The Geopolitical Stakes of the 2024 Romanian Presidential Elections

 The unexpected results of the first round of the Romanian presidential elections have greatly alarmed Washington, Brussels and Bucharest woke elites, who demanded and obtained the cancellation of the election process just before the second round on December 6.

https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/the-geopolitical-stakes-of-the-2024

The Danubian Democracies

 Accordingly, there is an obvious need for a more accurate geopolitical concept covering former Soviet satellite-states, subsequently lumped together into “New” Europe. The latter has proved to be an inadequate reflection of realities on the ground. 

Taking  commonalities and shared political agendas into account, one such grouping could be called  the Danubian democracies.

https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/the-danubian-democracies

A North Korean Blueprint for Romania's Future

 

If Romania's former dictator Ceaușescu wanted to emulate North Korea's dynastic communism, it now seems that his former secret police generals and their descendants wish to transform Romania into a North Korean-style militarised society. All this with NATO'S backing.

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For more than a year now, the second-in-command of NATO, Mircea Geoană, is being pushed forward by some circles in the American foreign policy establishment and in the affiliated Romanian media, as the best placed candidate to become president of Romania in the 2024 elections.

Mircea Geoană was a presidential candidate before. In 2009 he ran against incumbent president Băsescu and lost. His main qualification for being appointed ambassador to Washington, the boss of the Romanian Social Democrats or subsequently deputy Secretary-general of NATO was the fact that he is the son of Ceaușescu-era Securitate general Ioan Geoană. 

His ex- political boss Ion Iliescu, former president of Romania, said he considered Mircea Geoană as a "dimwit".

One can say many things about Ion Iliescu, but not that he isn't a shrewd judge of character. To illustrate this, here is the enlightening substance of an interview given by Geoană recently about his vision for Romania's future: 

"The only public institution that enjoys the respect and trust of Romanians is the Romanian Army. This is where we must start to rebuild(...) Investing in the army, in the military career, in modern equipment, represents more than a requirement of national security or obligations towards NATO, for which Romania acquits itself impeccably. It represents the support point for the historic Leap, which only a modern state can achieve", (Mircea Geoană.) 

Geoană sees Romania's future as a country full of army barracks, ammunition and weapons plants, manned by people thoroughly trained into military warfare or industrial arts. If during the 1980's Ceausescu wanted to inaugurate a local version of North Korean dynastic communism, Geoană -with his American and presumably with former secret police apparatchiks in Romania - now envisions the transformation of his country into a militarized society, similar, if not identical, to North Korea. 

Never mind that Romania has never been a military power before, or indeed ever wanted to become one. These development priorities, however, reflect the sad reality that in Romanian politics the American military-industrial complex and NATO are calling the shots.

Unfortunately, these "reconstruction plans" for Romania, drafted somewhere else, can succumb to the law of unintended consequences. The most obvious of such consequences that comes to mind is a militarised Romania that could easily turn back into a totalitarian state in the decades ahead and become a security threat to the entire region which surrounds it. This potential outcome of the 2024 presidential elections is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Last century, NATO was for decades known to support the dictatorial regime of general Franco in Spain. A fully militarised Romania would also complement nicely Zelensky's de facto dictatorship in Ukraine.

Romania's Confused Geopolitics

 Starting with 1968, Romania's geopolitical situation and the foreign policy of the Romanian state stopped taking into account the country's historical ties and the geographical area it belongs to .This situation has changed unfortunately little since.

For a long period of time, the modern Romanian state had a policy of alliances that reflected the fact that the country's political elites had a very clear idea about Romania's actual enemies, its potential enemies and the states that could be of help in obtaining or defending its independence.

Until the end of the 19th century, the number one enemy of the newly created Romanian state was the Ottoman Empire, against which the Romanian army fought, alongside the Russian troops, to obtain its independence. Second on the list of Romania's enemies was, until its disappearance in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian empire.

