Saturday, April 10, 2010

He’s Just not that Into You

The White House set up a focus meeting with former eastern European Soviet satellite states. The EU feels snubbed that it can’t bring to it a circus atmosphere of bring representatives of the utterly symbolic rotating Presidency, European Connission, Euro-this-and-that, and a retinue of thousands.

The US' decision not to invite any EU officials to a top-level security event in Prague is being seen as a fresh put-down by some in Brussels.

US leader Barack Obama will in the Czech capital on Thursday (8 April) sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty with his Russian counterpart before hosting a dinner with 11 heads of state and government from selected European countries.
The irony being that the internationally inept Obama is signing off on an arms reduction pact that the Bush White House negotiated.

The subject is security, something the EU has not the least serious bit of yet, but no matter – they need an orgy of photo-ops to cover for some deficiency of regards (as yet unearned, even in Europe,) that will replace any useful dialog with the near-weekly “historic summits” that have occupied the dim-bulb continental press for what now seems like years.
"This dinner points yet again to the fact that the European Union needs to make a common foreign policy a reality so that President Obama knows whom to call or who to invite for dinner."
Ergo: summits and dinners = continental security. Serious, serious “partners”, we have there.

The point is that there is no point in meeting at all with an ineffectual, consistently hostile “partner”, no matter how willing they are to set their passive-aggression aside for a week or so.
It also comes after Mr Obama cancelled an US-EU summit due to take place in Madrid in May, however. US and EU officials later suggested that future summits should be held only "when we both feel the need for one," rather than on a regular basis.

The developments embarrassed the Spanish EU presidency and have prompted questions of whether Washington continues to see the EU as an important player on the world stage.
The arrogance of the statement that assumes that anyone, anywhere “continues” to see the EU as an important player of the world stage, is undergirded by the idea that it even exists in any real way yet, as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

What’s emerging from the continued, strange hyperventilation from Brussels is that they are desperate to seek legitimacy, and that even those like the US who are desperate to help the Europeans form a Unitary state can’t find a way to plausibly support it with any seriousness.

Contentions are with those who ARE seriously in need to being dealt with diplomatically – and they are Russia, China, and the key players in the near east and Asia-pacific. There is a NEED to do that now, and on an ongoing basis. There is NO NEED to spend diplomatic capital playing dress-up for the Europeans, so that they can feel that they aren’t the dorky last kid picked to play dodge-ball.

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