Transatlantic Politics

Forget the war on terror. Now that Obama is shutting down Guantanamo and all CIA prisons, it’s clear that the enemy is elsewhere: It’s on your plate. Especially if you are a schnitzel or a steak-lover in Germany.

This is no joke. It’s for real. Here’s what the Guardian reports:

Germans have been urged to rethink their meat-eating habits if they want to help the planet. Germany’s federal environment agency has issued a strong advisory for people to return to prewar norms of eating meat only on special occasions and otherwise to model their diet on that of Mediterranean countries. Agriculture was responsible for around 15% of Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions and meat production was the most energy-intensive form of farming. With that in mind, reducing meat consumption was a logical step forward.

People, where is this going to? Have we all lost our common sense? Are we heading towards state-planned, rationalised eating schemes? What about freedom? What about choice? What about individual responsibility? Germany should know better, it’s not that long ago that they had state-planned societies - first during Hitler, then during the Soviet Union, in Eastern Germany.

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Romania’s top anti-corruption prosecutor Daniel Morar was awarded  as "European inspiration of the year" in an Oscar-like ceremony on Tuesday night. The awards are a must to the Brussels "creme de la creme", although Mr Morar could not attend himself, but was represented by his spokeswoman.

The European recognition comes at a crucial time for the beleaguered prosecutor, whose mandate expired in August and was temporarily prolongued until the end of December. He has few supporters among the local politicians, who have gathered against him and his highly performing unit which has investigated and prosecuted high level corruption for the first time since the fall of Communism.

Corruption is still a major problem in Romania and it was thanks to Mr Morar and a reformist justice minister, Monica Macovei - ousted just three months after the country joined the EU and her presence in the government was no longer seen as necessary to convince Brussels that the Romanian politicians were committed to fight corruption.

Also highly bullied at home, Ms Macovei recently received the "Woman of Europe" award from the president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Poettering, who expressed his deepest admiration for the reforms and fight against corruption she led at home, urging Europeans to follow her example.

How many more recognitions from abroad must come for the Romanian politicians to finally get it? Their impunity is an offence to the rule of law and respect for citizens. Yet some of the blame has to go also on the Romanians’ high tolerance for corruption. Former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, charged with several counts of corruption, has just been elected as MP on Sunday, in the new direct voting system.

But this is also why reformists and anti-corruption fighters should be promoted and let to do their work, not bullied and sacked. They should be able to set an example and lead their country forward. Mr Morar should stay on as a top prosecutor and Ms Macovei maybe return as a justice minister in the new cabinet to be formed next month.

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"A dream president", "what a great victory for democracy", "the hope we needed" - were some of the lines you could hear on the night of Nov. 4th in Brussels, where over 2000 expats and internationals partied in a posh hotel as the results from overseas were coming in.

Great expectations, and false ones, as some might argue, meaning that the disappointment is set to hit Europe accordingly.

Just a recent example of this utopian approach: A talk show  on the Belgian national tv earlier today was entitled "Will president Obama change the world?" On the show were US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker (speaking in great French, by the way) and Belgian politicians.

From the debate it became pretty clear that the moment president Obama will "pick up the phone and call up" European leaders to ask them to commit more troops to Afghanistan, the EU-Obama honey moon will end.

In Belgium "the army must first and foremost seek peace", as one Socialist lady senator put it. Quite some ally there for the US…

"Diplomacy first", meaning "talking to the Talibans" was the idea advocated by former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel, currently an EU commissioner for development and humanitarian. Yet Mr Michel would back a decision of sending more troops to Afghanistan if the decision was taken within NATO after a "real dialogue" of the Europeans with the US, he said, acclaiming that the "leadership" of the US in world affairs was over and "multilateralism" was dawning again.

Interesting were also the remarks on EU-Russia and US-Russia relations. The announcement of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he would deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad - a Russian enclave on the shores of the Baltic Sea squeezed between Poland and Lithuania - was presented by the host of the talk show as just an "odd way to congratulate the new US president on November 5th".

