Ashton calls for opening of Gaza crossing. AFP reports:
The European Union’s top diplomat Catherine Ashton called for the further easing of Israel’s four-year blockade of the Gaza Strip during a visit to the impoverished Hamas-run enclave on Sunday. “The answer here is opening the crossings,” Ashton told reporters on her first visit since Israel’s deadly May 31 seizure of a Gaza-bound aid fleet sparked international demands to lift the closure.
“People here recognise and understand the security needs of Israel,” she said at a news conference held at a UN-run school for Palestinian refugees. “But that should not prevent the ability to be able to see the free flow of goods into and out of Gaza in order that houses can be rebuilt, children can go to fully functioning schools and businesses can flourish.”
On Ashton’s trip to the Palestinian territories and Israel see also a New York Times report and a BBC report. Ashton’s statement after meeting Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad here, her statement after meeting Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman here.
A group of EU foreign ministers will visit Gaza in early September, AFP reports:
Italy’s foreign minister Friday said EU ministers would travel to the Gaza Strip in early September to verify Israel’s easing of a blockade of the territory.
The visit is “a delicate mission that we are preparing carefully,” Franco Frattini said, according to the ANSA news agency. “We will go to Gaza with a group of European ministers who share with me the need to observe and to help the people who live in Gaza, people who are suffering,” Frattini said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman last month invited Frattini to lead an EU delegation to Gaza, and last week Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Frattini and his Spanish and French counterparts would visit in July. Paris later indicated Germany and Britain would also participate.
“Israeli authorities will grant access and will not pose any conditions on the visit, but we are posing one condition: we will not meet with Hamas, but only with the Palestinian Authority,” Frattini said.
Europe’s economic crisis over? The New York Times reports:
Just two months ago, Europe’s sovereign debt problems seemed grave enough to imperil the global economic recovery. Now, at least some investors are treating it as the crisis that wasn’t.
Spain held an auction of 15-year bonds last week that went off without a hitch, raising 3 billion euros, or about $3.8 billion, at a relatively favorable interest rate of 5.116 percent. That was up from 4.434 percent on a debt sale in late April, though the latest one was far more heavily subscribed. Also last week, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Portugal’s credit by two notches, citing the nation’s debt burden and poor growth prospects, a sign that the country’s underlying problems are not over. Yet investors, rather than punish assets linked to Portugal’s economy, seemed to take the news in stride. (…)
“Europe has had a pretty good crisis,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “In the short term, it made a number of very constructive decisions that had the effect of calming down the markets or shifting market attention elsewhere.”
Indeed, there has been a string of calming news of late: well-subscribed bond auctions in Portugal and Italy, a deal to freeze wages in Greece as it tries to rein in its public spending, and signs that German industry, so important for the rest of Europe, is growing more strongly than expected, according to data for May.
Afghan poll: NATO does not provide security. 68 percent of Afghans believe that NATO forces do not protect them, Reuters reports.
US envoy: ICG arrest warrant complicates Sudan efforts. At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin reports:
As Sudan speeds toward a January referendum that could lead the splitting of the country or, in the worst case, all-out war, President Obama’s special envoy is complaining that his job has been made more difficult by new charges leveled against the Sudanese president.
On Monday, the International Criminal Court issued a second arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, this time on three counts of genocide. In March 2009, the ICC had indicted Bashir for five counts of “crimes against humanity.” The Obama administration has always said that war criminals should be brought to justice, but at the same time is pursuing a policy of engagement with Bashir’s government while avoiding direct contact with the Sudanese leader himself. On Tuesday, Obama said he was “fully supportive of the ICC.”
But the president’s point man on Sudan, retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, said this week that the new charges will have a damaging effect on his ability to work with Bashir’s government. Speaking at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Tuesday, he expressed dissatisfaction with the ICC’s latest move.
“The decision by the ICC to accuse Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir of genocide will make my mission more difficult and challenging especially if we realize that resolving the crisis in Darfur and South, issues of oil and combating terrorism at a 100 percent, we need Bashir,” Gration was quoted as saying by Radio Sawa, an Arabic language radio station run by the U.S. government.
