By Uttam Sen/newsin.asia
To the world in general, the Iran-Saudi Arabia deal brokered by China in Beijing on March 10, was like a bolt from the blue. On the face of it, West Asia’s contending powerhouses were mending fences after their ties broke down completely in 2016. Saudi missions in Teheran and Mashhad were attacked by protestors in retaliation for the execution of a Saudi Shi’ite Opposition cleric.
The agreement was reportedly followed by one between the Saudis and Iraq, now formally a Shia-majority country. As the dramatis personae of a formidably covert peace process declare themselves, it transpires that Iraq had been a mediator for some time. Does this bring the curtain down on the persistent feud between these two rival Islamic capitals and oil-producers or are we being taken in by another heady political escapade?
There is a surreal dimension in the fluctuations of the narrative that concerns us all but makes a definitive prognosis difficult.
The positives merit attention. Saudi Arabia wants to reform and modernize. The permanent war of attrition with Iran is depleting its resources. The Saudis want to be free to do what they want in keeping with their political aspirations. They see the world taking a turn towards multi-polarity in which China’s principal oil supplier, among other things, will be a very important factor, rather than just one of many.
China’s investment in winning friends and influencing people in 32 developing nations has virtually drowned the country in financial deficit, though casual followers of international relations and finance also remember the hue and cry that was raised for the recycling of its soaring trade surplus. The world is taking stock of where it is headed following the pandemic (which at times threatens to return), a global slowdown and impending recession.
The war in Ukraine is imparting a sense of urgency to the search for alternatives, what with broken supply chains rattling food and essential supplies to Western countries and driving the civil war-ravaged people of Yemen to starvation and death. The vulnerable are being left to their own devices.
Iran has reportedly secured the vital concession from Saudi Arabia, which supports the Sunni government in exile, that it will get the monkey off the Shia Houthi rebels’ back in Yemen. Another analysis says that the Iranians will stop helping the rebels. Either way, the desire to end the war in Yemen is palpable.
If lesser countries can develop means of security and sustenance, the world can catch its breath even while the knife-edge suspense of a wider disaster looms large because of the conflict in south-eastern Europe. Such conciliation could be eventually brought to bear upon Ukraine itself.
A former American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westphal, considers the thaw constructive for taking a load off his country’s mind. He does not discern anti-American nuances. The Chinese are busy securing their oil imports and trading outlets, just as much as zealously maintaining their tag as the world’s leading manufacturing hub, inclusive of US products.
What the USA cannot possibly find reassuring is the putative adoption of the yuan as the currency of oil purchases. On the US’s part, analysts do not see a diminution of strategic thinking or military presence. It’s each to their own. The Beijing exhibitions were a gallery show in so far as positioning the hosts to maximum advantage was concerned.
We in India are feeling vindicated in principle by the sight of countries seeking their places in the sun. Some African nations are now explicitly saying that without meaningful sovereignty there can be no liberty, freedom or democracy as mandated by the UN Charter. Independent foreign policy was the fulcrum of our non-alignment and our credo to the extent possible. Today that trend is indicating multi-polarity and a hundred and one things including trade in multiple currencies.
An entirely unlikely diegesis with Riyadh and Beijing moving closer to each other at the cost of their traditional allies has also been in the air. Perhaps the world will be pushed to the brink again before appreciating the universalistic, inclusive principles on which the endeavor was made to recover from two global confrontations. Blood-letting ended bizarrely with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The world almost capitulated again during the Cold War. Additionally, voices from the South are making bold to recall how, since time immemorial, Big Powers have been walking all over them. They are waiting for the moment of truth.
A specter is haunting sensitive people. In the ‘sixties the shadow of a nuclear holocaust had enveloped the West and virtually impaired the popular psyche, as they sat on the edge of existence, fearing that the nuclear trigger would go off any moment. Yet the Cuban missile crisis had witnessed one side backing off rather than plunge the world into destruction and chaos.
Thus, China assuming charge of global peace, then promising to put on the table its own currency for transactions, holding further discussions with the Russians along the same lines, over and above the war in Ukraine, are suggestive of a change in the order of things.
India, like the USA, has been quiet while reiterating a traditional faith in negotiations. Some analysts have seen in the turn of events a replication of India standing its ground on national self-interest. India can go along with the developments because of its long historical links with West Asia which maintains a vibrant Indian Diaspora. It is a member of BRICS, the acronym for economic cooperation between Brazil, Russia India and China to be soon joined by Saudi Arabia and Iran. India is a member of the Quad alongside the USA, Australia and Japan to promote an open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient.
Most importantly, India is seen as a hedge against a potentially unilateral initiative sweeping the board incognito. In a truly calibrated world order that is not about to blow apart, there has to be a measure of global inclusiveness. For all the faults of past exclusivity, the planet is not waiting for one type of exceptionalism to be replaced by another (analysts have said this!).
There is a certain consistency in anti-imperialist Oriental Marxists and West Asian religious fundamentalists sworn against alien Occidental values, particularly religious ones, aligning with each other. Yet Saudi Arabia has of late been described as paranoid both of entrapment and abandonment by the Americans, among other reasons because the latter has discovered shale oil. On the other side, public and official opinion in the US has been revolted by human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. The two countries drew close to each other initially to prospect for oil (the American company for the purpose, Aramco, was nationalized in the 80s). They had stood to fight Communism and its alleged proxies. They have now arrived at the crossroads vis-à-vis each other. In India there are doubts about the assured future of the Sino-Saudi rapprochement because of its inherent contradictions.
West Asia and the world present an almost upside-down predicament through the looking glass, as it were. Yesterday’s fantasies are becoming realities today and vice versa. For optimists and believers inversion and confusion will evolve into the harmony which the protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s timeless classic achieves in the end.
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