Mr Michel stressed that for the EU it’s "a matter of priority" to resume talks with Russia - suspended after the Georgian war - since this was the "bigger and very important neighbor" of Europe. As to the fears of the Baltic states and Poland - these were only "fuelled" by the outgoing Bush administration and Barack Obama would certainly adopt a more "flexible" attitude towards Russia, he argued.

The Green senator went even further, claiming that the Bush administration had played Eastern and Western Europe against each-other (not Russia!!!) and that all this would soon be over once president Obama takes over.

The Belgian politicians seemed also already disappointed with Mr Obama’s nuanced stance on Iran lately and still hoped he would sit down and talk to the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, as diplomacy was, in their view, the only solution to stop Tehran from aquiring nuclear bombs. And here, again, Mr Michel said the EU should "speak on one voice" and show more initiative.

The hypocrisy of EU "initiative" and "soft power" as opposed to the alleged blunt "hard power of the US" can be seen in Georgia: Russia has basically taken over for good the two breakaway provinces - although the war was only about one of them - has massed up thousands of troops on these territories and meanwhile everybody in Western Europe is happy to go back to business as usual with the Kremlin. Lithuania’s opposition to this move is expected to be silenced tomorrow at a meeting of the EU foreign affairs meeting, ahead of an EU-Russia summit this Thursday.

Rembember that op-ed in the WSJ entitled  "Stop! or we’ll say stop again!"? This is how the EU acts towards Russia. And this is how it acts towards Iran as well.

Luckily, president Obama will not take onboard his team day-dreaming, tree-hugging European politicians. And he should not fear to disappoint them.

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Liberal politicians are the worst kind everywhere in the world. With parliamentary elections coming up on November 30, Romanian Liberal Party - currently in government - is flirting with the idea to get a lucrative deal with Gazprom and a quick gain, even if it means to sacrifice the country’s energy independance on the long run.

Liberal minister of economy and finances, Varujan Vosganian said on Thursday that Romania is open to South Stream, a Gasprom pipeline project designed to discourage European attempts to build a pipeline known as Nabucco, that would bring Caspian gas directly to the EU market via Turkey, thus bypassing Russia.

Romania has been the last country involved in Nabucco so far resisting Russian pressure to sign up for South Stream. Yet a Gazprom delegation is expected in Bucharest next week, amidst various media reports that the Russian monopoly is about to offer Romania to join its project.

While the Romanian president Traian Basescu still declares his backing for Nabucco and calls upon European leaders to speed up the process, the liberal government it is at odds with signals "openness" towards Gazprom, with the Ministry of foreign affairs mediating a meeting last week in Moscow between Romanian gas officials and the Russian monopoly.

Now, the economy minister’s wording suggest that gas politics might shape up the electoral debate in the run up to the elections.

The social-democratic opposition already called upon the Government to hold "direct talks" with Moscow in order to get a better gas price and dismissed the president’s "deep freeze" policy towards the Kremlin which was "disastrous" and only drew prices up.

Yet it is at least naive to think that direct talks with the Russian giant will put Romania in a better position. The debate is false, because unlike Hungary and Bulgaria, both Nabucco countries which signed up for South Stream as well because they are  over 85% dependent on Russian gas, Romania imports only a third of its total gas consumption from Gazprom, the rest being produced internally.

As Vladimir Socor from the Jamestown Foundation puts it, Romania is "only the latest addition to Gazprom’s list of candidate countries for the proposed South Stream."

The offer to Romania appears designed to increase Russia’s leverage vis-à-vis countries that have already signed up for South Stream and are now negotiating the commercial and financial terms separately with Gazprom. The Russians propose to include more countries in South Stream than the pipeline could possibly reach. By the same token, Russia offers to include more countries than it could possibly supply from Russian gas reserves in the years ahead.