War with Iran more likely? Walter Russel Mead argues that most observers get Obama’s view on Iran wrong:
There is a significantly greater chance that President Obama will lead the United States into a war with Iran than many observers think — and that chance is growing rather than shrinking as the confrontation wears on. (…)
The failure to grasp the real possibility that Obama may confront the mullahs reflects the difficulty that many foreign policy experts have in understanding the way that President Obama’s world view differs from a conventional realist perspective. (…) As laid out in the 2010 National Security Strategy and as President Obama has made clear on many occasions, the United States has a president with a vision for the kind of world he wants to build, and as he made plain in his Oslo Nobel speech, there are things for which he is willing to fight. (…)
In many ways a classic example of the Wilsonian school of American foreign policy, President Obama believes that American security can best be safeguarded by the construction of a liberal and orderly world. (…) The essence of the Wilsonian project is to turn the system of Westphalian, sovereign states into a society of states under the rule of some basic laws and principles governing how they behave internationally and at home.
Think of the European Union blown up to a global scale; in the Global Union nations would have their own governments and their own laws, but an increasingly dense framework of commonly agreed-upon laws and norms, and an increasingly complex and effective web of global institutions would supplement and in many cases replace the authority of national governments. (…)
President Obama doesn’t think that creating the Global Union is going to be accomplished under his leadership, nor is he, I think, entirely certain that the world can ultimately reach even a modest version of this goal. But he does believe that there is no other way to make the United States (and the other nations of the earth) secure, and he believes that the core strategic challenge facing American foreign policy is to gradually move the world in the direction of a post-Westphalian peace. (…)
The consequences of the Iranian nuclear drive for the President’s Wilsonian project are deadly; the Iranian nuclear program can fairly be called an existential threat to the Wilsonian ideal. In particular a nuclear Iran will kill the two dreams at the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy and indeed of his view of the world: the dream that the genie of nuclear weapons can be forced back into the bottle and the dream that the nations of the world can build a post-Westphalian international order in which the world’s governments are bound by deepening networks of laws. (…)
Make no mistake about it. If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.
Ashton not a key player on Turkey’s EU membership, says Amanda Paul (EPC) at Today’s Zaman:
The recent visit of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and European Commissioner for Enlargement Stefan Füle to Turkey was supposed to reassure Ankara over its troubled membership bid. Ashton and Füle met with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and chief EU negotiator Egemen Bagis. At the joint press conference, Mrs. Ashton said that trust and friendship were the foundation of the relationship between Turkey and the EU given that both share the same goals for peace and prosperity. Very nice words, but then that is what this relationship is increasingly about — words rather than actions.
So one visit by Ashton to Turkey and we are supposed to believe that everything will be ok? Perhaps I am being too cynical, but she will convince nobody working on this issue. While Mrs. Ashton’s comments are welcome, at the end of the day it is not her who will decide. It is the 27 member states (and at the very end the European Parliament). They are the ones taking part in the various council meetings and working groups and it is they who have the power to block or open a chapter. If even one country decides (for whatever reason) a chapter should not be opened, it won’t be. (…)
Ashton’s and Fule’s visit was little more than an EU PR exercise and will change nothing. The truth is the EU has no appetite for Turkey and at the same time, with elections on the horizon, Erdogan will do nothing that will endanger his popularity. The dead or almost dead horse will continue to be flogged.
EEAS top jobs. The EU Observer reports:
Foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton is to shortly unveil the names of 31 new heads and deputy heads of EU delegations. But the 10 top jobs in the European External Action Service (EEAS) are to be doled out in October.
The British baroness is currently conducting interviews with the final two or three candidates for each of the 31 diplomatic posts and will announce the results en bloc before the EU’s summer recess. (…)
Ms Ashton plans to advertise the top 10 posts after EU foreign ministers sign off on the legal blueprint for the EEAS on 26 July. But she will be unable to make the appointments until EU institutions clear the 2010 salaries budget for the new body – worth €9.5 million – in a move expected in September.
The 10 posts are the EEAS secretary general; two deputy secretary generals; an official in charge of budgets and personnel; the chair of the Political and Security Committee (PSC); the head of the SitCen intelligence-sharing bureau; and four directors general (DGs). One DG will handle a “thematic” directorate handling issues such as human rights and UN relations. The others will each take charge of a “geographic” directorate, splitting the globe into industrialised countries, developing countries and a final set including post-Soviet states, the Western Balkans and the Middle East.
Another 10 or so second-tier posts will come up for grabs at the same time.
Ms Ashton is considering a classic EU recruitment process consisting of joint interview panels with member states, EU commission and Council officials. But due process is likely to be outweighed by political considerations. “Member states have been lobbying vis-a-vis Ms Ashton from day one. She has a pile of papers on her desk proposing candidates,” a contact in her inner circle told this website.
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