After the union with Transylvania, Moldova and Bucovina in 1918 and the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the main enemy of Greater Romania became the USSR, a communist state that emerged from the ruins of the old Russian empire. This enmity, it is worth emphasising, did not have a historical or geopolitical basis, being of a purely ideological nature ( in fact, between 1934 and 1936 Titulescu negotiated with USSR's Litvinov a non-aggresion pact with the Soviet Union ). For the Romanian political class in the interwar period, however, Soviet communism represented a permanent and real threat, because the infiltration of Moscow's agents had the potential to undermine the stability of the Romanian state.

The second great enemy of Romania in the interwar period was Nazi Germany, which in 1938 imposed on Romania, through the Vienna Diktat, the cession of northwestern Transylvania to Hungary. The success of the Nazis in Vienna encouraged Stalin in 1940 to demand by means of an ultimatum the reunification of Moldova with the USSR.

Until 1937, Romania had a policy of regional alliances well thought out by the then foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu. This is how the Little Entente appeared, a pact signed in 1920-21 between Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenes directed against Austro-Hungarian revisionism and the Balkan Pact of 1934 between Greece, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian and Turkey.

In 1941, the first and perhaps the most serious geopolitical error occurred, when Marshal Antonescu - the head of the Romanian state at the time - decided to participate with a million soldiers in the Nazi invasion of the USSR, although the dictator Salazar of Portugal advised him, in a secret diplomatic communication, to opt for Romania's neutrality.

After the occupation of Romania în 1945 by the Red Army, the ally of the Romanian state became the USSR, together with all the member states of the Warsaw Treaty. This time, Romania had a collective enemy, Western Europe, represented militarily in the area by NATO, which appeared in 1949.

It is nevertheless remarkable that the communist regime in Bucharest managed to convince Moscow to withdraw its troops from Romania as early as 1958, 31 years before that happened in the other communist states from Central and South-Eastern Europe.

After 1968, the Ceaușescu regime opted for a bizarre geopolitical orientation, anti-Soviet but pro-Chinese and pro-American, a fact that largely isolated Romania from the other alliance partners from the Soviet bloc and contributed to strategic destabilization in the area. For the first time in Romania's history, the Romanian state sought economic and political support outside Europe, from countries on other continents, such as the USA or China, located thousands of kilometers away, but which in turn had a adversarial relationship with the USSR .

Even more curious was the 1976 affiliation of Romania to the Group of 77, promoter of a policy of non-alignment. Since the group had only Yugoslavs and Romanians as members in Europe, Romania was included in the group of Latin American states of the G77. Again, Romania's potential allies were countries from other continents, thousands of kilometers away from our area of ​​the world. In this context, it should also be mentioned the alliances of the Ceaușescu regime with countries from Africa or the Middle East, which betrayed the exaggerated great power ambitions of the Romanian dictator.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to a return to normal from a geopolitical point of view or to re-establishing Romania's traditional alliances. Romania's accession to NATO in 2003, an alliance led from a distance of 7000 km from Europe, by Washington , is a case in point. Becoming a member of this alliance did not contribute to the geopolitical stabilization of the area, or to more secure Romanian borders , as the war in Ukraine currently demonstrates, on the contrary. Sadly, although since 2007 Romania has become a European Union member, the EU has been systematically prevented by the US to build its own collective security structures.

POLAND, THE USA'S TROJAN HORSE IN EUROPE

 The Polish premier attended an economic forum in Bucharest last week and proposed to Bucharest an economic and military alliance between Poland, Romania and Ukraine which is both anti-West and anti-East. Curiously, the project has many similarities with the political philosophy espoused in the inter-war period by the fascist Iron Guard in Romania. 

* * *

 After the refusal of Germany and France to participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US decided to split the EU in two: "old Europe", who wishes to avoid American military adventures and wants strategic autonomy, and "new Europe", made up of new NATO members such as Poland, the Baltic states, Romania and maybe Bulgaria.

Already in 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Poland and Romania seconded the US proposal to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance. France and Germany opposed it, in the name of preserving the strategic balance in Europe. A few months after the summit in the summer of 2008, Georgia attacked Russian troops in Ossetia and Abkhazia, which led to war with Russia.

