The inspiration here comes – as it so often does these days – from a tweet:

The reference is to this article in the Swiss paper 24 Heures about ancient Cuban strongman Fidel Castro recently emerging in public to rail against his old bugbear, the US. Turns out the authorities there have been holding an American businessman for eight months now, whom they are still “investigating.” How convenient: maybe to get him back the US government would be willing to exchange five already-convicted Cuban spies, namely the so-called “Cuban Five” who were dispatched to Florida to infiltrate Cuban exile organizations, one of whom was then found guilty of “conspiracy to commit murder.”

Any six-year-old marble-trader (not to mention The Doors) could tell you what’s wrong with that deal: they want five of ours for just one of theirs! And why would Fidel believe that the US would even consider such an unequal transaction? Because no less than a month ago the Obama administration did accept precisely that in sending ten suspected spies back to Russia in exchange for only four in return! Shortly thereafter, VP Biden tried to downplay this disparity by asserting that “[w]e got back four really good ones.”

But anyone can see that that is far from true. In fact, all you need to do to disprove Biden’s assertion is examine the case of but one of those Russians, Anna Chapman (which, strangely, is precisely what Biden and his talk-show host Jay Leno then proceeded to do!). From the considerable value-added that has been derived from her already – like this, and also this – it’s clear that, in fact, Ms. Chapman alone should have been worth the return of ten of our own spies from Russian jails – at least.

But apparently Obama has rather less trading-savvy than any man-on-the-street, so the Russian spy exchange went through and Anna Chapman was gone – oh so irretrievably gone! That’s what makes Fidel think he can dangle a similarly lopsided sort of deal in front of US authorities and that they’ll go for it as well, but this sort of soft-headedness in the spy-horse-trading market has got to stop!

P.S. Interestingly, the latest English-language coverage I’ve been able to find so far on this Cuban spy issue, like this recent piece from the Associate Press, completely misses the agent-exchange point by focusing instead on Castro’s characterization of the treatment of one of those imprisoned Cuban spies by US authorities as “torture.”

That’s ridiculous! The United States does not “torture” – not like they do on the island of Cuba! Why, I can distinctly remember the last President, George W. Bush, saying precisely that.

                          

It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress.

Our old friend, the Danish journalist-in-US-residence Paul Høi – perhaps partly because he did not have to disrupt his sleep-patterns to watch – also has a piece out on Obama’s address: Obama aims high and hits low. He divides the speech into two very different parts and has very little to say about the first, which he characterizes as simply a populist tirade designed to up his sagging poll numbers by demonstrating that he is in charge and is perfectly able to get tough with BP. No, like Die Welt’s Unterreiner, he’d prefer to focus on the second “idealistic” part where the President announced the end of cheap oil and puts developing new sources of “green” energy on par with the campaign in the 1960s to put an American astronaut on the Moon. “Does he seriously mean that?” he asks. After all, Høi knows the math: to get something like that CO2 bill through the American Senate you need 60 votes, and since there are now 41 Republicans, Obama probably does not have them.

Then again – Obama also did not have 60 votes in the Senate for his Health Care Reform bill, which of course did ultimately pass earlier this year. Yes, I realize that that was true only at the end . . . but give the man a break, Høi is just trying to find some sort of silver lining here, some sign that Obama’s talk about “the end of cheap oil” was more than mere words. Actually, he borrows this silver lining from an analysis by Ezra Kline of the Washington Post, who professes to see signs from the language in Obama’s speech that indicate that the President is in fact serious, more precisely indications of an attitude of “Come with what you’ve got, give me what we can agree on, and will pass a law that will lead us in the right direction” – supposedly also the President’s attitude to Health Care Reform, once he got serious about passing it, and supposedly his attitude now about the CO2 stuck in Congress.

Update: OK, that was a couple of foreign commentators. But you’ve got to think they are on to something with their “Was he serious?” doubts when the same stance is taken by the Rude Pundit. (Warning: As usual, profane language.) “So tell us what to do,” His Rudeness implores. “Lead us. That’s what we want . . . not an especially skilled anchor[man] informing us that oil spills are bad.”

                          

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well.

The Libération correspondent’s just-below-the-surface point is that none of Obama’s interventions should have been necessary – quite apart from the fact that he carries no official post or authority within the EU or any of its member-states. It was clearly an emergency situation (and it may still be), but it seems that the European leadership actually in place was itself not equal to the task, and instead had to be persuaded by the US President to do the right things.

Actually, it is not clear that EU leaders would have failed to take appropriate measures absent the President’s calls – it’s also not clear that the measures they did take, despite the huge-sounding €750 billion figure, were sufficient to the emergency – but that is a historical experiment no one really desired to undertake for real. It does seem a more convincing case that Zapatero would not have acted as he did without the American intervention, and also that the official who actual does hold the “EU Council President” title that Quatremer says Obama usurped – namely Herman van Rompuy – was fairly useless throughout. (Quatremer: “If during this crisis the former Belgian prime minister was useful for anything, you’ll have to explain that to me.”)

