Delhi meeting, who knew?

The foreign ministers of Russia, China and India met yesterday in Delhi. As usual, a high level meeting of three of the largest nations on earth is barely covered by our newspapers of record (NYT, WaPo, though the Boston Globe did pick up the Reuters feed).

According to a Times Online (the UK newspaper) article, Giants meet to counter US power:

It was the second such meeting in the past two years and came after an unprecedented meeting between their respective leaders, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, during the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July.

It also came only four days after Mr Putin stunned Western officials by railing against American foreign policy at a security conference in Munich.

The unipolar approach of the Cheney administration is accelerating the realization that the US needs to be countered by a more unified approach. The US, like the Brits before them, has always played the divide and conquer strategy and it has always worked well in the past. This time, the outrageous and dangerous nature of current US policies may prove that strategy's undoing.

All three nations have much to lose from an attack on Iran, India and Russia are trying to get a pipeline across Pakistan (see the Asia Times article reference here), and China is also trying to lock up agreements for Iranian gas. With the Feb. 21 UN deadline for a stop to Iranian enrichment, and the US undoubtedly pushing for stronger sanctions if they fail to comply, it will be interesting to see if the three will form a more united front on this and other issues.