Clean up the mess in Kabul. The International Crisis Group says that “a deeply flawed presidential electoral process delivered a critical blow to the legitimacy of both the government and the international community”. It calls for a series of measures to repair the damage. They include the resignation of UN Mission chief Kai Eide “since he has lost the faith of many on his staff and the necessary trust of many parts of the Afghan polity”. Samina Ahmed, Crisis Group’s South Asia Project Director, argues that: “Impending decisions about military strategies, troop levels and state-building concepts may mean little if we do not cauterise the damage these fraudulent elections inflicted on Afghanistan. Only thorough reform can do that”. Obama’s new Afghan strategy. The US president “will authorize between 30,000 and 36,000 new U.S. troops, depending on prospective NATO contributions, and an additional 10,000 more in a year if necessary, according to administration sources”, writes Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in the Daily Beast. And he will come up with a more modest US goal: His goal up to now has been to “defeat” al Qaeda. The new mission: to “dismantle and degrade” the terrorists. It is a more modest and achievable goal, intended to weaken the terrorists’ ability to operate in the South Asia region. The United States will continue to take the lead over the next few years to achieve this goal in Afghanistan. But after that, the president is expected to say, the main burden will fall on Kabul—though with continuing American economic and military support. As of this point, it’s not clear whether Mr. Obama will condition his new strategy on President Hamid Karzai cleaning up the corrupt and ineffectual Afghan government. “We are a superpower”. Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist (for Newsweek) who has been jailed in Iran during the recent protests. When released last month, his interrogator told him to send the following message to the world, as he reports in a Washington Post column: “We are a superpower. America’s power is waning, and we will soon overtake them. Now that Americans have started this war against us, we will not let them rest in peace.” According to Bahari, it is the Revolutionary Guards who have taken over: In Iran’s triangle of power — the Guards, Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the Guards are becoming stronger than the president and the supreme leader. Some Guards are devoted to Khamenei for religious reasons, but many of them use his status as a religious leader to legitimize their own actions. They also use Ahmadinejad, a former Guard, to increase their political power. The Guards have arms and money. They are the biggest industrial contractors in Iran. They have front companies all over the region and in the West and are involved in smuggling goods into and out of Iran. They answer only to Khamenei. Obama comes to Copenhagen, why? “Because low expectations make for good politics”, says Daniel Stone in Newsweek. Eight voices for the European Union. According to a new CEPS backgrounder — Two new leaders in search of a job description — no more than eight individuals are going to be involved in the future external representation of the EU: 1. President of the European Council (but formally only for the CFSP) To be added: 27 heads of states or government, and 27 foreign ministers. Member states want weak (supranational) Commission, says Gilles Andréani on the GMF blog: If the EU leadership remains fragmented, that is not by accident. The member states wanted it thus. The position of High Representative was first established (in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty) within the Council so as not to have to entrust foreign policy to the Commission, the EU’s proper executive organ. The Lisbon Treaty brings the High Representative closer to the Commission, but at the same time diminishes the Commission’s authority and command over EU policies. The new President of the EU Council, a French idea reluctantly endorsed by Germany, inevitably threatens to take away substance and legitimacy from the Commission and its President. In consequence, with one member appointed by each of the 27 member states, and given Barroso’s record of deference to their concerns all along his first term, the Commission is today more under the influence of the member states than it ever was. What Ashton can learn from Solana’s legacy. The European Voicecomments: When Javier Solana hands over the reins of the European Union’s foreign policy to Catherine Ashton next week, he will be leaving behind a complex but ultimately disappointing legacy. A decade in office has reduced this mercurial character from a strategic thinker to an administrator of small-scale missions scattered across the world. The transformation, though gradual, can be dated to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Solana devoted the period 1999-2003 to laying the institutional groundwork for the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The period from 2003 to the present has been taken up with running the ESDP and its field missions (some 23 to date). He has retreated from engagement on the big diplomatic questions of the day, with the partial exception of Iran. Initially, Solana carved out for himself a position that was far more powerful than foreseen in the EU’s Treaty of Amsterdam. Putting to use the skills – and the contacts – acquired in long years as a cabinet minister in Spain and then as NATO’s secretary-general, he established a small but influential policy apparatus in the secretariat