Harper and Putin talk tough on trade, Mideast, but warm up over hockey

Mark MacKinnon
Vladivostok, Russia — The Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Sep. 08 2012, 7:49 AM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Sep. 08 2012, 4:08 PM EDT

‘There’s lots of things that Mr. Putin and our government do not necessarily agree on, but our conversations are extremely frank on these issues,’ Canadian Prime Minister says.

At least there was hockey to talk about.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Russian President Vladimir Putin reminisced briefly but warmly about the epochal hockey series 40 years ago between Canada and the Soviet Union during a bilateral meeting Saturday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.

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It was the only time the two leaders found common ground during a meeting marked by disagreements about policy toward Iran and Syria, as well as the unimpressive Canada-Russia trade relationship.

The meeting – the first tête-à-tête between Mr. Putin and Mr. Harper since 2007 – began awkwardly with Mr. Putin running more than an hour late because of a packed schedule of other bilateral meetings. Mr. Harper then made Mr. Putin wait several minutes before finally entering the meeting room to stiff smiles and handshakes.

“I’ll just say the tone with Mr. Putin, you know, there’s a lot of things, it’s not a secret, there’s lots of things that Mr. Putin and our government do not necessarily agree on,” Mr. Harper told reporters afterward, “but I’ll always say that our conversations are extremely frank on these issues.”

Mr. Harper said he spent part of the 50-minute meeting trying to encourage Mr. Putin to end its support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin has provided diplomatic cover for Mr. al-Assad as he has used his army to try to crush the 18-month rebellion, using its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block resolutions designed to pressure the regime.

“I did bring up Syria of course. Obviously, the government of Russia and ourselves have very different perspectives on this. Our view is pretty clear that as long as Assad remains in power, practising brutality against his citizens, the situation is going to become more and more desperate and more chaotic for everybody. And that’s why he needs to go and, obviously, Mr. Putin has a different perspective. But I urged Mr. Putin to play a more positive role.”

Mr. Harper said he also encouraged Mr. Putin to continue to pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

Disputes over issues in the Middle East have started to affect the broader ties between Ottawa and Moscow. In a letter to Canadian delegates attending the APEC conference, Canadian ambassador to Russia John Sloan wrote that “because of the disagreements on Syria and other issues, our political relationship is in something of a holding pattern.”

It’s unlikely Mr. Harper managed to change the Russian President’s mind on Saturday. In an interview broadcast on Russian television this week ahead of the opening of the APEC summit, Mr. Putin gave a combative defence of his country’s policies in the Middle East.

“How come Russia is the only one who’s expected to revise its stand? Don’t you think our counterparts in negotiations ought to revise theirs as well? Because if we look back at the events in the past few years, we’ll see that quite a few of our counterparts’ initiatives have not played out the way they were intended to,” he told RT television. “Look at what’s going on in Arab countries. There have been notable developments in Egypt. Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, etc. Would you say that order and prosperity have been totally ensured for these nations? And what’s going on in Iraq?”

Mr. Putin seemed more interested in discussing the anemic trade between Canada and Russia than Mr. Harper’s thoughts about the Middle East. Hosting the APEC summit in Vladivostok – a port city of 600,000 that was a closed military base during the Soviet era – is part of a Kremlin push to deepen its engagement with the Asia-Pacific region, a task made urgent by the economic crisis in Europe.

In brief remarks before reporters were ushered out of the room, Mr. Putin lamented the fact that while the potential for Canada-Russia trade was “huge,” the two countries had not yet been able to elevate their economic relationship to the level Russia would like. “Unfortunately, in absolute figures, the value remains limited,” he said.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail ahead of the APEC summit, Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast – who led a trade mission to Moscow in June – said Canada wanted to expand trade with Russia, but “Canadian businesses are still concerned about the investment climate. When Canadian businesses invest abroad, they look for certainty, they look for predictability and they look for the security of their investment.”

In his remarks about the Canada-USSR hockey series, Mr. Putin particularly praised the Canadian players as “true goodwill ambassadors” for travelling to Russia this week to mark the anniversary. In particular, he asked Mr. Harper to pass on his thanks to them for playing a memorial game in the city of Yaroslavl, whose hockey team, Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, was wiped out in a plane crash a year ago.

Mr. Harper called the 1972 series “the beginning of our modern cultural relations.”

continue reading: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/harper-and-putin-talk-tough-on-trade-mideast-but-warm-up-over-hockey/article4529251/

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• Doug Saunders By cutting ties with Iran, we just shot ourself in the foot

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By cutting ties with Iran, we just shot ourself in the foot

By Doug Saunders
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, September 08 2012

The boxy red-brick building on Metcalfe Street looks more like a medium-security prison than an embassy, and its air of menace extends beyond its architectural design and impenetrable gates.

