While US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was flying east on her latest Middle East mission, her airplane may have passed that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was going west for a four-nation Latin American tour. Among the many differences between the two, the largest is that Rice admits she has no concrete plans for anything while the Iranian president, on the other hand, clearly has a strategy.
Ahmadinejad’s first call has been upon Venezuela’s newly re-elected socialist president Hugo Chavez, a stout supporter of Iran’s disputed nuclear program. Today Ahmadinejad is in Nicaragua to meet socialist president Daniel Ortega. Tomorrow he will be in Quito to attend the swearing in of Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s new left-wing president. While at the ceremony, he will have informal meetings with other South American presidents who are attending the event. He will then move on to Bolivia for talks with its socialist president Evo Morales. There is of course the sound of grinding teeth from Washington as the demonized Iranian president has convivial discussions with four anti-US Latin American leaders whom the US views with the deepest suspicion. Ever since the 1823 Doctrine of US President James Monroe, Washington has regarded Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. It has been quite prepared to plunge any regional state denying US hegemony into civil war and impose ruthless dictators who are required only to toe the US political and big business line in order to be allowed to run their countries as ruthlessly as they chose.
Ahmadinejad no doubt views his diplomatic mission into Washington’s backyard as a small matter compared with President Bush’s military adventures on Iran’s borders and the US administrations continuous belligerent threats about Tehran’s nuclear program. But there is hopefully a more serious purpose to Ahmadinejad’s mission than upsetting the Bush administration. The bloody chaos in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan are all products of an ignorant and blinkered worldview which blithely assumes that what America wants is what the rest of the world should want as well. This arrogant premise does not so much ignore cultural and social differences as brand them inferior and indeed threatening to Washington’s righteous and thus correct desires and wishes.
It is time the rest of the world challenged America’s unipolar policies. Russia and Europe appear unprepared to take the lead. China and, to a lesser extent, India are still moving with caution into the world role their rising economic power has given them. Has the moment therefore come for a revival of the political rather than economic focus of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which, in the post-Cold War era, seemed redundant? Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua are, along with Iran and also Saudi Arabia, are among the 118 NAM members. The next NAM summit is not scheduled until 2009 in Cairo. A concerted and united non-US voice must make itself heard long before then.
