Brown signals foreign policy shift towards EU
I said yesterday that I found the trailers for Brown's Mansion House speech confusing with it's claim that Britain would be "the US's greatest ally". When the actual speech was delivered it appeared much more as a promise to side with Europe and the UN than a promise to be the kind of ally Bush has become used to under Blair.
Mapping out his strategy of "hard-headed internationalism" for Britain's future foreign policy, Mr Brown marked a shift from Tony Blair's readiness to act as foremost ally of the US and favoured confidant of President George W Bush. He signalled that in future Britain would work more closely with EU partners and through the UN. Mr Brown made it clear that Britain believes tougher sanctions – rather than the threats of military action – against Iran are starting to work, although his senior officials insisted that "nothing is ruled out".He does appear still to be insisting that Iran stop all nuclear enrichment, which is embracing the American theory that all nuclear enrichment should stop despite this being perfectly legal under the NNPT, and has proposed a series of sanctions that it is impossible to imagine Russia and China agreeing to.
"We will lead in seeking tougher sanctions both at the UN and in the European Union, including on oil and gas investment and the financial sector," Brown said in the prime minister's annual foreign policy speech at the Mansion House. Iran, he said, "should be in no doubt about the seriousness of our purpose."He then, in language that I find slightly troubling, spoke of the need for "hard-headed internationalism". It's one of those phrases which a Prime Minister uses where we only discover it's true meaning several years down the line. But I don't like the sound of it.
He then repeated the proposal put forward by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia of a nuclear fuel bank which would mean that Iran did not have to enrich uranium on it's own soil, which I think avoids the fact that the Iranians see producing their own nuclear fuel as a sign of their emergence as a world power and a return to the greatness of Persia. It's not something that they are going to give up on easily. For, under all these proposals, the Iranians would be right to detect a whiff of racism, a hint that they are not considered civilised enough to be trusted with the enrichment of uranium.
I feel Brown's words would carry a lot more weight if we, here in Britain, met the same internationally-enforced non-proliferation standards that we are now demanding of Iran. Under the NNPT, nuclear powers are supposed to take steps to disarm. It is hard to think that we are serious about complying with our NNPT requirements as we prepare to recommission Trident. The same can also be said for the US, where Bush demands others resist developing nuclear weapons, whilst the US develops a new range of "bunker busting" nuclear weapons, totally contrary to it's commitments under the NNPT.A fuel bank would avoid Iran having to process nuclear material and would make it more difficult for the Iranian President to argue that his country's enrichment process was for peaceful nuclear power.
Mr Brown said: "This offer should be made only as long as these countries renounce nuclear weapons and meet internationally-enforced non-proliferation standards.
"Iran has a choice – confrontation with the international community leading to a tightening of sanctions or, if it changes its approach and ends support for terrorism, a transformed relationship with the world."
And all these threats of sanctions are occurring without anyone producing a sliver of evidence that Iran are intending to build a nuclear bomb.
We seem more intent than ever on insisting that a nuclear club exists and that, whilst we demand others resist from joining, the club members themselves stubbornly refuse to give up the weapons that earn them membership.
If we continue like this, then the NNPT is effectively dead.
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