It’s the economy. The Economist has good news from the US:
In the fourth quarter of last year American GDP grew by an impressive 5.7%, at an annual rate, the best quarterly performance since 2003.
Iran — after the deadline. A New York Times editorial calls for sanctions:
Iran has again proved to be a master at playing for time. Six months after a new diplomatic overture from Washington and its partners, Tehran has shown no interest in resolving the dispute over its nuclear program. It is time for President Obama and other leaders to ratchet up the pressure with tougher sanctions.
France is taking over the presidency of the U.N. Security Council today and is expected to push for a rapid move towards sanctions, according to the Washington Post.
And Hillary Clinton is trying to build support for sanctions. The New York Times reports:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned China on Friday that it would face economic insecurity and diplomatic isolation if it did not sign on to tough new sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, seeking to raise the pressure on Beijing to fall in line with an American-led campaign. (…)
With Russia increasingly frustrated by Iran’s recalcitrance, China has emerged as perhaps the lone holdout to a new United Nations resolution that would focus sweeping financial and economic sanctions on Iran’s leadership, including a possible ban on sales of technology to its energy sector.
Mrs. Clinton — in a flurry of meetings this week in Europe, including one with the Chinese foreign minister — has tried to build momentum for new measures against Iran. Britain, France and Germany back the effort, and Russia, which has often blocked previous efforts, now seems ready to act.
Only China, which imports crude oil from Iran and has large investments in Iran’s oil and gas sector, has said it would prefer to continue negotiating with the Iranian government. With a veto in the United Nations Security Council, it could block a move to impose more sanctions.
But the US leverage against China seems to melt down: see a Washington Post analysis here and a New York Times analysis here.
Meanwhile China managed to remove the topic Google vs. China from the Davos agenda, the Washington Post notes.
EU debates arms embargo against China. The FT’s Tony Barber reports that Spain’s ambassador to China
said two weeks ago that Madrid intended to use its six-month spell in charge to “deepen discussions” on lifting the embargo. Lady Ashton has remained silent on the matter, but some officials made clear that the ambassador had spoken out of turn. In Brussels, EU officials expressed amazement that Carlos Blasco Villa, the Spanish ambassador to Beijing, had spoken about lifting the embargo in an interview with China Daily, a state-controlled newspaper. Serge Abou, the head of the EU’s delegation in Beijing, said Europe “gains nothing from making the debate public”. The ban is a divisive question inside the EU, with some countries, such as France and Spain, keen on lifting the embargo, and others, including the UK, opposed.
The issue goes to the heart of two of the most sensitive issues preoccupying the EU – whether Spain is using its presidency to speak out more than it should on foreign policy, and whether Lady Ashton is asserting herself sufficiently in her new job. However, a decision to lift the arms embargo would in the last resort require unanimity among the EU’s 27 governments – something they achieved last October, when they lifted an arms sales ban on Uzbekistan in spite of continuing concerns about human rights violations there.
Can Taliban fighters be bought off? No, says Newsweek’s Ron Moreau:
My Newsweek colleague Sami Yousafzai laughs at the notion that the Taliban can be bought or bribed. Few journalists, officials, or analysts know the Taliban the way he does. If the leadership, commanders, and subcommanders wanted comfortable lives, he says, they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival. Now they’re back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north. They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. They’ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side. The mujahedin warlords who regained power in the 2001 U.S. invasion have grown fabulously wealthy since then. The senior Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani could have done the same. Now he and his fellow Taliban are gunning for those opportunists.
The London conference has called into question the EU’s relevance as an actor in Afghanistan, Edward Burke (FRIDE) writes in New Europe:
Most EU member states continue to view their commitment to Afghanistan almost exclusively through a NATO prism. By contrast, they have severely neglected the EU’s Policing Mission in Afghanistan. In London Cathy Ashton looked and was treated very much as a fringe player.
Kabul observers downbeat on London conference, reports Eurasianet:
In Kabul, the London conference results generated little enthusiasm. Instead, analysts remained concerned that the country’s fragile democratization process was being undermined by the international community’s preoccupation with a questionable security plan. To some, Western leaders seem more concerned about setting a timetable for withdrawal, something that would resonate with domestic political constituents, than with establishing a realizable and sustainable development blueprint for Afghanistan. (…)
For many in Kabul, the most divisive issue discussed in London was the peace and reconciliation plan. Women’s groups and human rights activists offered the most vocal criticism of what they perceived as an attempt to forgive and forget the Taliban’s past behavior. (…)
Waliullah Rahmani, director of the Kabul Centre for Strategic Studies, suggested that the Afghan government’s security agenda could have ominous implications for civil society development in the country. Achieving “security by any means and at any cost” could result in the sacrifice of hard won civil rights attained at the cost of human lives, he said.
Rebuilding Haiti. Minimalist or maximalist approach? William Easterly speaking to the New York Times:
“I think the whole idea of the earthquake being an opportunity for foreigners to do more aggressive interventions is really problematic and objectionable,” he said in an interview, arguing for modest, homegrown plans. “We have tried basically everything in the book already in Haiti as far as grandiose plans, and those haven’t worked.”
Goodbye capitalism? According to David Ignatius, a new “Davos consensus” is emerging in the global political and business elite:
They take it as a given that the free market failed in the crash of 2008 and that the new system will be more regulated, more interventionist, more prudential than was the old. (…) Americans need to understand that the 2008 financial crisis proved a point that many Europeans and Asians have been arguing for decades: Economic “liberalism,” of the sort found in Britain and the United States, creates a dangerous overreliance on the market. During the boom years, their complaints seemed like just so much whining. Not anymore.
Obama will not attend EU-US summit, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Nabucco pipeline is stuck again. The reason: a dispute between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Katinka Barysch (CER) has the background.
Read today on Global Europe: Too many cooks. We need a little self-restraint from our national leaders, by Nick Witney, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) and former Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency in Brussels.
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