The coincidence is striking. The US 'ban' on 'non-participants' in the 'international coalition' to participate in $ 18-billions worth of 'works contract' for Iraq's reconstruction, and also the follow-up talks on the deadlocked WTO negotiations at Cancun. Between them, the two may have begun designing a new course for politics and cooperation in the international arena, where economy now has a major say.
The American 'denial decision' threatens to trivialize the US-led 'global war on terrorism', as much in world capitals as in the streets of Iraq and elsewhere in West Asia. Washington's decision to use 'US security' as the yardstick for awarding these contracts could revive theories on the real motives behind the Iraq War.
Thus, there was a mention of the US wanting to quench its oil-thirst from Iraq and Central Asia, the latter after the Afghanistan war. The American media has catalogued the business links of aides and advisors of President Bush, with 'prospective beneficiaries' of these contracts long before they were floated. There was even a suggestion that Saddam Hussein had wanted to link the Iraqi oil prices to the euro, which could have set a trend, and which the US naturally would have resented.
In a way, all this could point back at the increasing irreverence for the UN, whose relevance has assumed a new meaning and significance. In a uni-polar world, in the absence of a 'balancing force' like the erstwhile Soviet Union, such a course threatens to confer post facto legitimacy on terrorism, which the world should despise.
The lack of 'American respect' for international institutions and systems, as the UN debates on the Iraq war and the post-War US conduct have showed, and the absence of an 'ideological platform' for maintaining 'global equilibrium' may be a temptation for 'denied' nations to look elsewhere. These are not just nations that have been denied a share in the Iraqi pie, where the abduction of Indian workers in Afghanistan sends out smells of real danger.
The list includes, rather comprises, nations that have been denied a share in the larger global pie for long, and feel helpless and at times manipulated. The 'denied' nations from the Iraqi War may have no reason to side with them as yet, but may soon have cause to sympathise with them.
WTO is an option, an opportunity - a possibility that could not be ruled out. Once considered the creation of the West to 'browbeat the developing nations' on the 'all-embracing' economic agenda, where agriculture subsidies and labour standards have acquired new definitions and meanings, WTO is not the same after Cancun. The form may be missing - and it will continue to be so for a long time to come - but the emerging content cannot be entirely pushed under.
Having set economy as the global agenda for the new millennium along with terrorism, the West, the US in particular, cannot complain. The greater institutionalisation of the European Union, and other regional forums like the ASEAN, if not the SAARC, may not divert from such an agenda. Instead, it could strengthen the same, lending variations that could become as compelling as they could become complicated.
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