Gazprom is tempting the maximum possible number of countries, playing them off against each other with the prospect of individual package deals around South Stream. Package deals would include supply contracts, transit revenue, and storage sites that could confer on this or that recipient country the coveted status of a gas-trading “hub.” Mostly aware of Gazprom’s limited gas export potential in the years ahead, the countries are vying to wrap up supply contracts ahead of their neighbors and to make the most out of any possible transit and storage opportunities.

For The Economist, all this works only because the European Union "is asleep on the job".

Bizarrely, Europe’s leaders publicly maintain that the two pipelines are not competitors. They have given the task of promoting Nabucco to a retired Dutch politician who has not visited the most important countries in the project recently (or in some cases even at all).

The main reason for the lack of private-sector interest is lack of gas. The big reserves are in Turkmenistan, but Russia wants them too. Securing them for Nabucco would mean a huge, concerted diplomatic push from the EU and from America. It would also require the building of a Transcaspian gas pipeline.

Yet as long as EU countries still give in to the temptation of bilateral deals with Russia, Nabucco, though twice cheaper than South Stream, has increasingly less chances to be completed.

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Following the Russian military invasion, Georgia might soon be left out from the vital energy corridor now trasiting its territory, if Azerbaidjan comes to terms with Armenia over the frozen conflict in the Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to  Iranian Ambassador to Baku, Naser Hamidi-Zare, Iran is willing to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Iran proposed to mediate between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the resolution of the conflict” Hamidi-Zare said, adding that Tehran has held discussion on this issue with both parties of the conflict.

Why the sudden interest in Tehran for this very old conflict? Apart from an obvious image gain if it were to succeed in the mediator role, Iran wants to counter the US influence in the region. Early plans of the now functional Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline took into consideration another route, through Azerbaijan and Armenia, right on the border with Iran (see map). But with the US sanctions over Iran and the frozen conflict right in the middle of the shortest route from Baku to Turkey,, Georgia was then seen as a safer alternative.

But following the brutal "unfreeze" of the 2 Georgian frozen conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, now recognized as independent republics by the Kremlin, Azerbaijan is already hesitant in committing fully its exports through Georgia, rerouting some of these through Russia. And if its conflict with Armenia was to be solved, guess where the shortest route for its large oil and gas supplies would be? Exactly. Through Armenia.

Another key player in this whole energy game is Turkey, so far at odds with Armenia over a historical event it won’t recognize - the genocide against Armenians during World War 1 and over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Ankara being a strong supporter of Azerbaijan.

Diplomatic ties were broken off between Armenia and Turkey in 1993, as a sign of support for Azerbaijan. But in the aftermath of the Georgian conflict, Turkish President Abdullah Gul made a historic visit to Erevan, the pretext being a football game between the two countries. And during the UN plenary in New York on September 26, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sat down with his Armenian and Azeri counterparts in an attempt to move forward the discussions, so far championed by US envoy to the region Matthew Bryza.

Armenian media hope that Turkey’s increasing distance from the US and closer ties to Russia could work in its favour over the frozen conflict, and could end-up rerouting future Caspian-EU energy links through its territory instead of Georgia. Turkey is favoring both Russian and Iranian gas to be transported by the planned Nabucco pipeline, which is to reduce Europe’s dependancy on Russian gas. The US has so far insisted that Azeri gas and possibly gas from Turkmenistan would suffice for the pipeline.

Yet the Georgian conflict sees regional powers such as Turkey and Iran regrouping and arguably reinforcing their positions on the energy front. Russia can only encourage this.

P.S. According to EUObserver, an alleged Armenian-Russian connection during the Georgian conflict was highlighted in the European Parliament by the chairman of the Foreign Affairs committe Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, who asked EU’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana in a public hearing on 10 September if Russian bases in Armenia were used to launch missiles at Georgia during the conflict. Mr Solana said he could not confirm the information.

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