President
Obama, on the last day of his visit to Germany, met with Angela Markel, David
Cameron, François Hollande and Matteo Renzi. In my opinion, he should have
invited Donald Tusk as well. This would have added strength to his speeches
about the EU´s relevance. Words are important and the President said the right
ones. But he missed the opportunity to show he means business when supporting
Europe´s unity.
The
meeting lasted two hours. Most of the time was spent on the situation in Syria,
including the positions that should be taken regarding the Geneva negotiating
process, which is now out of the rails, and the fight against the Islamic State
terrorists. On the latter, it is clear the IS has been losing ground. There is
less money available, less volunteer fighters, and greater military pressure on
them. The additional deployment of 250 US Special Forces, announced moments
before the meeting by Obama, is also a significant development in combatting
the terrorists. I hope the Germans in particular will also increase their
contribution to the ground operations.
The
rest of the meeting focussed on Libya. Italy and the UK are most likely to
intensify their support to the recognised Libyan Prime Minister. And in
addition, we should see more naval patrols off the Libyan coast soon. There are
some differences of opinion about the nature of such maritime task force:
should it be a NATO-led force or should it be an expansion of the current
EU-sponsored naval presence? In any case, the maritime effort should be a
supporting one to the actions on the ground inside Libya. The priority is on
land and that means stabilising the situation in that North African country.
No comments:
Post a Comment