Now the Polish prime minister, who attended an economic summit in Bucharest last week, has launched the project of forming a "strategic triangle " between Poland, Romania and Ukraine, which would represent an economic counterweight directed against EU companies supported by Brussels, as well as a military one, directed against Russia.

It is obvious to me that this absurd project is also inspired by Americans, the "divide and conquer" strategy being obvious. The Polish Prime Minister hopes that this alliance, which would have 100 million members, will be able to economically counterbalance  230 million Western Europeans and, militarily, 180 million Russians.

A. Severin, former Romanian foreign minister, reached similar conclusions: "This is how the war started by the USA in Ukraine is directed not only against Russia, but also against the EU (German Europe), as well as the attempts to form, within the EU or across the borders of the EU, in association with actors from its eastern neighborhood, dissident groups, fundamentally German-sceptic, all of which have as a driving force Poland, with its aspiration to the status of the first European power. Such attempts, of American inspiration and vigorous Polish support, are the Bucharest Format 9 (nine states from the east of the EU, strategic partners of the USA), the Three Seas Initiative (Baltic, Black and Adriatic) and, now, the "Polish-Romanian-Ukrainian confederal strategic triangle".

The Romanian Prime Minister, General Ciuca, did not object to his Polish guest's project. Ciuca fought in Iraq in 2004, and is therefore a man the American hegemonists view as safe. However, in the alliance of this Latin country of 20 million inhabitants with two Slavic states counting together 80 million inhabitants, Romania would be the disadvantaged partner.

Furthermore, as a Latin state, Romania's place is next to France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, not next to Poland and Ukraine. In other words, alongside the states of western Europe, not its neighbours from the north or east.

America's Imperial Apparatchiks in Eastern Europe

Upending constitutional order or undermining the political systems of Orthodox members of the EU or NATO will not work for the Alliance in the long run. Furthermore, cultivating hate of Russia in these countries is bound to backfire.

Very few Westerners know that in 2014 the actions in Maidan Square were mirrored in neighbouring Romania, albeit without violence. On the cusp of the presidential elections, American-backed Romanian secret services replaced the Liberal Party's president at the time with an ethnic German, Klaus Iohannis, who was hand-held to win the country's presidency that year. This, to be sure, was one of the freakiest developments ever in the country's political history, very similar to Ukraine being led by a Jewish president.

The former president of the Romanian Liberals was definitely an unsafe choice for the US in the region because he was friendly towards Russia. As Nato was gearing up for a major confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, neighbouring states like Romania, Bulgaria or even neutral Moldova had to have at their helm political leaders that the US could control 100 percent.

It's a well known fact that - generally speaking - Catholic Western politicians have always been mistrustful of politicians hailing from Orthodox countries. Even when they were accepted as EU members, for example, Romanians and Bulgarians were made to feel like tolerated, second-class citizens and prevented from enjoying the full benefits attached to their membership. Thus, even 15 years on since their accession to the EU, neither Romania nor Bulgaria have been accepted into the Schengen zone. 

These double standards in the way the EU is being managed, where its Catholic member states are favoured and where its Eastern Orthodox members are regularly derided or have their economic performances downgraded, are too well-documented to insist upon here. The important point to mention at present is that the meddling of the US and EU in the above-mentioned Orthodox countries' selection of their political leaders is not only extensive, but highly detrimental to the very ideas of democracy, freedom and self-rule.

In preparation for the current conflict in Ukraine, the US felt it needed to promote to executive office in Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria an Americanised breed of politicians who, although natives of the countries concerned, have been trained at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government or have done stints at the World Bank. Orthodox nations, it seems, are not to be trusted to make decisions about what is happening in their region: they have to be guided and kept on a short leash by Washington. 

Current events in Ukraine show why the US and the EU have worked in tandem over the last few years to demolish what was left of the Romanian or Bulgarian democracies which emerged after the 1989 revolutions. Like nowadays in Ukraine, opposition leaders have been regularly jailed on corruption charges that in the rest of Europe could attract at most a fine. In so doing, the US has made sure that the "right" politicians get into high office, and once there, they do America's bidding against its eternal foe Russia. 

