The Guardian 24 October, 2007
Editorial
Foreign policy crises for Bush
Two major events last week illustrate the deepening foreign policy crisis facing the Bush administration. The first of these was the meeting between the Russian and Iranian Presidents in Teheran together with the heads of states of three other countries (all former Republics of the Soviet Union) which border on the oil and gas rich Caspian Sea.
There is a separate article on this meeting and the declaration that arose out of the conference in this issue of The Guardian. In effect the five states were telling the US and other powers that may attempt to interfere in the region to keep their troops and their corporations out. The resources belong to the states on whose territory they are to be found and that only their ships, planes and other military forces will be allowed into the region. Furthermore, the five states committed themselves not to allow their territories to be used for any military attack on any of the other signatories to the statement.
This is the first time for about 60 years that the head of state of the Russian Federation (or the former Soviet Union) had paid a visit to Iran even though the two states have a common border and have had economic relations over many years.
The conference and the declaration indicate the increasingly assertive foreign policy of both the Russian Federation and Iran. Talk by the western powers of Iran’s "isolation" in the international arena are beginning to look very sick as Iran is also forging economic and political ties with a number of South American countries as well — including Cuba.
The United States continues to declare that all options, including the military one, are "on the table", but the possibility of attacking Iran are becoming less as Iran’s northern border states close their airspace to US use.
The US response to this conference was one of fury. The Bush administration is well aware that their attempts to build up a wall against Iran is already in virtual ruins.
A second major event was the announcement from the Congress led government of India that it is about to pull out of the nuclear deal that had been entered into between the Prime Minister of India and George Bush. One can be sure that behind the scenes, furious arm-twisting is taking place to force the Indian government not to breach the deal.
However, there was very widespread opposition in India to the deal which would have pushed India into the foreign policy orbit of the United States in contravention of its former position of non-alignment. Not only were all the Left parties in India’s parliament opposed to the deal (and they hold the balance of power in India’s parliament) but right-wing parties were also opposed. The government found itself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They had a choice, to push ahead with the deal and face the possibility of the Congress government collapsing or allow the government to collapse and face a national election in which not only would the government face likely defeat with the deal itself falling apart as well.
The US administration had worked long and hard with the support of the Australian government which was also involved in pressuring the Indian government to become an open ally of the United States and US imperialism. They had good reason to suppose that they had succeeded in wresting India away from it policy of non-alignment and from its natural Asian partners when the blow fell.
There is yet another serious problem facing the Bush administration — it is the steadily sinking value of the US dollar on world currency markets and the reports that countries that have major holdings of US dollar bonds are selling them off as the value of the dollar sinks and the value of their holdings also slump.
On the horizon too is the threat of the Turkish government to invade Kurdish Iraq as a consequence of guerrilla fighting by the Kurdish Workers’ Party fighters making cross-border attacks on Turkish troops. If Turkey were to invade Iraq would the US use its military forces to expel invading Turkish forces?