NAM's looming power plays critical role in preventing war: Analyst

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The final resolution of the 16th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has been adopted unanimously.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad read out the resolution, which included over seven-hundred clauses, in the final session of the summit on Friday night.

The final communiqué expressed support for Iran’s nuclear energy program, rejected the United States’ unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic, and called for greater efforts to support the Palestinian cause.

The need to combat Islamophobia and racism throughout the world as well as global nuclear disarmament were some of the other key issues mentioned in the document.

In the closing ceremony, President Ahmadinejad hailed the resolution as “effective and historic” and expressed his gratitude to all of the participants of the summit, which he said had a very important message for the entire world.

Over 100 countries sent representatives to the NAM summit, which kicked off on Sunday with a two-day expert-level meeting in the Iranian capital, followed by a foreign ministerial meeting that ended on Wednesday.

Iran assumed the rotating presidency of NAM for a three-year term on Thursday, when the meeting of heads of state opened with an inaugural speech by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

NAM is an international organization with 120 member states that is not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. Nearly two-thirds of the countries of the UN are also NAM members.

Interview with Jeff Steinberg with the Executive Intelligence Review from Washington to more elaborate on the issue.

He is joined by the author and political scientist Kaveh Afrasiabi from Boston and political commentator Hisham Safieddin from Beirut.

The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Q: Jeff Steinberg when we look at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) since its inception and the charter that they have; obviously this is to go against some of the things that are the shortcomings, for example, from the United Nations we can refer to the Security Council.

Tell us, in your view, whether NAM has proved to be an effective form in order for any of the goals that have been set out throughout the past decade. Whether they have gotten any attention, whether they have been successful or not?

Steinberg: Well, I think that for a very long period of time the world was dominated by the cold war, in fact, the whole launching of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bandung Conference was because countries that were emerging from colonialism were being squeezed out of their proper role in shaping the world’s destiny because every nation was under pressure, the either side with one side or the other; the Soviet bloc or the Western-NATO bloc in all major world policy affairs where in a sense now coming out of the last residues of those cold war fault line.

So I think that there is an extraordinary opportunity now for the Non-Aligned Movement to play a critical role; the role that was envisioned by some of the great leaders who where there for the founding of this movement back in the 1950’s.

And so I think for example, this past week, I think that some of the most important behind the scenes diplomatic discussions, to take place in a very, very long time, have taken place in Tehran, because the issue of the upcoming critical next round of P5+1 talks, the unresolved situation around Syria both of which have the potential to spark a regional and even, in the worst case, a global war; have obviously not been successfully resolved by the Security Council-centered institutions.

So I found the announcement, the proposal for a whole new diplomacy to try to solve the Syria problem to be a very welcomed development.

I thought that the fact that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, explicitly refused the direct demand by the Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu to boycott the meeting meant that many things were accomplished.

I understand that critical discussions took place among Iranian leaders and the head of the UN behind the scenes, but under the convenient umbrella of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting and I think that is the spirit and purpose of this organization to present solutions that great powers are paralyzed to, actually, come up with.

So it has the potential to be a front for imaginitive ideas and I hope that process got a good boost forward at this meeting that just ended.

Q: Jeff Steinberg do you agree with that? I mean that we have countries that receive foreign aid, I mean we can talk about Egypt, it is about 1.3 billion dollars, we could talk about occupation when it comes to, for example, the ten-year-old US-led war in Afghanistan where that government, I think the last count was three billion dollars, you know; is not that going to be a challenge in order to achieve NAM’s objectives especially given the fact that this one is now taken over by Iran, in terms of its presidency?

Steinberg: Well, I think that you have got to realize that there has been a really dramatic shift in the last decade or so, where the center of the economic gravity of the world economy has shifted much more to Asia.

China is the second largest economy in the world, they have just passed Japan; India is the second largest economy in the world from the standpoint of size and population.

Egypt’s president Morsi went to China just before the Non-Aligned Summit meeting and there is about a five billion dollar investment deal that China has made with Egypt, which really, potentially, trumps and surpasses the investment profile of the United States.

The US has the stigma of being the enforcer of International Monetary Fund Conditionality Programs that have frankly wrecked more economies than they have improved.

So I think that we are in much of a changing world. There are very, very complex issues, the Non-Aligned Movement is by no means a unified single voice because there are, obviously, different blocs that are represented within it.

But right now, just taking the issues that are of the greatest immediate concerns for me, namely the danger of a much larger war erupting coming from the crises that are right in front of our nose there in the Middle East; in a certain sense, the Middle East today is like the Balkans war potentially in the period before the eruption of World War I, something very bad could be triggered; and you have got efforts that have failed miserably from the United Nations, from the Security Council, because there was a double cross by the United States, Britain and France of Russia and China around the regime change operation in Libya.

And so right now on issues of war and peace , the Security Council is completely divided and dysfunctional.

So NAM has a critical role to play not because there is great unanimity but because there is a vacuum, there is a danger of general war and the leading countries of the Non-Aligned Movement can step forward and also exert the fact that there is a lot more economic muscle and potential, represented there; than has been in the past.

Frankly the trans-Atlantic region is in great decline, economically and that can not be offset for very much longer by the strict American military might.

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