At the end of the day, these countries are going to be left with quasi-dictatorial political regimes manned by Western-trained politicians who act as Washington's puppets and seriously affect their countries' national interest, if Bulgaria's recent loss of gas supplies is any guide. Furthermore, pushing these countries' leaders to prove their loyalty to the Western alliance and adopt a much more bellicose stance towards Russia than what their citizens would normally approve of, makes their territory prime targets of Russian missiles if and when the Ukraine conflict reaches boiling point. But who cares, right ? They are only some poorer, second-class citizens of an alliance lacking the most basic respect towards their traditions, religion and culture...

On the G8 and NATO

 In the spring of 1997 during my lobbying activity to foreign chancelleries, I was very preoccupied with the need to create an appropriate institutional framework for the transition from a bipolar to a multipolar world. American neoconservatives and NATO had other plans, however. If they wanted Russia as an enemy, well ... now they got it.

In the spring of 1997, I came up with the idea of ​​recommending to the Clinton administration the inclusion of Russia in the G7, a proposal that was accepted by the Americans. Thus, in June 1997 the G7 became G8 with Russia as a member.

My geopolitical suggestion was based on solid economic reasons, but also on the fact that Russia felt immense frustration with its international status after the disappearance of the bipolar world. Between 1995 and 1997 I participated in a series of international conferences organized by EuroForum or IBC (two London companies) in Bucharest, Prague and London on the transition of Eastern European states to a market economy and the necessary reforms. On those occasions, I was able to see the dissatisfaction of the Russians with the way this process was evolving in their country, but also with the uncertain status of the new Russia internationally.

Unfortunately  at the time , the West had not yet framed a coherent post-1989 foreign policy, so as to give the Russians the feeling that they had not become a third-hand power, as many US or EU political actors would have liked. The fact that my proposal was accepted proves that at that time the Clinton administration had not yet come to be dominated by neoconservatives, the artisans behind American unipolarity, that was inaugurated by President GW Bush after the 2001 terrorist attack.

In the end, Russia was arbitrarily reduced - at the instigation of the neoconservatives - to the status of a big state with an oil pump ( Nina Khrushcheva ) and was removed from the G8 in 2014, after it annexed the Crimean peninsula.

In the summer of 1997, I also sent a lobby letter to then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in support of Romania's NATO membership. My motivation was by no means anti-Russian. At that time, the country was in a dire economic situation, failing to attract - like the Czech Republic, Hungary or Poland - foreign investors to take over large bankrupt companies in Romania. It was only years later that I realised that the military goal of the alliance had really become that of encircling Russia, and it never crossed my mind in 1997 that NATO would accept the Baltic states in 2004 as members of the alliance. ..

Certainly at that time, I did not grasp that I was trying to gain Romania's accession to a politico-military alliance, NATO, which would become responsible two decades later for the outbreak of hostilities heralding World War III, because this is the phase which we are all in after the events of 2014 in Ukraine. Mea maxima culpa !

A NEOCON FOREIGN MINISTER IN TITULESCU'S COUNTRY

 

 I have lived to see this one too! In Titulescu's country, they have installed as  foreign minister a certain Bogdan Aurescu, who acts abroad as if he were an employee of the US State Department and his boss were Blinken, not the president of Romania.

On January 24, Aurescu proposed - without his EU counterparts paying any attention - that the next regular meeting of EU foreign ministers be held in Kiev, in an apparent show of "solidarity" with Ukraine. Without mentioning a single word about the Ukrainian government's policies of denationalization through the language suffered by the 500,000 Romanians who actually live in the middle of the Ukrainian nightmare, Aurescu is worried about the fate of Ukraine! (I won't mention here the fact that in 2015 the same Romanians living in Ukraine complained that the Kiev authorities were forcibly recruiting them and sending them to fight the Russophones in the Donbas.)

As a matter of interest, in 1998 - anticipating trouble in the region - I sent a letter to Romanian President Emil Constantinescu, advising him to try to relocate the Romanians from Ukrainian Bukovina to the villages in Transylvania left empty after the massive migration of Transylvanian Saxons to Germany after 1989. Naturally, the former president turned a typical deaf ear , as if those Romanians did not exist for Bucharest. President Iohannis can find the letter in the archives of the Presidency and could try, as a fellow Transylvanian Saxon, to save willing Romanians of Ukraine from  Kiev's nationalist excesses in the way I proposed back then. He could consider that, of course, once the ski season comes to an end...