Another thing that this tale gives the lie to: that Europe’s current economic and financial travails need be no concern to the Americans, something asserted recently by no less than Treasury Secretary Timonthy Geithner. No, says Quatremer in rather dramatic fashion, Obama realized all too well the “risk of unleashing a [financial] tsunami capable of ravaging the planet.”

BTW in recent times I’ve repeatedly picked up glowing praises and recommendations of Quatremer’s blog – written in French, of course. So I think it’s time that I finally start to read it more regularly and have added it to my RSS reader under a label that should ensure that subsequent entries do attract my attention (even though there’s really something wrong with the clunky way he embeds photographs into his posts! Mais ça, ce n’est rien . . .).

                          

On the other hand, the story here is not quite as coherent as the Danish report. Sending this He (“He-man”? Hu?) guy in his place was of course a deliberate gesture by Premier Wen to show his contempt for what was going on, but it turned out to be smart in another way since He turned out to be the direct verbal target of some very powerful Western politicians, along with Indian Premier Manmohan Singh. All this was not because of any sort of anti-Asia prejudice on the part of the other world leaders, but out of the very good reason that China and India had already decided that they simply would not go along with the sort of legally-enforceable national limits to greenhouse-gas emissions that European leaders (mainly) were trying to enshrine in the World Climate Treaty that was supposed to issue out of the conference, limits designed to replace expiring national obligations under the Kyoto Protocol (2005).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the main protagonist here, fighting hard for measures designed to limit the rise in average temperatures to 2ºC through this century. This meant among other things cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by 2050. Western developed nations had already agreed to cuts of 80%, but something would have to be forthcoming from the developing world as well if that 2050 goal was to be achieved, especially considering the explosive recent economic growth in China and India. But behind closed doors the representatives from those countries did not yield from positions that had already been taken publicly, namely that they weren’t interested in any binding restrictions and, in any case, they had no obligation to be interested – it was mainly the West’s fault anyway that the world was in the dire climate-change situation it now found itself. This attitude led Merkel to expressions of dismay and President Sarkozy to (politely stated) accusations of hypocrisy, while according to the transcript Obama tried to intervene to calm the waters, expressing a not entirely-useful hope that things could be settled “later, outside of this multilateral framework.”

The lesson I draw from this report is that the public stances countries take prior to such summits are generally serious ones, i.e. they accurately track the positions those countries will adopt once negotiations begin. The only real sensational element here, then, is the accounts of the personal interactions – sometimes quite tense – between the world leaders present. At least the picture of events from this leaked transcript gives the lie to the assertion of many commentators that at Copenhagen European leaders ultimately were left on the sidelines while the conference’s fate was decided in discussions between the US and China. But I guess a leading European publication like Der Spiegel would say that.

By the way, the reason all this climate-change stuff is current again in the news is probably the international conference now happening at Petersberg, Germany (near Bonn), intended to draw lessons from the COP15 experience. This is meant in preparation for the very next formal UNFCCC world climate-change conference, scheduled for next December in Cancún, Mexico.

                          

Aside from being refreshingly arcane – anybody see any sort of coverage of this at all in the American press? I thought not – how is any of this important? In a couple of ways, actually. First there’s our old friend German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who explicitly campaigned during the last German nationwide election to have the Americans withdraw all of their nuclear warheads from Germany. It’s even a separate policy-point in the coalition agreement that undergirds the current CDU/CSU/FDP federal government in power in Berlin.

Obviously, though, if the Americans are seriously contemplating going forward with B-61 modernization, including for the many such warheads stored in Germany (the exact number is surely classified), then the German Foreign Minister can yell and demand all he wants, but it will remain painfully apparent that he has no say in the matter. Hey, they’re just devices sitting on German soil, each capable of annihilating a major city – but it’s highly unlikely that even Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel herself has any say, either, due to the web of defense agreements governing NATO military installations and US-German relations dating from back when Central Europe was a much more dangerous place.

It’s all something rather alarming to be made aware of, especially if you’re a German citizen, but this still is plainly the main message of this article’s author, Otfried Nassauer, even as he goes on in his article to describe – in what sometimes reads like rather unseemly detail – exactly what the proposed B-61 modernization plans entail. Right now there are five B-61 models, and that’s too unwieldy; those five are to be transformed into just two, namely Model 11 (which already exists and is said to be an atomic “bunker-buster” for tactical use) and Model 12 (brand-new, a multi-use model to take up the roles now covered by all the other models which are to be phased out). Further, in a yet more- explicit sign of the clear intention to keep these weapons in Europe for a long time to come, another aspect of the modernization will involve making sure these bombs are modified so that they can be delivered by the next generation of NATO tactical aircraft, such as the Joint Strike Fighter.

