Transatlantic Politics

Despite the arrests, killings and beatings of protesters in Iran, Western leaders keep  the invitation for the Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki at the G8 meeting in Trieste (Italy) next week. The Obama administration apparently still hopes the Iranians will help in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so the Italians followed orders and did not withdraw the invitation.

According to EUobserver, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi explained on Friday at an EU summit that the invite was "in agreement with the US administration."

"We equally believe it is important to involve Iran in the stabilisation of Afghanistan," he said.

German foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, who will also be present at the G8 meeting, also said that retracting the invitation would not help - not with the nuclear file, nor the current demonstrations.

"I think we must respect the US position in criticising strongly the reaction of Iranian authorities towards the demonstrators, but we must also realise that we won’t solve these conflicts just by withdrawing our foreign policy activities," said Steinmeier.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton broke her elbow and won’t be able to travel next week. Which makes it even less understandable why the US still wants the Iranian minister to be there. Wouldn’t it appear as if the West is accepting the brutal crackdown on demonstrators?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Hillary’s charm tour in Europe ended in a big mockery, as she found herself lost in translation. When in Geneva, Hillary gave Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a plastic button, after Joe Biden’s announcement last month that the Obama administration has to hit the ‘reset button’ in US-Russian relations.

"You got it wrong" - Lavrov said. Instead of "reset", the button read "overload" or "overcharge" in Russian. Whooops… Sorry, wrong button.

No problem, DeeDee, thank God you’re not the POTUS and don’t have a real button to play with.

And hopefully this embarrassment will put an end to such gimmick-diplomacy. What exactly was that button supposed to mean? A fresh start with Russia, based on what? Down at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Hillary did not sound so much different than Condi. Hell, she even called Poland and the Czech Republic "visionary" for signing up for missile defense, a plan that really pisses off Russia.

Of course, her hawkish talk may have been just a way to soothe fears in Europe after that Obama letter offering to scrap missile defence in return for real Russian help against Iran. But one can hardly say what’s more naive: to think that such trade-off would really work or to believe that the Kremlin would buy this "fresh start" thing based on a gimmick which wasn’t even spelled correctly.

But the reset-button episode was not the only gaffe. While in Brussels, Hillary also managed to misspell two of her counterparts names during a press conference - she called the EU top diplomat Javier Solana a cream candy - ‘Solano’ - and the EU commissioner for external relations ‘Benina’ - when her real name is Benita. Both were standing right next to her and rolled their eyes thinking "oh boy, why can’t the Americans learn the names of the people they talk to?"

Maybe all of this is just a warm-up for gaffe-master Biden, who is in Brussels this week to convince Europeans to commit more troops to Pakistan. Sorry, Afghanistan. Or just call it AfPak, like most of the Obamites now do. Is much easier. Also solves the eternal question of how it’s spelled correctly - Iran or Iraq?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

"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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

If elected president of the US, senator Barack Obama would not trade eastern European security for Russian help on Iran, his senior foreign policy advisor, Gregory B. Craig, told EUObserver in an interview.

"[But] that doesn’t mean that you trade away our security commitments to the new members of NATO, that’s not even thinkable. I always remember the notion that the expansion of NATO was not a threat to Russia, that this was a decision not by NATO to move east, but a decision by the new democracies from the former Soviet space to integrate with the West."

"The notion that you choose to co-operate with Russia vis-a-vis Iran at the expense of central and eastern Europe, I just don’t accept that. That’s not viable and it won’t happen that way," Mr Craig said.

Russia’s aggressive stance toward neighbours who want to be part of NATO and the EU is a historical throwback, he added. "I think the notion that Russia has a veto over what they decide inside of Ukraine or Georgia is very 19th to 20th century. In a 21st century world, with global impacts, global trends, Russia suffered enormously economically as a result of its intervention in Georgia."

Hmm..let’s see..

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!