Ahmadinejad orders uranium enrichment. The NY Times reports:
Iran’s president ordered his atomic scientists on Sunday to begin enriching their stockpile of uranium in order to power a medical reactor, a move that accelerated Iran’s brinkmanship over its nuclear program by moving the country closer to producing weapons-grade fuel. (…)
United States officials, who said they were not surprised by the announcement, said they believed that it would help President Obama win more stringent sanctions against Iran, and particularly against the Revolutionary Guards, who run the nuclear program and have protected Mr. Ahmadinejad and other leaders by moving to crush Iran’s domestic opposition movement. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, reacting to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s announcement, said during a visit to Rome that sanctions could still work “if the international community will stand together and bring pressure to bear on the Iranian government.”
Focus of Chinese leadership has shifted from the US to the domestic audience, says Newsweek’s Melinda Liu:
It’s not that Chinese leaders no longer care what the Americans think. They’re just so much more worried about what ordinary Chinese think. Growing prosperity and greater communication with the outside world have made the country’s more than 1.3 billion people much harder to manage than they used to be. Now it’s a matter of basic survival for party bosses to keep a close eye on public opinion. (…) Senior leaders’ staffs now devote huge amounts of time and resources to monitoring public opinion. They commission social surveys and even assign undercover researchers to unearth what ordinary Chinese really think.
Ukraine’s presidential elections: Yanukovych likely to be the winner, but Tymoshenko might challenge results. The NY Times reports:
By early Monday, with more than 80 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Yanukovich had 48 percent, to 46 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko. Turnout was 69 percent of registered voters. (…)
In his remarks on Sunday night, Mr. Yanukovich called on Ms. Tymoshenko to accept the election and resign as prime minister. (…) The question now is what Ms. Tymoshenko will do next. She had contended last week that Mr. Yanukovich’s campaign intended to steal the election, saying that she would call for mass protests in response, in a repeat of the Orange Revolution. If Mr. Yanukovich wins by the slim margin suggested by the exit polls, she could still contest the election. “It is too early to draw conclusions,” Ms. Tymoshenko said at a news conference after the polls closed. “Everything will depend on how our team defends the results. I ask everyone to fight for every result, every document, every vote, because a vote can decide our fate.” (…)
A Yanukovich victory would be “a triumph for Moscow”:
If the count confirms the exit polls, it will amount to a rebuke of the Orange Revolution, which was supposed to serve as a post-Soviet model, moving the country toward a European-style democracy, but has instead given rise to political and economic turmoil.
A victory for Mr. Yanukovich would also be a triumph for Moscow in its struggle for influence with the West in the former Soviet Union. While Mr. Yanukovich, with the assistance of an American political consultant, has tried to remake his image so that he is not considered a favorite of Russia, he advocates policies that it welcomes. The Kremlin has been infuriated by Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, saying that the West is infringing upon Moscow’s traditional sphere of influence, and Mr. Yanukovich is vowing to abandon the plan.
Ukrainian political analyst Yevgeny Kiselyov comments for the Moscow Times:
Although the official results of the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election have not been announced, it is clear that the country’s next president will be Viktor Yanukovych. Over the past three weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko failed to close the 10-point lead Yanukovych has held since the first round of voting. Every attempt to convince voters that as president she would take the country along a new path of development didn’t convince people who asked themselves, “If Tymoshenko wasn’t able to move the country in the right direction after being prime minister for two years, how will she be able to do any better as president?”
Tymoshenko’s failure proved that it is impossible to win a presidential race after serving as prime minister of a country that was hit harder by the crisis than any other nation in Europe. Since the crisis started, the budget deficit, inflation and the government debt have soared to dangerously high levels, and the standard of living of Ukrainians plummeted.
One of the biggest factors that crippled Tymoshenko’s ability to close the gap in the past three weeks was her failure to win the support of Sergei Tigipko, a successful businessman and former Central Bank chairman who came in third place in the first round with 13 percent of the vote. (…)
And what a bizarre campaign it was. The presidential candidates never focused on the most urgent problems facing the country. There was very little discussion about how to overcome the crisis and little attention was paid to the issue of reforming the constitution, making Ukraine the only country where the ruling power is shared simultaneously by the president, the parliament and the Cabinet. Keeping this terribly unwieldy political arrangement in place guarantees that the government will be crippled by political infighting, chaos and an inability to carry out its basic functions. But instead of focusing on what Ukraine needs the most, the candidates engaged in a mud-slinging fest, accusing each other of everything from hypocrisy, lying and corruption to betraying Ukraine’s national interests.
One of Tymoshenko’s campaign strategies was to try to portray Yanukovych as Moscow’s puppet. But Yanukovych countered by making a number of statements toward the close of the campaign that were clearly intended to show that he is willing to stand up to Moscow by demanding lower prices in gas contracts and opposing the South Stream pipeline project, which will bypass Ukraine. More important, however, Yanukovych went further by questioning the sacrosanct issue of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol, saying the current rental price for the base is far too low.
