Engage/ingratiate with the West? Nah!

"Our allies such as Chavez, even Ahmadinejad, are agents in this global diplomatic counter-culture, if you will, and being close to them would bring us many financial and other advantages besides a UN vote. It’s true that Ahmadinejad or Chavez will not give us GSP+......

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(September 21, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It’s true that Lakshman Kadirgarmar is not our foreign minister anymore. Therefore we cannot have the cake and eat it with regards the West, or so the argument goes. Kadirgarmar knew how to palaver them, and use his genteel disarming ways to calm their anxieties and reign in any belligerence.

So, the argument of newspaper pundits goes, we should now play to the West, particularly because the West can hold the gun at us, that figurative gun, by threatening to withhold GSP + concessions and loans and all other types of assistance.

Weak argument

As arguments go this is a very weak one, as it ignores all that went before the EU, for instance, threatened to withhold GSP concessions from us.

The EU was a partner in trying to stop the war wasn’t it? That’s conceded all round. How diplomats such as Milliband and Carl Bildt can be cajoled now by engagement is puzzling. There is one way to put them in place, which is to speak softly and carry a big stick.

Besides, all this argument that we should bend over backwards to please the West without whose largesse and kind indulgence we cannot survive, sounds, to say the least, rather spectacularly unmatched by the ground reality.

Take the IMF loan for instance. This newspaper predicted editorially, on day one, so to say, when the first rumblings regarding the IMF loan were heard, and when Hillary Clinton was mooing “it is not the appropriate time the IMF should extend this facility to Sri Lanka,’’ that the IMF loan would definitely be forthcoming, no matter the stonewalling and the statements on the part of the patrician IMF elite.

It’s not as if we had some extraordinary clairvoyance. The fact is that we were able to read the situation in its proper context, and editorialise that “Western greed trumps Western greed”, and that the IMF, which is in the business of giving loans and making money by usury, was not about to forfeit the chance to ensnare us, which presented itself after many years of Sri Lanka’s insistence on avoiding the IMF debt trap.

As predicted, the IMF loan was granted, and it’s not as if it’s a major trump in any way, as getting deeper in debt at any time, good or bad, is not exactly a cause for celebration.

The simple issue is that it’s very retrograde thinking for anybody to posit that the West is so very needed by us that we should be ingratiating —- bootlicking? - the West, while refusing to call the West out when they often railroad us, all in the name of accommodation and engagement.

As is often the case, as seen by the IMF ‘bailout’, the West needs us, almost more than we need them. Though it’s theoretically true that the West has many countries to choose from in the matter of extending loans and concessions etc., we have to consider the fact that the West needs business wherever it can find it, and the IMF bailout, which was granted in the end, is abundant proof of that.

Demonized by extension

It’s also being argued that the courting of anti-Western leaders such as Chavez and Ahmadinejad does us no good as we get demonized by extension! This is a preposterous position to take, not only for its rather alarming lack of moral compass, but more so because the implication definitely is that we have to choose our friends on the basis of their standing with the so-called powerful nations of the West.

But leave aside the moral compass, this argument is completely lacking in pragmatism, savvy, or political acumen, particularly when it’s suggested that all these friendly governments can give us, is a couple of votes at the UN! In the first place, if some of those countries did not vote for us at the UN, we would have had sanctions clamped down on us by the rich club of Western nations we are now being goaded to ingratiate with - - simply because we stood up to the West, when they called upon us to stop the military campaign against the LTTE.

So, pooh-poohing these votes as mere statistical ciphers shows not just further brittleness in the gratitude and moral compass department, but also shows an inability to assess the issues in a pragmatic light. As Dayan Jayatillelke said in an interview with this newspaper once, stand up for someone, and they stand up for you —- it’s as simple as that.

