THE WORLD REDESIGNS ITSELF
COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 13 Feb 2009
So Iran is "ready" for a direct dialogue with the United States. The most radical of its leaders, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said so yesterday [Feb. 10/09].
That means that none of the currents present in the Iranian regime rejects the negotiated pursuit – quid pro quo – of normalization with Washington.
The entire Near Eastern landscape could be modified by that. As long as it provides formal and verifiable guarantees with respect to the abandonment of its nuclear ambitions, the Islamic Republic could obtain the repeal of the economic sanctions that have excluded it from international trade the last thirty years.
The former Persia could then harness itself to the modernization of its immense oil and gas reserves, enrich itself, profit from its potential, once again become the strategic ally of the United States it was during the era of the Shah and see itself acknowledged as a regional power by contributing to the calming down of the Iraqi, Afghan and Israeli-Palestinian crises.
That will not happen in a day. This negotiation will be anything but easy, so numerous are the ambushes, but evoking this possibility alone suggests to what degree the global crisis and Barack Obama’s election are redesigning the world. Everything is changing everywhere at such a speed, one no longer sees it happening and this has been particularly true the last few days.
Thursday, the very same Head of State, Nicolas Sarkozy, who got himself elected by promising a free market "rupture" inspired by the Anglo-Saxon model, told fifteen million television watchers: "Frankly, when we see the situation in the United States and the situation in the United Kingdom, we don’t want to be like them." I had to pinch myself.
One no longer knows whether one must admire the speed with which this man has integrated the new political climate or take umbrage at so much chutzpah. According to the polls, this about-face has not convinced the French, but still, let’s listen to this president switch gears without the shadow of a mea culpa.
Here he is, suddenly observing that "it doesn’t work" with respect to the division of wealth, promising to get it straightened out, "even if that means legislating it," convoking unions and management to come up with a joint response to the crisis and calling for "structural decisions" on market controls, in the absence of which, he says, "the people will revolt" and will be "right to do so."
As mistaken as he was yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy is not wrong today. Social anger is brewing, and not only in France. Not only will it force governments to take political power relations into account, but the very scale of the crisis itself will force them to break with the laissez-faire era and return to a compromise between capital and labor, to the government’s role as an arbiter, and to social shock-absorbers – return, in short, to that European model the neo-liberal free traders had believed buried and that Barack Obama is reinstalling as the flavor of the day by announcing the ceiling on CEO salaries and the restoration of union rights.
It’s no less important than the coming dialogue between the ayatollahs and the White House, but let’s see what else is going on. The annual conference of the big actors on the international scene, the Munich Security Conference, took place last weekend.
Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy took advantage of the time for a side conference to ask – together – for an extraordinary summit meeting of the Union to relaunch European cooperation in the face of the crisis, this necessity that the chancellor had rejected up until now out of fear it would cost her country – the richest of the Twenty-Seven – too dearly.
Since then, Merkel has come to understand that Germany will not exit a crisis we’ve only just seen begin by itself. It’s a sign of the acceleration of the "crisis of the century" as Sarkozy calls it, but it’s also a hopeful sign that the European Union is leaving behind the "every-man-for-himself" mentality, that it’s stopped adding up national plans that have no common coherence and is planning, instead, to organize their convergence.
We’re not yet at a stage of defining economic and industrial policies for the Euro zone. That will take time, but in addition to Germany and France picking up the reins of the Union again and sharing a single will with respect to market regulation, they expressed such similar diplomatic positions in Munich that their rapprochement seems truly spectacular.
Both pleaded for the assertion of a European defense and a continental security system that integrates Russia, and – a fourth novelty – the vice president of the United States approved. Come to explain Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Joe Biden insisted on the necessity of cooperation with Moscow and showed himself much more open to the idea of a European defense now that Sarkozy has confirmed France’s imminent return to NATO’s integrated command.
In search of support, America has become more flexible. Confronted with the collapse of their indicators, the Russians congratulate themselves on America extending its hand. Between Washington and Moscow, the thaw is becoming dëtente, and that is not without bearing on the welcome the Iranians finally extended, much earlier than expected, to American overtures. The crisis has only just begun, but for the moment, it is providing everyone with a dose of common sense.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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