An anti-Bush alliance
COUNTRIES large and small are rejecting President Bush's foreign policy by intimidation, and are banding together to counter the US superpower. The next example may come from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional grouping that is considering adding Iran to its membership.
The Bush administration pretended to ignore last year's organization summit, at which the members -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan -- called for the United States to withdraw the troops it had stationed in Central Asia for the war that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the organization's foreign ministers meeting in Shanghai last week discussed a plan to accept four new members: India, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Iran. After that meeting, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Iran's belligerent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be attending a summit meeting on June 15 in Shanghai, along with the leaders of China, Russia, and the four Central Asian member states. That should get the Bush administration's attention.
Acceptance of Iran by the organization at the very moment when the Islamic Republic is defying the International Atomic Energy Agency -- and when China and Russia are blocking US efforts to have the United Nations Security Council approve sanctions on Iran -- suggests a tectonic shift in geopolitics. This is not merely a tactic to enhance Chinese and Russian relations with Tehran. Nor is it simply an annoying ploy to protect Iran as a seller of energy to China and a buyer of nuclear plants and conventional weapons from Russia.
Bringing Iran into the organization portends a dramatic new stage of strategic coordination between Russia and China. The purpose of this collaboration is to give form to a common policy of resisting what the governments in Beijing and Moscow have come to see as an aggressive, overbearing America.
Ironically, this is precisely what President Bush has pledged to prevent. The national security doctrine that Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have proclaimed in public rests upon a determination to discourage any combination of countries from mounting a challenge to the United States. By building a military force so awesome that no cluster of countries could even hope to match it -- and by demonstrating a willingness to stay clear of constraining international treaties and obligations -- administration hardliners planned to intimidate all potential challengers into meekly accepting Washington's dictates.
But after five years of trial and error, it is clear that the Bush doctrine is having the opposite effect. Instead of inciting awe and submission, the policies associated with Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration hawks are motivating countries in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Latin America to seek channels for cooperation against US hegemony.
Enlargement of the Shanghai grouping would be the most telling collective response yet to the administration's often arrogant attempts to have its way in the world. This is a prospect that should induce Bush to reconsider the wisdom of his provocative doctrine.
The inclusion of new members envisaged by the organization's foreign ministers would not only bring together major exporters of oil and gas, Russia and Iran, with the fast-growing energy consumers China and India. It would also make Iran a member of a regional security organization that would include four other states that are established nuclear powers.
Having Iran inside an expanded Shanghai Cooperation Organization would only make Tehran's hardliners more impervious than they already are to US and European efforts to deflect Iran from its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And the enlarged organization would be a club dominated by undemocratic states, India and Mongolia being the exceptions. Russian officials, resentful of Western monitoring of elections in states of the former Soviet sphere, have already crowed about plans to have the organization conduct its own monitoring of elections in that region.
It did not have to be this way. After Sept. 11, China and Russia were eager to cooperate with Washington in deposing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and mounting a world-wide struggle against Al Qaeda and affiliated groups. But Bush and Cheney have repeatedly acted as though they could ignore the interests and sensitivities of their counterterrorist partners without eventually provoking a negative reaction. Cheney's recent tirade against Russia in Lithuania and Bush's refusal to give China's President Hu Jintao the prestigious state dinner he was known to want were recent examples of needless offense. Russia and China may deserve criticism but should not be driven into an alliance with Iran against the United States.
If there is a promising sign that the administration may be learning a modicum of practical humility in foreign affairs, it is in a plan to undertake negotiations on a peace treaty with North Korea as an inducement for Pyongyang to trade away its nuclear program. Conducting real give-and-take negotiations with smaller nations may seem humbling for a superpower, but Bush did originally promise to practice a humble statecraft. If he had done so, he would not have turned so much of the world against America.
