Word: diplomats
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...Last week things looked dire because the NLA occupied a village in the hills around the capital. That created a high level of alarm in Skopje - one Western diplomat said it was as if a knife was pointing at the heart of the city. But as far as what the EU can do to persuade the parties to come to some sort of agreement, they've already threatened to reduce financial aid if there's no agreement by Monday, and that doesn't seem to have helped. Part of the problem here is that the Europeans have insufficient leverage...
Those concessions produced a softening on the European side. Even the perennial Yank-bashers in Paris are trying to play nice. "Bush came in with big theories," says a French diplomat, "but on all these questions the Administration has evolved." Yet Bush is hardly rolling over on all issues. In response to American steelmakers' allegations of "dumping" by foreign manufacturers, the Administration may impose import tariffs on steel, an idea protested across Europe and Asia. "Bush is a single-minded ideologue," complains Portugal's former President, Mario Soares. "The U.S. is doing things that have grave consequences for the world...
Putin is only marginally more experienced as a diplomat than Bush. For the Russian leader--whose key achievement has been to begin pulling his country out of an inferiority complex 10 years in the making--the meeting itself is the message. Securing quality time with a U.S. President signals that Russia remains a "great power" --if only because it retains its Soviet nuclear arsenal. Moscow lobbied hard for the meeting and wasn't pleased that Washington was slow to agree. Russian officials took note of every dismissive remark the Bushies made about Russia and were quick to point out that...
...Spoken like the best striped-pants diplomat. And when Rumsfeld met his ministerial counterparts in Brussels, he treated the Europeans to the full measure of persuasion and consultation as the Americans shared videotapes and intelligence data to make the case for national missile defense. But the plain truth is, a defense review that doesn't prioritize the Asian theater won't be worth reading. Asia is where the action is?or where it could be. John Chipman, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, points out that many key European defense issues haven't changed for most...
...German mother and a Chinese father, who divorced when he was just three years old, Lee left Germany for China two years before the Second World War broke out. He lived in Mauritius in safety during the war, then followed his father, a Chinese diplomat, to Iran for just a year...