But the most glaring fault lines in the position that we should not call the bluff of the West where we have to, and that we should not actively court allies such as Chavez and Ahmadinejad, is that it presupposes that (a) global political realities are fused in fixed positions and that (b) there is so much to gain from the ‘West’ that we might as well fall at their feet and kiss goodbye to all our genuine allies.

Extend that argument a little further, and we would soon be told that we should turn our backs on China, which certainly by no stretch can be lumped in that Western pile, even though the Chinese may not be as demonised, as say, Chavez is, by the West.

But definitely, buying arms from China for the war, and extending the Chinese harbour facilities in Hambantatota etc, etc, did not endear us to the West. In fact, by the benchmark standard of ingratiating with the West that’s being now advocated by newspaper pundits, our Chinese diplomacy would fail the test.

So does that mean that we should walk away from China, and keep a healthy distance, just because the West obviously does not like the Chinese very much?

I would say, go in that direction, and it would be the biggest diplomatic faux pas we would be committing since post- independence. The China example opens our eyes to an entirely new window through which we should envision our future foreign policy initiatives.

China is the emerging economy, China’s global clout is burgeoning, and such a large slice of the US debt is owed to the Chinese that there is some talk, even though a little premature perhaps, of the Chinese currency replacing the dollar as the reserve currency of the world.

Agents of diplomatic counter-culture

Our allies such as Chavez, even Ahmadinejad, are agents in this global diplomatic counter-culture, if you will, and being close to them would bring us many financial and other advantages besides a UN vote. It’s true that Ahmadinejad or Chavez will not give us GSP+, but it cannot be forgotten that Ahmadinejad was able to give us hard currency at a time we needed it, for instance, though it will be a bit much to expect him to bankroll this country in perpetuity.

It’s fuzzy logic at best therefore, this day and age, to say that we should put all our eggs in the Western basket. Choosing our friends on the basis of the expectation of Western largesse, would not only be very shortsighted but also diplomatically very maladroit. Why, we could take a leaf from Chavez’s book, even though we do not have Chavez’s oil. When the Americans virtually staged a coup against his administration, Chavez aggressively courted the Chinese, the Russians, and a myriad other allies, even Ahmadinejad. Predictably, that brought him a great deal of flack from the West, but it helped him keep his country’s economy afloat, and keep the OPEC oil prices from plummeting, while overall helping his economy and helping the Bolivarian revolution which empowered a great deal of the poor Barrio folks of Venezuela, who never had a better chance in life than under Chavez.

The argument is that we don’t have Chavez’s oil buffeted economic clout. But, the fact is that there is strength in numbers. This is not the dark past of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike days and the non-aligned movement; we are at the cusp of a great global upheaval in which America and her western allies are on the decline (refer the global meltdown) and China and her smaller independent satellites are charting an economic course of their own. For crying out loud, this is not the China of Chou-en-lai, when we were involved in non-alignment in the 60s and 70s. In case anybody has just woken up from a deep coma or a Rip-van-Winkle sleep, China is now the giant of the capitalist market dynamic, the globe’s one indispensable capitalistic market partner. Russia and China are both G-20 members. So, comparing the here and now with Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s isolationism in the old Cold War era is uninformed.

And yes, there is strength in numbers. The best proof of it is that we would never had won the war if we had allied with the nay-saying West, and not got our arms from China and our oil from Ahmadinejad, despite the West looking at us aghast. There is no real reason to change that policy substantially today, just because the war is over.

END-NOTE: As for Kadirgarmar, he was urbane, but never ingratiating with the West. It was Kadirgarmar who began the pragmatic policy tendency of the present, which is to find allies wherever he could. To that end, he wasn’t afraid, for instance, to say that a UN representative here should only worry about minor matters like mosquitoes, or that Shane Warne should quit being a sissy and play cricket —- or to pointedly refuse to extend an invitation to the Dalai Lama, even though embracing His Holiness would have earned us plenty brownie points from the West.
(The writer , Editor of the Lakbima News)

-Sri Lanka Guardian