Iranian Canadians have long believed that Tehran’s outpost in Ottawa is used to spy on their activities, in less than subtle ways, and occasionally to send intimidating messages to expats.

That sort of subterfuge, if it got out of hand, might have been a good reason to expel Iran’s ambassador to Canada. Likewise, the torture killing of Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi in 2003 and its subsequent cover-up were good reasons to withdraw Canada’s ambassador from Tehran.

But those were not the sorts of reasons given by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird on Friday when he tried to explain the extraordinary step he had just taken of cutting diplomatic relations with Iran, closing Canada’s embassy in Tehran and expelling Iran’s diplomatic staff from Ottawa.

Instead, Mr. Baird said, at some length, that Canada simply does not like Iran. The Islamic Republic supports Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in his brutal crackdown against rebels. It continues to be dishonest with the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear programs. It backs dangerous organizations, including terrorist groups, in Lebanon and Afghanistan. Its loudmouth president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, often rails against Israel and Jews and doesn’t treat leaders and diplomats with respect.

Mr. Baird even went so far as to claim that the current government of Iran is “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.” Even if that were true, it would not be a reason to sever diplomatic ties – in fact, it would be a very good reason to maintain them.

Closing an embassy is rarely done even in moments of hostility. By its very nature, it prevents the possibility of further relations with the country in question, good or bad, influential or ineffective. Messages of protest, off-record moves to quell an eruption, clandestine efforts to build relations with reformists within the regime – all of these options are no longer possible. Once you’ve pulled the plug, you’re out of the game.

Libya’s embassy in Ottawa was more menacing than Iran’s has ever been – it employed goons in Moammar Gadhafi’s intelligence agency to infiltrate visiting students, follow them daily, and sometimes threaten to kill their families.

Even after Libyan embassies in other countries had fallen to anti-Gadhafi rebels last year, the Ottawa mission remained firmly loyal to the dictator. Yet, Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t order it closed until August of 2011, after Canada and its NATO partners had been at war with Libya for months. Up to that point, it made sense to maintain the embassy: It was a vital channel to the regime.

Iran is a deeply troubled country controlled by a religious dictatorship and an elected president who have little respect for international agreements. Yet, these are matters of diplomacy, negotiation and sanctions – and Iran’s leadership is factional and fragmented and very likely rejected by a majority of the public, so has genuine potential for movement.

There’s no imminent risk. U.S. intelligence agencies and Israel’s military chief, Benny Gantz, have said recently they believe Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. There’s no suggestion of any Iranian military attack against any other country at the moment. The Iranian menace is all politics and potential.

The crucial milestone in Iran is not the acquisition of nuclear weapons – which, even if they began pursuing them, would be years away. It’s the June 14, 2013, presidential election – which could repeat the crackdowns, reprisals and fraud of the 2009 vote, but also have real potential for leadership change. (Mr. Ahmadinejad, facing a term limit, will not be running.)

Sanctions have the power to sway that vote. So do diplomatic acts. Canada has now abandoned such possibilities.

“This is the first time in decades that a Canadian prime minister, Liberal or Conservative, appears to be advocating approaches that reduce diplomatic opportunities for peace during an international crisis,” Canada’s last full ambassador to Tehran, John Mundy, wrote on this page this year when Stephen Harper began talking about abandoning negotiations. We now have another unfortunate first. The Prime Minister ought to listen to his diplomats.

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/by-cutting-ties-with-iran-we-just-shot-ourself-in-the-foot/article4527936/

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Cameron and Obama ended the neocon era. But the era of Assad goes on

David Cameron and Barack Obama buried the neocons in Washington. But the west will pay a price for the quiet life

By Martin Kettle
The Guardian
Wednesday 14 March 2012 21.20 GMT

Barack Obama welcomes David Cameron during an official arrival ceremony on the south lawn of the White House in Washington today. Photograph: Mark Wilson / POOL/EPA

It is as easy to be distracted by the outward glamour of a prime ministerial visit to Washington as it is to fail to discern its occasional real inner substance. Both things apply in the case of David Cameron’s White House talks with Barack Obama. On one level they were the very embodiment of the self-indulgent vacuity of which Simon Jenkins wrote here. On another, they marked the end of a chapter in modern history.

