Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's trysts during his junket to three of the world's most powerful Western capital cities last week have begun to raise a number of questions. How seriously should one take these meetings, for instance? And what's really behind Abdullah's trips to Washington, London and Paris, whose governments - excluding France (for now) - Malaysia has vehemently rebuked for their preemptive-strike policies and their invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Take the meeting with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris. Abdullah said at the meeting that he would work with France to halve world poverty by 2015. Noble, but how realistic is this latest gesture? Since the onset of the new international economic order in 1970-71, when the Bretton Woods system of economic management collapsed, the world has heard precisely such hype countless times. Each time such talk evaporated into thin air. Thirty-odd years later, the world is again confronted with more of the same mumbo-jumbo.

Moreover, Abdullah didn't give any details on how he will carry out his plan. But Malaysia's pitiful media thought it noble and bold all the same. At last - after former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad's foreign-policy grand posturing, always laced with his signature belligerence and schizophrenic neo-nationalism - Abdullah has launched Malaysian foreign policy into the brave new world and the age of global terrorism.

Commercial reasons

But Abdullah's underlying motive isn't about paving the road with good intentions. Commercial reasons will underscore Malaysia's latest foreign-policy turn. Circling Iraqi skies like a vulture, Malaysia hopes to pick up the scraps that Washington and London and the lame duck United Nations may throw its way as they attempt to rebuild Iraq.

Nor is Abdullah looking to become a great international statesman in a way the garrulous Mahathir didn't, and could never have. After Mahathir made Malaysia the butt of foreign-policy jokes in international diplomatic circles, Abdullah wants Malaysia to be taken seriously in international affairs.

Fair enough. Yet Malaysia's new foreign-policy bravado has startling similarities to that of its other Western nemesis - Australia. Both want to box above their weight. And if Abdullah is serious about halving world poverty within the next decade or so, he had better get a move on. Time is short, especially for a problem that has become larger and increasingly politically intractable throughout history.

But don't expect the details of this grand and noble cause, or how this bold policy move is to be framed, to come out any time soon. Nor should one expect to learn the kinds of bureaucratic processes and resources that will be needed to underpin the methodology by which both Malaysia and France will nut out and eradicate world poverty to half of what it is today.

It is safe to say that this latest Malaysian foreign-policy bluster will die another natural death. It won't be given the kind of long-term commitment of political will and financial resources it will require to succeed - if it succeeds at all. And besides, who's going to lead the charge on reconfiguring and policing a world trading system that has so demonstrably - and historically - favored the West? Certainly not France; it can't play fair any more than the United States can.

In a 1918 essay, HG Wells wrote of the newly formed League of Nations' attempt to tackle the great "riddle" posed by an Africa so torn by colonial struggles and disease that it had become, he argued, "a festering sore in the body of mankind". The same festering sore has now grown bigger and more menacing; so menacing in fact that, according to both Mahathir and Abdullah, it is the root cause of global terrorism.

Prevalent, grinding poverty is only part of the cause for the scourge of Islamic terrorism and its rampant ascendancy. Yet Abdullah ensured that he would not offer his diatribe in London or Washington, where he would be given only lip service. Instead, Abdullah saved his spiel for Paris, where he knew Chirac, who remains entirely skeptical of America's "global hegemonic" plans, would give Abdullah's "perspective" a sympathetic hearing.

Disingenuous spin

But Abdullah was doing no more than spinning - and the spin is disingenuous. France was one of the nations that formed the cluster of competing colonialists who invaded, occupied and plundered the colonies for the benefit of the Western state and its powerful merchant classes and maritime trade. Thus it beggars disbelief that Malaysia can be so naive in thinking it can team up with France to end the misery of poverty globally.

Somehow, a sense of history and many of its great imponderables always seems hopelessly lost on Malaysian policymakers. Still, it would take a brave Malaysian prime minister, including one like Mahathir, to stand on the soil of an Arab or Muslim country and say exactly the same thing Abdullah did in Paris. Because the fact remains that the post-colonial state and its cronies have worsened poverty through their blatant abuse of political power and thieving of national wealth.

This is where the problem begins. But the problem has been accentuated by the West through the ascension of modern-day multinational corporations that are vigorously promoted, protected and feted by Western and Third World governments alike. It's here that the harbingers of Islamic terrorism reside, as social inequalities and political injustices worsen. The blame for all this and the present-day scourge of Islamic terrorism can be placed squarely on the shoulders of not only impoverished Third World states, but also oil-rich feudal states such as Saudi Arabia, although not without undue influence by Western states, including France.

Abdullah would be well advised to stop pipe-dreaming self-grandeur the way Mahathir did. If he, unlike Mahathir, is an honest and honorable man, he'll admit that there's enough structural poverty in Malaysia among all the races that the hare-brained New Economic Policy in its 20-year span from 1970-90 didn't alleviate, far less eradicate - at least not any more than its desolate transplant, the National Development Plan, ever will.

Halving the world's poverty by 2015 sounds about as banal as all the hypocrisy that was bandied about by both Western and Third World leaders in getting rid of the latter's foreign debt. That foreign debt has worsened several-fold, and it burdens the people of the Third World increasingly, while the massively corrupt political elite and the greedy business class continue to plunder the wealth of these nations. In fact, the world's Catholic churches hoard so much financial wealth that they could eliminate the Third World's total debt in one fell swoop.

Lucrative reconstruction

What Abdullah did in Paris was more calculated than what he did while in London, and especially in Washington. In Britain and the United States, Abdullah mostly tiptoed around the postwar-Iraq issue. And neither British Prime Minister Tony Blair nor US President George W Bush tackled Abdullah on the Malaysian government's anti-democratic record.

The red carpet accorded to Abdullah by London and Washington was purely perfunctory. Neither Bush nor Blair welcomed Abdullah at the airport. Moreover, Bush's and Blair's chatter regarding the wonderful job the Malaysian government has done in fighting global Islamic terrorism was purely tokenistic, especially amid the growing hatred of the West by the world's Muslims.

Blair, more than Bush, declared Malaysia a "model" of a peaceful, secular Muslim country for other Islamic states to emulate. But it can't be too hard to fathom how peace and stability in ethnically pluralistic Malaysia is maintained, given the raft of draconian, anti-democratic legislation the state uses to quash its critics and other political dissenters.

Bush and Blair now find it perfectly acceptable to turn a blind eye to Malaysia's authoritarian structures and institutions, including the human- and political-rights abuses of its citizens that the Muslim state decrees as morally justifiable. It's the kind of political legitimacy that the increasingly pro-West Abdullah would have been expecting. Clearly Bush and Blair now see all this as perfectly legitimate, even necessary, but only as long as Malaysia is seen to be doing something to roll back Islamic fundamentalism and murderous jihadis.

Abdullah, in turn, was keen to turn on Malaysia's new foreign-policy approachability charm. By the time he left the United States, Abdullah had made the offer that Malaysia was willing to send a sizable medical team to Iraq. But there's more to the idea of sending a token group of Malaysian medicos to help wounded Iraqis. Abdullah is hanging on so that Malaysian companies can get a slice of the action in the lucrative reconstruction of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. All this comes after Malaysia had fiercely criticized the West for first isolating then invading Iraq.

No longer will Malaysia castigate the West with Mahathir-type hyperbole - of large-scale Western conspiracies to conquer the Muslim world. Malaysian foreign policy is being slowly but surely Halliburton-ized. And don't be surprised if sooner or later Malaysian peacekeepers are sent to Iraq too - just for good measure.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific. The above article also appears in Asia Times online.