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bne October 2018
Opinion 63
And Germany’s call for a change is not limited to broad brush- strokes. Maas has been drilling into specific details that mirror many Russia initiatives to remove levers that Washington could use to pressure the Kremlin. Maas wants an independent European military that would downplay the predominance of Nato, a European payments system that would run in paral-
lel to the US-based SWIFT system, and a proactive EU foreign policy lifted from the nation state level to a formal EU foreign council that can act collectively, amongst other things.
Specifically Maas called for a Franco-German alliance that will in effect take Europe out from under the US security umbrella that has been the guarantor of peace since the start of the Cold War, and for Europe to actively oppose the US if it “crosses the line.”
The widening Atlantic
Germany is the biggest economy in Europe and is flourishing. It currently has record low levels of unemployment, strong economic growth, low levels of external debt and the largest current account surplus in the world. Yet since the end
of WWII Germany has been shy of playing a large role in international politics. Now it has put these qualms aside.
In a string of speeches and articles Maas is proactively calling for Germany to take the reins of power. Most recently Maas laid out a detailed blueprint in a Handelsblatt article and he was shockingly blunt.
“The fact that the Atlantic has widened politically is by no means solely due to Donald Trump. The US and Europe have been drifting apart for years. The overlapping of values and interests that shaped our relationship for two generations
is decreasing. The binding force of the East-West conflict is history,” he wrote.
The crisis in Ukraine is a good example of the growing divergence between Washington and Brussels. Europeans were annoyed by US top diplomat Victoria Nuland, who walked into Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests and took over. “Fuck the EU,” she famously said in a leaked conversation with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing how to build a new pro-US government.
Ukraine is the EU’s backyard but US policy was a cynical attempt to push its own interests in the region. Leaked US embassy cables called former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanu- kovych “a man we can do business with” before the revolution, as Washington manoeuvred to limit Putin’s attempt to get Ukraine to join his newly minted Customs Union. Nuland later openly picked jobs for Ukrainian opposition leaders, while Europe became increasingly uncomfortable with the American belief that as “the steward of the planet,” as Nuland said in Kyiv in 2014, it could ignore Brussels and Berlin.
“If you look around the world at who’s made the largest financial and political contribution to this challenge, the United States, I think, is second to none... Are we, as stewards of this planet,
going to support the right of individuals to have a say in how they are governed, to live democratically, to live openly, to live in tolerance,” Nuland said during a panel discussion on Ukraine’s East and Crimea: Solving the Unsolvable in Kyiv in 2015.
Post Euromaidan, after Yanukovych was ousted, the Europeans reasserted themselves. Then German foreign minister Frank- Walter Steinmeier together with President of the European Council Donald Tusk was at a crucial meeting where the top European diplomats persuaded the opposition protest leaders to call for early elections and leave Yanukovych in office in the meantime. bne IntelliNews sources at the meeting described Tusk shouting at the Ukrainian politicians, warning them
there would be blood on the street unless they managed the transition democratically. As it was the decision came to nothing as the crowds on Maidan chased Yanukovych out of the country within a few days. The Americans played little role in these dramatic events. The peace accords of Minsk
“Germany’s new Foreign Minister Heiko Maas recently called the US an ʻunreliable partnerʼ”
II were also a European deal negotiated between Merkel, France’s then president François Hollande and Putin. The US got back into the game again later when US Secretary of State John Kerry asserted himself, but ever since then pursuing a conclusion to the Ukrainian debacle has been a Merkel project.
Iran row
Trump’s ham-fistedness has led the EU to become increasingly assertive in its foreign policy clashes with Washington. A more recent run-in was over the US decision to reimpose a tough sanctions regime on Iran despite the fact it was fully complying with the terms of the delicately crafted deal agreed in 2015 between Iran and the permanent members of the UN security council, plus Germany.
The agreement was hailed as a diplomatic triumph and more importantly it was working, as inspectors say Iran had completely dismantled its nuclear bomb building research apparatus. Moreover, the deal opened the way for businesses to enter Iran, and European companies have already signed off on a string of lucrative agreements.
Trump threw the deal under the bus reportedly at Israel’s behest. In a leaked video clip aired in July by Israeli television, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel was responsible for Trump’s decision to quit the Iran nuclear deal.
“We convinced the US president [to exit the deal] and I had
to stand up against the whole world and come out against this agreement,” Netanyahu says in the video, cited by the Times of Israel. “And we didn’t give up.”
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