Early next week George W. Bush will be greeting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, at the White House. A day or so later France’s Nicolas Sarkozy will pitch up in Washington. By the weekend, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, will be sharing a hamburger with the US president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Lame-duck president he may be but Mr. Bush does not lack for foreign visitors writes Philip Stephens in the Financial Times.
The French president, honored with an invitation to address a joint session of Congress, will probably attract the fanfare. Mr. Sarkozy is good at grabbing the limelight. More of immediate substance hangs on Mr. Erdogan’s visit. The Turkish prime minister has warned that unless he gets the assurances he seeks from the US about security in northern Iraq he will order in Turkish troops to take on the fighters of the Kurdish PKK. That in turn would threaten a broader regional conflict, perhaps pulling in Iran.
Every time I come back to Washington I am reminded that the US, for all its present troubles, remains the indispensable nation. Anti-Americanism may be rife among electorates everywhere, but the US remains the reference point for everyone else’s foreign policy. Hence one of the ways Mr. Sarkozy wants to persuade France to leave behind the past is by building an easier relationship with Washington. If things go well, the French president envisages a symbolic break with Gaullism by taking France back into Nato’s military command structure.
As for Mr. Erdogan, the relationship between Ankara and Washington can hardly be described as warm. Turkish voters are demanding military retaliation against the recent incursions of the PKK. As for America’s approval ratings in Turkey, one US official half-jokes that when you are at 10 per cent or thereabouts, arithmetic assures you that you are unlikely to fall much further. For all that, the odds are that, offered assurances of an Iraqi clampdown on the PKK, the Turkish leader will pay heed to Mr Bush’s entreaties to stay his hand.
Friends tell me the State department is a beleaguered institution these days, with morale sapped by a stream of departures and an edict that will compel reluctant diplomats to serve time in Baghdad’s green zone. What still strikes me, though, is the depth of strategic knowledge about most things almost everywhere. This week I heard Matthew Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state, spell out the geopolitics of piping gas from central Asia to Europe. Europe, of course, would be the principal beneficiary of a new southern gas corridor because it would reduce a dangerous dependence on Russia’s Gazprom. Yet I struggle to recall hearing a European official making such a lucid case.
Read more here: America is still indispensable but it must work with others