On Wednesday in the White House they buried the neocons. Or, to put it rather more carefully, since neoconservatism has been through many contrasting incarnations and the term is widely misused, Cameron and Obama marked the imminent close of the phase of US-UK foreign policy that began after 9/11 with the coming together of American imperial power and British support for the active promotion of democracy and liberal institutions, particularly in the Muslim world.

Of course, like most attempts to draw a line in the sand of history, this one is approximate and inconclusive in many ways. The Afghanistan campaign which, along with the jihadist threat, is one of the few constants of the past decade, is not over yet. There will still be nearly 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan at the turn of this year and 9,000 British until late next, with an “enduring commitment” beyond that. The interventionist reflex, the wish to nurture liberal institutions as a counterweight to jihadism, and the sheer ability to act with greater military effectiveness than most rivals will all continue to shape US and UK foreign policy in the Muslim world and elsewhere for as far ahead as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, for all the buddiness of the US visit and the Churchillian rhetoric of their Washington Post op-ed piece this week, the two leaders do not march in lockstep anyway. Obama put it with utter clarity in Wednesday’s White House press conference. Britain and America are different economies in different places. The one nation is an indisputable first-rank world power. The other is a leading second-rank one that cannot act unilaterally even if it wanted to. The US is bound into the Middle East, in particular in relations with Israel, in ways that do not apply to Britain to the same degree. Cameron was more committed to intervention in Libya and is keener on intervention in Syria than Obama.

Yet, even when all these and many other provisos are taken into account, Wednesday was still the end of an era. Over Afghanistan – despite all the talk about the upcoming Nato summit, the handover to Afghan security forces and Obama’s claim that there will be “no steep cliff” of rapid pullout at the end of 2014 – the aim is withdrawal. Recent killings of Brits and by Americans and Wednesday’s audacious attack inside Camp Bastion are all harbingers of that. “People get weary,” said Obama, in a moment of frankness. The pullout will happen because the voters have lost the will to fight.

The similar surface noise over Iran and Syria also conceals a deeper current, a long withdrawing roar of disengagement. Cameron and Obama dwelt less on Iran and Syria than they did on Afghanistan. That’s partly because there is less they can do there, even the Americans, certainly the British. The Washington Post joint article emphasised that there is time and space to pursue a diplomatic solution in Iran, buttressed by stronger sanctions. There is not an iota of ambiguity in the toughness of the language, but the unspoken reality is that Obama would do almost anything to avoid getting trapped into a military strike against Iran. That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. But it does mean that he thinks, rightly, that it would be a mark of failure if it did.

In Syria the limits of engagement are even more stark. At the White House press conference, Obama spoke about aid to the opposition, about pressure on the regime, about mobilising the nations and tightening the sanctions. Cameron threatened the Assad dynasty with the international criminal court. It all sounds like action, and it is all useful incremental stuff. But it is action at a distance, with strict limits. It is not intervention, because the international order has a collective interest in inaction and because the costs – not least the political costs at home – are deemed too high.

All this is, in very large part, the politics of where we are now. Faced with all three of these grim situations at once – a decade-long losing struggle against a feudal patriarchal narco-state, the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of a paranoid revolutionary theocracy, and the readiness of a corrupt Arab socialist autocrat to kill his own people for the sake of the revolution – it is hardly surprising that Obama and Cameron hold back. Who’s to blame them for doing so? The historic failure in Iraq leaves them little choice. But so does the fragility of the global economy. Even if the US and the UK were faced with only one of the three problems, Iraq and the recession would make them think twice.

A large part of all of us breathes a huge sigh of relief at this. The post-George Bush era finally beckons. Withdrawal from Afghanistan means no more pointless deaths of young soldiers, no more massacres, insults and acts of desecration against Afghans – at least by Americans. Western nations think in instant gratification terms and short timescales and this has all gone on too long. The west has had enough of fear and shame and hard times, of making enemies out of strangers and realising that getting people to change their ways is harder than it first seemed. People get weary, just like Obama said.

Another part of us, though, ought to reflect on what is being lost by this overwhelming collective disengagement. The disengagement is happening because the mistakes – crimes if you prefer – of the past have created a collective war-weariness that has now become a collective war-wariness. It is natural to want the conflict to end.

Who wouldn’t? It’s not wrong to want a quiet life, but how right is it when it comes at a price that someone else will inevitably have to pay? That wasn’t acceptable to earlier generations who scorned non-intervention in Spain or Abyssinia. Obama and Cameron closed the door on the George Bush era on Wednesday, to the general relief of the world. But the era of Mullah Omar, Ayatollah Khamenei and Bashar al-Assad goes on, posing questions that will one day have to be answered.

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