Are these just empty words intended to deflect accusations by the opposition that Yanukovych was too pro-Russian, or is there a real chance that he means what he says? Once Yanukovych becomes president, we will be able to answer this question.
The Washington Post has a backgrounder about Ukraine’s relations with the West:
Ukraine today is a fragile and dysfunctional democracy, with free but sometimes corrupt media, courts vulnerable to bribes and political pressure, and weak political parties and policymaking institutions. Yevgeny Bystritsky, director of the pro-democracy International Renaissance Foundation in Kiev, said U.S. and European leaders made the mistake of romanticizing the Orange Revolution leaders as democrats resisting Russian authoritarianism and did not pressure them to pursue political reforms. “The problem is our politicians,” he said, noting that Washington paid for experts to help craft a sweeping judicial reform bill only to see it stall in parliament because political leaders were unwilling to give up control of the courts. He argued that the West should attach more conditions and demand results in exchange for aid.
Others say there are limits to what Europe and the United States can do. “Conditionality almost never works, and I’m not sure more money is going to make the difference either,” said William Taylor, who pressed Kiev for reforms as the U.S. ambassador from 2006 to 2009. “I don’t think you can bludgeon them to do things for their own good.”
Deputy Prime Minister Hryhoriy Nemyria said a “real possibility” of European Union membership for Ukraine would have done more to spur reform than any additional aid. He linked the success of democracy in neighboring Eastern European countries to the E.U. accession process. “That strong anchor was and is absent for Ukraine,” he said. Still, he acknowledged that Europe was waiting “to see Ukrainian leaders who are serious” about reform.
Armenia and Turkey: The truce is in need of a rescue, Henri J. Barkey and Thomas de Waal are arguing in the Los Angeles Times:
But this great truce is already in need of a rescue, and if it breaks down, we will end up in a worse place than where we started. In January, Turkey showed signs of having cold feet. Its foreign ministry objected to a judgment by the Armenian constitutional court supporting the protocols on the grounds that they are consistent with the founding principles of the state, which commit it to pursuing recognition of the 1915 killings as genocide. The endorsement of the court, which the U.S. government welcomed, actually opens the way for the Armenian parliament to ratify the protocols. Turkey’s move was a fairly transparent device to put the brakes on the process.
Why the EU needs more snubs. Justin Vaïsse, director of research at the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution, hopes, in a NY Times op-ed, that Obama’s decision to skip the EU-US summit will be a wake-up call:
It’s a great service that Barack Obama rendered to Europeans. This humiliation probably convinced a few more of the obvious need to finally get their acts together and be more united on foreign policy if they want to have a say in the world — or just be taken seriously. (…)
In fact, much of Europe’s progress in foreign policy in the past two decades came after similar moments of frustration, humiliation and antagonism. The various failures of Europe in the Balkans throughout the 1990s spurred a more united foreign policy and the creation of Europe’s common security and defense capabilities. The Iraq war led public opinion to briefly coalesce against the Bush administration and allowed Europeans to feel more European, and the painful divisions it engendered led leaders to adopt the common security strategy and to be more united and firm on Iran’s nuclear program.
In truth, if Europe is to ever rise to the status of great power, it will need not only more brush-offs from America, but also more antagonism from Russia and China. The problem, right now, is that Moscow and Beijing have fine-tuned their policy of divide and rule and play this card to the perfection. Russia calibrates its provocations and knows exactly how far it can push without triggering a meaningful reaction from Europeans or encouraging a sudden leap in unity and resolve. China never snubs the European Union as such, but makes sure to maximize divisions among member states who are all too happy to break ranks in exchange for temporary economic favors.
Of course, ideally, Europe would not need “enemies,” crisis or painful challenges to coalesce its forces. But let’s face it: Europe will never be a meaningful player without some sort of external spur. It will take more than fine arguments and patient education to shake off complacency and overcome the go-it-alone and free-ride tendencies of national policies.
In this sense, the current world is not stable and peaceful enough for Europe to simply be Europe — the multilateral normative paragon, the non-aggressive and herbivorous power, as the European Council on Foreign Relations once labeled it. But it is not multipolar and competitive enough, or not yet, to compel it to become more coherent, assertive and hard-headed.
Ever closer union. The current debt crisis could ultimately lead to a more integrated EU, says Newsweek’s Stefan Theil:
Working out these problems could leave Europe stronger as a political institution. Just as the Great Depression forced the U.S. to impose a tighter federalism, today’s economic crisis will likely force Europe into a closer union. Already last week, the EU Commission began pushing reforms on Greece. Through the back door of an economic crisis, the euro zone might then get the kind of political governance that skeptics always warned was necessary for a currency union to work. At the end of the tunnel could be a more integrated Europe, reformed problem economies, and ultimately a more competitive Europe.
Catherine Ashton gave a solid speech on EU foreign and security policy at the Munich Security Conference, read it here (PDF).
Read today on Global Europe: Farcical events. Let’s not waste time on summits that have no substance. By Fraser Cameron, Director of the EU Russia Centre.
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