the new capitalist paradigm first championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan. Through the WTO, the whole world is being re-organised, mainly for the benefit of the Anglo-American MNCs. This would make EU itself a cog in the big machine over which would preside the US. What the French and the Dutch people have rejected is this paradigm. In a manner of speaking, the WTO- and US-imposed world order, political and economic, has been rejected.

It is strange that in the short span of three or four years the US has been meeting setbacks on three major fronts. The going is getting rougher with the passage of time in Iraq and Afghanistan; the rest of the reshaping of the Middle East may have to wait. True, the neo-cons may wish to press on, but that will not be easy.

In Central Asia, the opposition from Russia and China is becoming organised, and at least one of the Central Republics that had earlier been won over by the Americans may have slipped out, viz. Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan poses other problems and has not yet fully cast its lot with the Americans.

Insofar as the nuclear issue is concerned, the US policy is clear. It is going to police the world through the PSI (Proliferation Strategic Initiative). Despite these setbacks, America, after having rejected the Salt II and the ABM treaties, is building new kinds of nuclear weapons. It is otherwise also determined to vertically proliferate. As against that, the rest of the world is at a loss what to do. Ultimately, the rest of the world will have to think of promoting non-violent protests and ways of persuading American public opinion to press for nuclear disarmament. That underlines the need for a big global anti-nuclear movement with special emphasis on taking the Americans with us.

Another possible line of attack by the rest of the world is to think more constructively and to suggest an alternative paradigm to what the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, etc. are insisting on, mainly at the behest of the Anglo-Americans. The existing paradigm is sounding the death-knell for the welfare state in Europe and other developed countries. This red-in-the-tooth-and-claw capitalism needs to be metamorphosed into a more civilised one by insisting on social goals, such as exists in Europe. The concept of a more evenly-spread economic development is the need of the hour.

MB Naqvi is a leading columist in Pakistan.