Volume 11 - Issue 2 - March 2005

On 25 March 2005, after months of secret deliberation, US President George W. Bush finally telephoned India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to personally inform him that the United States would resume the sale of F-16 combat aircraft to Pakistan. Singh apparently conveyed his ‘grave disappointment’, but New Delhi’s public response was uncharacteristically muted. Indeed, Bush administration representatives have expressed quiet confidence about the value of their wider strategy. Here, India and Pakistan are seen as representing different kinds of strategic opportunities.  The United States has now decided not just to bolster Pakistan, but also to help India become a major world power.

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There is a paradox in the EU’s role in counter-terrorism. On the one hand, the national governments agree in principle that cooperation at the EU level is a good thing because of the cross-border nature of the terrorist threat. On the other, they are slow to give the EU the powers (such as of investigation and prosecution) and resources (such as intelligence agents and money) it would need to be truly effective in this area. Security policy goes to the core of matters of national sovereignty, and governments are reluctant to give the EU powers that could interfere with their existing laws and national practices.

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Iran has been one of the world’s most persistent and active state sponsors of terrorism since its Islamic revolution in 1979, having debuted on the US State Department’s official list of such sponsors in 1984 and appeared every year since. But Tehran’s most recent inclination has been to confine its support for terrorism to the Middle East and Persian Gulf region. The reformist government’s desire for international political legitimacy, a more pragmatic tilt on the part of some members of the clerical establishment, and diminishing regional pretexts for terrorist sponsorship have tempered Iranian provocations.

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Extra-hemispheric preoccupations have left less room for Latin America in US foreign policy than President George W. Bush would have preferred before the 11 September attacks, but Washington has at least been able over the last three years to advance its support for Colombia’s counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency efforts. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s virulent anti-Americanism, which has led him into dalliances with the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group, as well as with Cuba, has thus been regarded in the dimmest light. In the wider context of Latin America’s relatively gentle leftward political tilt, Washington views Chávez as a potential source and catalyst of more extreme reactions against the traditional hemispheric dominance of the US.

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Beijing’s current approach to Africa focuses primarily on economic concerns (particularly resource security). Diplomatic competition with Taiwan remains another key motivator of Chinese activism. Finally, the growing importance in China’s foreign policy of multilateralism, and the associated need to cultivate allies and constituencies of support within multilateral institutions, has been significant in guiding and enforcing relations between China and African countries.

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