As for Aurescu, a resignation of honour would be the most appropriate exit from the scene, even more necessary than that of Prime Minister Ciuca. I am sure that just as the Ukrainians have found a job for the former Georgian president Shakashvili, Aurescu too would be able to find a job over there with the help of American neocons, maybe even as Kiev's foreign minister.

UKRAINE AND THE END OF PEACE IN EUROPE

In an unfortunate turn of events, it seems Ukrainians are intent on finalising their nation-building at the expense of European peace.

Today Romania celebrates 163 years since the double election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as ruler of the United Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. The double election capped a 3-year diplomatic offensive by Romanian intellectuals in leading European capitals, aimed at securing  international recognition for the new state - formed through the unification of Moldova and Wallachia - by the great powers of the day. 

Cuza's double election was the gimmick used by the founders of the modern Romanian state in order to circumvent the restrictions imposed on the unification of the two principalities by the European great powers during  the 1856 Paris peace congress . The unity of the new Romanian state was thus obtained peacefully, albeit by defying the will of Western and Central European rulers, most notably those of Great Britain and the Austrian empire. Less than a decade later, the Romanian state became a kingdom and in 1877 it obtained its independence from the Ottoman empire.

This outstanding example of diplomatic skill and statecraft allowed the new state to survive and prosper. At the end of WWI, the Romanian kingdom more than doubled its territory and population, reuniting within its borders all the Romanians hitherto living in Austro-Hungarian or Russian empires. To this day, for all its shortcomings, Romania is a functioning democracy, a stable and peaceful nation of Europe.

Europe is unfortunately witnessing today the different saga of yet another new state, Ukraine, at its doorstep. The evolution of Ukraine since 1991 has not matched Romania's peaceful model in any way shape or manner. The initial Western enthusiasm from the 1990's having evaporated, Ukraine is barely functioning and looks set to put an end to peace in Europe - a peace that has lasted largely uninterrupted since 1945. 

In my professional view, this is happening because Ukraine lacks a patriotic elite. Sure, there are pro-western politicians and parties, as there are pro-Russian parties and politicians. What Ukraine badly needed, however, is a breed of politicians and intellectuals who are pro-Ukrainian, that is, exclusively dedicated to advancing a purely Ukrainian agenda on the international stage. 

The lack of such an elite was and is currently being used by interested parties, like Russia and the United States. Their geopolitical designs, however, have very little to do with the core interests of the new nation. Sadly, however, the Ukrainians have failed to prove to them both that they have what it takes to build a strong and peaceful nation.

The very latest developments are a case in point. In an open-for-all-to-see international conspiracy, some politicians from the UK and the United States are using the Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border to sell rumours and unconfirmed stories to the Western public about Moscow's intention to install a puppet regime in Kiev. Echoing the London or Washington storyline, current Ukrainian authorities have vowed to round up all the local politicians who might be part of the plot. In so doing, they seem to overlook the fact that they behave as a puppet regime of the West themselves. Moreover, Ukrainian leaders are showing a bizarre willingness to send their own citizens to the slaughter , by beating the drums of war with Russia on behalf of the West.

In truth, taking part in a conspiracy against peace in Europe is not the way to advance Ukrainian nation-building. As an historian, I am more convinced today than ten years ago that what we are dealing with in Ukraine's case is the failed launch of the new state. In other words, over the past 30 years Ukrainians have proved to the rest of the world that they are not mature enough to have their own state and to govern themselves peacefully , with only minimal foreign interference.

Unfortunately, as Ukrainians rejected neutrality out of hand - which is the only realistic solution to their problems -  they are running the serious risk of disappearing again from the map of Europe as an independent state. In case that happens, they will not be able to blame Russia or the West, but only themselves.

