Khashoggi and a foreign policy for the Third World

Oct 27, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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After Independence, the former colonies of European empires and through the post war power of the US had their foreign policies shaped by Cold War configurations. The exception was India and no doubt its largeness of size, population and economy insulated it from big power dictates.
Realizing that it needed breathing space to define its own destiny, the Third World (TW) adumbrated a third pathway concretized in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). What NAM did was to allow the TW to pursue a foreign policy based on economic development ignoring the tentacles of geopolitics.
In simple terms the TW states said to the USSR, Europe and the US, we are not interested in making enemies of any big power; we want to be friends with all countries that can assist in development because economic projects are our priorities.
The rise of globalization and the fall of international communism extirpated the NAM. Globalization literally wrecked the economies of TW states. Perhaps the best example of this any scholar can use to reinforce the point of changing international relations from the nineties onward, is Guyana.
Built on guaranteed markets, its sugar industry continued to be the main fulcrum on which rested the economy. Then the EU told Guyana that based on WTO rules there can no longer be guaranteed prices for its sugar. Secretly of course, the EU, Canada and the US were violating WTO rules through subsidization of many farming industries.
The demise of international communism did not kill off the formidable role of geopolitics in global affairs. It simply took on new faces. The rise of China, Iran, Chavez in Venezuela and a resurgent Putin put back politics onto the global agenda. TW nations dependent on EU and American aid had to shape their foreign policies to coincide with both the economic and geopolitical interests in the 21st century just as they did during the Cold War.
The West was not particularly impressed with small countries having relationships with Iran, Chavez, China etc. It didn’t matter if Iran or Chavez or China offered valuable economic assistance. What was sickening about this type of bullying tactics in international relations is that the West maintained intimate relationships with countries whose brutal human rights record of violations made Cuba, Iran and Venezuela look like angels. One such state is Saudia Arabia.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has exposed the double standards of western international relations. American Senator, Paul Rand, on Wednesday, brought out some horrible statistics about Saudia Arabia. He said they have about three thousand political prisoners in jail and many critics have been killed.
Historian Hugh Eakin, writing in the October 18, 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books, noted that in the spring of 2012 he went to Saudia Arabia. Eakin listed the top names he met with, including Khashoggi. They included progressive clerics, academics, civil society figures, critical professionals. Eakin wrote that since that year, they all have either been jailed, or killed including Khashoggi.
This is a vivid description of one of the most cruel and despotic regimes in the 21st century. But it is one of the countries western democracies have strategic, economic and diplomatic connections with of the closest kind. In the meantime, the bad guys are Iran, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Burma, Venezuela.
Toby Blair does consultancy work for one of the oil dictatorships that were once part of the USSR – Kazakhstan.
The same Blair would frown on such a job in Cuba. We may not like Trump but he was honest and candid when he said that the Saudis have enormous orders in the US that amount to more than a hundred billion dollars and the US should not jeopardize that. Point taken! Trump is right. China and Russia couldn’t be bothered with how many people the Saudi monarchy kill. They would with those lucrative orders.
But China and Russia would not deter TW countries from taking developmental assistance from Iran and Venezuela. The US would. China and Russia wouldn’t care; they would see it as none of their business. But the US would be happy to cozy up with a dictatorship that is important to the US economy. American and European attitude on the Khashoggi assassination should send a clear signal to TW countries – foreign policy is based on the maximization of national interests.
TW countries should quickly internalize the meaning of the Khashoggi incident in international relations. TW states are comparatively poor and they should pay no attention to geopolitical priorities of the big powers but concentrate on securing aid and trade from all countries that are willing to work with them.

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