of the Council of Ministers that functioned as a sort of EU brains trust for strategic thinking. But the unhappy experience of 2003 showed up the limitations of his office. The vicious battles between the EU’s member states over Iraq made it impossible to form a united EU policy. Solana withdrew from the big questions and shrewdly focused on those where he felt the EU could make a difference – missions, often limited in scope and time, in the western Balkans, in Africa, but also in Aceh (Indonesia) and Georgia. The harder task for Van Rompuy and Ashton. Ron Asmus writes on the GMF blog: It may not not difficult to see the Van Rompuy-Ashton team working together effectively to create consensus on foreign policy issues within the EU — at least in cases where one or a group of nation-states does not have a strong national preference. But can they really crack heads and force agreement when that task must be done? And can they represent the EU in the corridors of power in Washington, go toe-to-toe with the leaders in the Kremlin on energy, hammer out new trade or financial agreements with Beijing or face down the mullahs in Tehran on nuclear issues? What can one conclude other than Europe’s leaders opted to keep control of issues such as these largely to themselves? A lack of will. Timothy Garton Ash comments in the Guardian: The best one can say is that the two newcomers will not start their new jobs burdened with excessively high expectations. They have everything to prove. The appointments, he says, followed the political logic of the European Union as it exists. They reflected the will of the democratically elected governments of the member states and of the two largest political groupings in the European parliament. Van Rompuy was the candidate on whom France, Germany and the centre-right in the parliament agreed. Ashton emerged as the intersection of three criteria: from the centre-left, as defined by the centre-left grouping in the parliament (the centre-right having got the presidency); a Brit, in return for Gordon Brown giving up on Tony Blair’s candidacy for the presidency; and a woman. The fact that there were at least 50 people better qualified for the job, including serving and former foreign ministers, counted for nothing. Ashton, however, now has the opportunity to shape a new European foreign policy culture: Common analyses prepared by the European foreign service will gradually convince national foreign ministers that their national interests do largely coincide on nine issues out of 10. European foreign policy will be made where the national interests sufficiently coincide; where they don’t, it won’t be. The further rise of non-European great powers such as China, India and Brazil will help to concentrate European minds on the world they’re in. Gradually, a new strategic culture will emerge, so that Europeans talk about the same foreign policy questions in similar ways (though still in different languages) in their own countries. But Ash remains skeptical, as European citizen do not want the EU to become a global player: It’s not just the heads of national governments who are reluctant to do what is needed to have Europe speak with a stronger voice. In their reluctance, they represent the wishes of the majority of their people. Intellectually, they may recognise the case for getting our act together; politically, they are both shaped and bound by their own national politics. (…) Most Europeans are not interested in projecting European power around the world – and certainly not military power. Many feel we did too much of that already in our history. So bring our boys home from Afghanistan and just leave us alone. (…) Refined arguments may be made in the pages of quality newspapers about how we need a European foreign policy simply to defend, in the longer run, the very quality of life Europeans value most – but these arguments cut little ice. Today’s external challenges – climate change, global poverty, Russia, rising China – are not immediate and galvanising, like the armies of Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s Soviet Union in the heart of Europe. They don’t make everyone feel that we must stand up and be counted, now. Read today on Global Europe: Keep up the talks. Catherine Ashton must try to get Iran to reconsider its position, by Tomas Valasek, director of foreign policy and defence at the Centre for European Reform (CER). If you want to receive the Global Europe Morning Brief every weekday by email, send an email to globeurope@gmail.comGlobalEurope
Monitoring European Foreign Policy.
Morning Brief (26-11)
Thursday, 26 November 2009 • By Ulrich Speck
2. High Representative of the Union, supported by the EEAS
3. President of the European Commission (on a number of dossiers, excluding CFSP – cf. presence in summits,
esp. G-8, G-20 and EU-third country summits)
4. Members of the European Commission (depending on the issue and presumably only with the consent of the
President of the Commission)
5. Presidency of the Council (individual ministers, changing depending on Council formation)
6. Head of State or Government of the member state holding the rotating presidency – would they differ
completely to the President of the European Council in external representation? (plan minimal: involvement
as host when meetings in EU)
7. President of the European Central Bank (where appropriate, such as in G-20 talks)
8. President of the Eurogroup (where appropriate on currency issues and presumably on economic coordination
among eurozone states)
Thursday 26 November 2009
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