The Failed Presidents of Eastern Europe

  With each passing day, I am more and more convinced that the Ukrainians have fallen into the same political trap as Romanian voters did when they elected Iohannis as president in 2014.

To be sure, Iohannis did not have the necessary national political experience : until his election, he was the mayor of a Transylvanian city atypical for Romania, nor was he a member of the Liberal Party (he had been active in the German Forum). No, he was elected because Romanian voters thought that by endorsing a Saxon they would get a better treatment in Brussels and that they would be accepted faster in the Schengen area by the EU:

"The election of Iohannis is undoubtedly linked to high expectations and hopes. But these alone do not fundamentally change the political situation in Romania,"  a leading German CDU MP said. "Doubts about Romania's accession to the Schengen Area persist (...) (Romania) will not achieve this goal in 2015," he added. The reaction of the chairman of the Bundestag Committee on Internal Affairs comes in the context in which, recently, the president Klaus Iohannis declared in the German press that he will make efforts for Romania's accession to Schengen to take place in 2015. "( Adevarul newspaper from 2015)

In turn, Zelensky was elected president without any previous political experience. In my opinion, the Ukrainians voted for him because of the supposed connections that someone of his ethnicity might have in Washington. Ukrainians seem to have believed - wrongly, as it comes out - that the mere choice of Zelensky as president would secure their admission into NATO. ( Unfortunately, neoconservatives of Jewish origin's perceived domination of US State Department structures had created a vulnerability for the United States, which is currently being exploited by the likes of Zelensky. )

Both Iohannis and Zelensky were also elected with a mandate to end corruption, which has not happened. Instead, Iohannis became - ironically for a descendant of Hitler's allies in Transylvania - a vocal champion of campaigns to combat anti-Semitism in Romania ...

The two presidents both belong to microscopic ethnic minorities from Romania or Ukraine, which unfortunately do not have a history of harmonious coexistence with the majorities of the two states. This fact makes their selection for their state's top job  even more inexcusable.

The consequences of choosing the two presidents are worrying, to say the least. Romania's domestic political instability has become chronic over the past year, while Zelensky has managed to endanger peace across Eastern Europe through his uninspired neighborhood policy.

It is obvious today that at the instigation of domestic and / or foreign services, both peoples made a colossal electoral error. I am curious to see, however, how all this will play out in the end.

When History repeats itself as a Farce

 

On the 20th of October the US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited Bucharest, where he met with President Iohannis and Defence Minister Ciuca. A day later, President Iohannis designated Ciuca as the next Prime Minister of Romania, to replace the disgraced Vasile Citu. 

At first, General Ciuca sought a parliamentary vote of confidence in a PNL minority government and failed. For his second attempt, President Iohannis enlisted the help of Romania's social democratic party (PSD), which he brought - against the wishes of many Liberal party members - into a coalition with the ruling Liberals, not before destroying the former coalition between the Liberals and a smaller centre-right party, USR Plus.

Iohannis - who for years has campaigned and got re-elected as president on an anti-PSD platform (which was regularly labelled by him as the "red plague") - has thus stunned most members of his Liberal party, as well as the country's leading writers and artists who had hitherto supported his policies and presidential bids. Moreover, he single-handedly imposed Citu as the new president of the Liberal party and provoked the expulsion of the incumbent party president, former PM Ludovic Orban, who was against undoing the coalition with USR Plus. (To fully understand the character of Iohannis, it's worth mentioning the fact that it was Ludovic Orban who had convinced his party members in 2014 to accept Iohannis and to support his presidential bid.)

Lloyd Austin came to Bucharest in the middle of the crisis provoked by the political clumsiness of the Romanian president. In all probability, he was the one who advised Iohannis to promote general Ciuca to the post of Romanian PM, the first general to lead the government since the end of WWII.

A historical retrospective is in order here. In 1940, Hitler was preparing the invasion of the USSR and badly needed Romania's oil reserves and military help. As a result, general Ion Antonescu was the prime minister selected to lead Romania during the war, with the support of Nazi Germany. The tragedy of Romania after 1945 sprung from the nefarious alliance concluded by Antonescu with Hitler, which ended up in the occupation of the country by the victorious Red Army.

