Transatlantic Politics

So it’s official. Obama’s honeymoon with Europe is over. Yesteday’s overwhelming vote against a key agreement on EU-US bank data transfers is the first major snub from the European side after Obama’s inauguration last year.

The vote in the European Parliament is particularly embarrassing after Hillary Clinton’s intense efforts in the past week to change the lawmakers’ minds - phonecalls, letters, op-eds.. telling them how important it is for Europe to allow US investigators to get data on their banking transactions on the search for terrorism funding. Nothing helped.

Euro-deputies scoffed at being sidelined in negotiations and claimed the data protection provisions were too weak.

Added to that, and maybe more important than privacy issues, the Parliament used this vote to flex its muscles towards national governments and the EU commission - the bloc’s executive.

A "historic victory" claimed the Socialist leader in the parliament, Martin Schulz. "The US Administration may have wrongly thought they could deal with the European Parliament like Gulliver with the Lilliputians," the German politician said. 

As one fellow journalist put it, "15 minutes of fame for the European Parliament at the expense of EU security."

Now what? Well, the US can still negotiate bilateral deals with the Netherlands and Switzerland, where the company dealing with this data, SWIFT, has its data bases. A mirror data base on US soil, which had been at the thrust of a big EU-US scandal in 2006 has been reconfigured since January 1st, so that it no longer has information on European transactions. That is why the US had negotiated this deal last year, but meanwhile, the new EU legal framework - the Lisbon Treaty - came into force, giving the Parliament the power to reject the agreement.

Washington can also pursue the EU track, negotiating a new agreement with the whole Union, but that would take considerably longer and the European Parliament will still have the right to say ‘nay’ at the end of the process.

The Parliament’s snub comes shortly after Obama himself gave Europe the cold shoulder, when cancelling his attendance to an EU-US summit planned in Madrid in May.

In fairness, the summit more than anything else was a photo-opportunity for the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Rodriguez Zapatero, who has developed somewhat of a crush on Obama. He even attended the National Prayer Breakfast, despite being a convinced secularist, just to shake hands with Obama. His country’s plummeting economy and soaring unemployment rates, his dwindling popularity, were all enough reasons to be depressed. Not to mention that although he is the chairman of the rotating EU presidency, he has way less powers than his predecessors, because of the same Lisbon Treaty that gave a bigger say to the EU parliament. It actually shouldn’t be Zapatero, but the standing president of the EU council - Belgian low-key politician Herman Van Rompuy - who organises such summit. These institutional quarrels were one of the reasons why Obama decided not to go to Madrid. "We’ve told them: ‘Figure it out and let us know,’ " a White House official told WSJ.

However, summitry is what EU is best at. And diplomats say it’s a way to cement relations between the EU and US. Especially after the deep freeze during the Bush years. Obama just doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. Will this come back to haunt him? Maybe the EU parliament’s snub is a first sign already…

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Quite peaceful, isn’t he? Even the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov looks worried.. "Whoa, Dmitri, careful with that gun!"

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So the left lost bigtime in the European elections this week. In France, Germany, Spain, Italy, but first and foremost in Great Britain, where Labour scored its lowest since 1918.

Hopefully, that will tone down the whole "capitalism is dead, long live socialism" discourse. More importantly, isn’t it interesting how Europe is turning to the right, while the US is turning more to the left than ever before? Maybe now they will finally meet each other halfway and we’ll have a real economic connundrum.

Here is a funny illustration of Brown’s downfall:

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A dose of Russian humour from Moscow’s military district chorus. Very much appreciated by the audience, as you can see from the video below.

"Should Ukraine join NATO, there’s no need to quarrel or be mad, we’ll just cut their gas!"

"Europe also has problems, American special forces are already there. But we’ll just smile - it’s their own business - and at night we’ll just cut gas to Europe as well."

"We can solve any problem, we just need to know where the Gazprom faucet is, so that we can cut the gas for everybody, just in case!"

and if you’re into some more Russian tunes, here  is the Gazprom anthem. Warning! VERY KITCH!

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Yesterday’s  record fine against US giant Intel - $ 1.45 billion - is yet another example of EU’s double standards when it comes to American companies and Russian monopolies.

Not that TransatlanticPolitics is contesting the accuracy of the EU commission’s findings  - the bloc’s guardian of fair competition rules - but it is at least dubious that no probe has been launched into any Russian company/monopoly on the EU market.

"Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years," competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

"If we smell that there is something rotten in the state, we act."

It seems however that Gazprom’s actions on the EU market have no smell, despite its ownership of half of the trading floor in one of Europe’s major gas hubs in Austria - Baumgarten.

No formal inquiry has been launched by the EU into this matter, although Gazprom basically has free access to priviliged information about all the gas being traded there.

"Knowing, for example, that one company’s future contracts become mature on this particular date, another county needs gas on that date, if you know all the pricing information, you can undercut these limited opportunities that began to emerge at Baumgarten for more market-based pricing of gas giving this arbitrage a possibility. So, it’s crucial that the EU is examining the operation of that gas hub and information systems and make sure the information is not being used by one company or another company to undercut competition," US deputy assistant secretary of state Matt Bryza told EUobserver in April. Similar statements here.

 Asked about this issue, a spokesman for the EU commission said the matter was not relevant, since Gazprom could only follow the amounts of gas currently traded and not influence any future transactions.

So much for Europe’s level playing field..

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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?

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