Transatlantic Politics

So Biden has made quite an impact with his "hit the reset button" with Russia remark at the Munich security conference over the week-end. But this comes as bad news for Eastern European countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic or Romania - hailed as "special partners" by the previous Bush administration. Not to mention Georgia and Ukraine.

On the planned missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, Biden said the US would "continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective."

"We will do so in consultation with our NATO allies and Russia."

Well, since Russia has consistantly opposed this project and with Germany and France not very keen on the project either, chances are pretty slim that the shield is ever going to be installed, despite serious political damages to the Eastern European governments involved, after they put their credibility at stake with the Bush-backed plan.

Here’s some background from the Wall Street Journal:

In advance of Mr. Biden’s speech, White House aides had said the vice president would announce that the U.S. was prepared to reconsider plans for a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe. Moscow has long opposed such plans. Mr. Biden’s actual remarks appeared vaguer. A senior administration official traveling with Mr. Biden said the administration toned down the language because of unease in Washington that Moscow was behind last week’s proposed eviction of the U.S. from an air base in Kyrgyzstan used to support the military in Afghanistan.

So the Obama administration would have no problem in scrapping the missile defense shield and it is probably a matter of months until they will do so, the moment Moscow signals some opening.

Already the Russian envoys reacted warmly to Biden’s statements.

"The U.S. sent a very strong signal, and the signal was heard," Russian foreign minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters. "It’s obvious the new U.S. administration has a very strong desire to change, and we’re ready to cooperate with this administration on all levels."

Sad day for Eastern Europe. A new entente between big European countries - France, Germany, UK - Russia and the US could only come at the expense of Eastern Europe, still seen by Moscow as its own backyard.

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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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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..

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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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Condoleezza Rice spoke yesterday at a press briefing before travelling to Paris and Tbilisi about the importance to grant Georgia the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), an intermediate stage before granting full membership of the Alliance.

One of the reasons for NATO Membership Action Plan and, ultimately, for NATO membership, is that it allows states to overcome longstanding difficulties, differences and conflicts under the umbrella of a collective security organization, defense organization of democracies. I have noted before that had anyone said that you would be able to resolve, for instance, differences between Hungary and Romania, between Bulgaria and Turkey in peaceful ways — no one would have believed it when the Soviet empire broke up. But in fact, under the umbrella of NATO, that has been taking place.
 
And so if you now look across Central and Eastern Europe, one thing that is also very different from just a few decades ago is that the countries that were liberated after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states and the aspirants – Albania, Croatia, Macedonia and others are now – have made the transition and are making the transition into transatlantic institutions. That allows them both to resolve their differences and to have a reason, a spur, for internal reform and further democratization, the appropriate relationship between civilian and military leaders and so forth and so on. 

That is why Membership Action Plan has been so valuable, and it’s why the United States continues to stand for Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine.

She also fiercly condemned Russia’s military invasion beyond the South Ossetian borders and alluded to banning Russia from international organizations such as the WTO, the G8 and the OECD.

When you start bombing ports and threatening to bomb airfields and bombing a city like Gori and bringing troops in a flanking maneuver on the western flank of Georgia and tying up the main roads between Georgia – between Tbilisi and Gori, that’s well beyond anything that is needed to protect Russian peacekeepers. And that is why Russia is starting to face international condemnation for what it is doing.

 
This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it. Things have changed.

Meanwhile, a common naval exercise between Russia, US, France and UK in the Pacific was cancelled, and NATO refused the participation of a Russian vessel in common maneuvres in the Mediterranean. But are these gestures enough to protect Georgia from a brutal takeover by Russia?

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