As Marx was fond of reminding his readers, history can only be repeated twice: first as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce. 

To put things into perspective, it is fair to say that Putin is nowhere near as fierce an enemy of the West as Stalin once was. Lloyd Austin's efforts to prepare the Eastern flank of NATO for a Russian invasion of Ukraine are largely misguided. What's more, the American Secretary of Defence is guilty of gross interference in Romania's internal political affairs and of playing an identical role in Romanian eyes to that of Hitler in 1940. In other words, Lloyd Austin behaved in Bucharest like a Hitler 2.0 of sorts, provoking the ire of the Romanian intellectual and artistic elites who feel they're witnessing a grotesque political farce all over again.

EU's Regional Security Concerns

 October 27, 2010

Slowly but surely, EU leaders are waking up to the fact that they should take regional security into their own hands and promote a neighbourhood diplomacy which would eventually have to exclude NATO or the United States, but would be inclusive of Russia and Turkey.

This is the new geostrategic context in which the Sarkozy-Merkel-Medvedev meeting has taken place last week in Deauville. As the leaders of the two most powerful EU countries, Sarkozy and Merkel could no longer overlook the adverse consequences for the Union of the US’ involvement in promoting the Orange revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Romania. The two previous winters beset by gas supply interruptions, as well as the Georgian war were alarming enough events for France and Germany to take action. Now that a pro-Russian president is again in power in Kiev, and that the Georgian conflict is largely frozen even if not solved, Merkel and Sarkozy can concentrate on the future relationship with Russia and, to a lesser extent, with Turkey.

Since 2008, president Medvedev has advanced a common Russia-EU security architecture project, which until recently has received the cold shoulder from Paris or Berlin. Far from trying to divide the NATO alliance, as American pundits claim, the Russians feel that regional security would be better served if Russia and the EU adapted to the new geopolitical landscape and built a regional security organisation. Indeed, as the EU is one of Russia’s largest customers for oil and gas, it makes sense for both supplier and end-user to join forces in ensuring the security of supply routes and – it goes without saying – in preventing the US from interfering again in each other’s “spheres of influence”. The pay-off, especially during these tight economic times, could be huge, as this way both EU and Russia would save tens of billions of euros earmarked for the construction of undersea pipelines, originally planned to bypass problem-countries like the Ukraine.

Further afield, the European Union has to compete for Central Asian oil & gas with a turbo-charged China and with a burgeoning India. By comparison, Russia’s cooperation with China is functioning smoothly : oil & gas pipelines have been built, from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to China, and more are planned and paid for. To date, the Europeans haven’t been successful in completing more than one such project with Russia, namely the North Stream pipeline. That brings it into the same leagues with India, which experiences similar difficulties in securing its energy supplies. In both cases, the negative outcome is the direct result of the US’ involvement in regional security matters and trade options, from Eastern Europe to the Persian Gulf.

Russia’s frustration with US-supported revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, and the disruptions of gas supplies that affected Gazprom’s earnings, have determined Moscow to shift its geopolitical agenda towards China, taking its Central Asian allies along with her. Thus since 2001, Russia and China have established the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), designed to deal with security threats affecting Russia, China and Central Asia. The SCO is the first working example of a regional security organisation which will become the hallmark of the security arrangements of the evolving multipolar world. Similarly, the ASEAN countries have this year started working on their own collective security architecture, and across the Atlantic, a group of Latin American countries have established Unasur as of 2008.

As a consequence, the European Union, will have to compete for the natural resources it needs and for political influence with a player like China. The latter was quicker off the mark and better at developing a brisk raw materials and energy trade with Russia, Central Asia and Latin America, as well as in reaching cooperative security arrangements with Russia.

Coming just weeks before the Lisbon NATO summit, the Deauville summit has given a clear indication of where the immediate security interests of the European Union lie. These, to be sure, are not global, but regional in scope and would have to involve Russia and Turkey. As for NATO, the outdated organisation is still in search of an elusive enemy, which will probably have to be found in outer space, in partnership with NASA. (sources: EurActiv, Presseurop, SME.sk, BBC)