There’s yet another point Nassauer intends to make as well, however. Didn’t President Obama, in his speech to the adoring crowd last April in Prague’s Hradčanské náměstí (Castle Square), speak of his ambition to abolish nuclear weapons entirely? What ever happened to that notion? It’s true that Obama gets the last word in this modernization decision, which he will present in the “Nuclear Posture Review” that his administration is due to deliver to Congress shortly. But – surprise! – no sort of radical move to put aside the proposed modernization entirely is expected. There is too much money at stake, i.e. too many vested interests pushing for it both in DOE and DOD. Indeed, the main point of contention currently is whether the envisioned modernization will end up paving the way for the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons or instead just serve as a substitute for that.

But as for the Germans? Forget ‘em.

                          

What with all this current drama about Obama under pressure, it’s curious to see some contrarian media pieces about him now starting to appear in the foreign press – “contrarian” in the sense of reacting sharply to the “Obama myth” by making instead the point “just what’s so special about this guy, anyway?” One of these is “Opposing Obama,” a broadcast on the BBC World Service in which Guardian journalist Gary Younge (who is British and black) tours the US finding people “who think Barack Obama’s presidency is nothing but bad news.” Anybody interested should be able to click on the above link starting tomorrow (1 February 2010) and hear the program, or just hear it as it is periodically scheduled on the BBC World Service broadcast itself (listenable on-line, of course), starting tomorrow at 5.05 hours Eastern Standard Time.

Then there is also the recent article on the website of Cicero, the German-language “Magazine for Political Culture,” entitled Man Without Qualities (a title which is identical to, and therefore presumably some sort of a reference to, the highly-acclaimed (although very long, and unfinished) 1930s novel Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil). Here, Leon de Winter takes Obama thoroughly to the cleaners:

• First of all, the only reason Barack Obama got elected president in the first place is race, pure and simple. Although handsome and well-spoken, he didn’t really accomplish much in the US Senate during his limited years there, so it wasn’t really a matter of being most-qualified. Rather, he managed to come under the wing of David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political consultant and expert in promoting black candidates (as he had done already in getting Deval Patrick elected as the first-ever black governor of Massachusetts). Axelrod managed to make Obama’s election as president inevitable, by turning it into a sort of cleansing ritual, both of America’s troubled racial history and of the unhappy previous two terms of George W. Bush.
  
• For that matter, Obama is also simply a creation of the Chicago political machine (of which Axelrod is an important component part). He’s just a machine politician, and continues to kow-tow to the head of that machine, Chicago mayor Richard Daley – that’s the only reason why he went to Copenhagen back last October in the first place, to try to sell the International Olympic Committee on bestowing the 2016 Summer Games (and the huge pay-off they represent) to Daley’s city.
  
• For that matter, De Winter claims, if Obama is not some sort of leftist radical now, there is plenty of evidence that he was one such during his early adulthood, the formative years for his political views. Why is it, he asks, that the President has been unwilling to release academic transcripts or any of the papers he wrote while he was an undergraduate at Columbia and Occidental College. Ah yes, Columbia, where he ultimately received his B.A. in 1983: that was the home of, among other leftist professors, the radical pro-Palestinian Edward Said. Who knows to what degree Obama’s thought could have been infected there by such professors as that?
  
• Ultimately, though (and ironically), Barack Obama is really not black at all. Only one of his parents was black, of course, and he was Kenyan, and so not a black American coming from out of the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow. So he doesn’t really count as a black man, although that point has obviously gone straight over the head of the vast majority of the American electorate.

There you have it. And who is this Leon de Winter? He’s a Dutch novelist and film-maker of some sort of renown in the Benelux and Germany, from an orthodox Jewish family, who currently spends a good part of his time living in Los Angeles. So he presumably has all the access he needs to become as sharp an observer of American affairs as he wants take the time to become – indeed his Wikipedia entry alleges that a couple of years ago he was considering taking his family to live in the US permanently. So he’s an “Americanophile” – and, since he’s European, you’d also expect him to be well under Obama’s spell. Clearly, he’s not, but he also would seem to have no particular axe to grind about the President either.

Right after that hit SOTU speech, we also found out (or were reminded) that Obama does know his policy and is a master of debate, even if that is against 200+ Republican members of the US Congress, all at once. (The video of that recent encounter at a hotel in Baltimore is here.) And clearly many of the claims being made against the president (“socialist,” “not born in the USA,” etc.) are way off-base. But it just might be useful, on occasion, to be exposed to something deviating from the usual hero-worship, especially if it comes from a source with no apparent inherent bias.

                          

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

                          

The hat-tip for the one noticing this first must go to Jillian Rayfield, affiliated with Talking Points Memo, and then just yesterday David Kurtz from the same site posted a slide-show on the subject. But I soon found my way to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the German- and English-language website belonging to the musical itself. Check it out: there’s some good information there, even if the English version is written by someone not in complete control of that language and with a fondness for the phrase inter alia (actually a Latin expression, for all you non-lawyers out there, meaning “among others”). The songs that make up the show will surely become hits, it says there, for “[e]xperts of the German music scene” are sure they have that “Earth Wind and Fire [sic] quality”! Even more intriguingly, we learn that “Hope” is the first “interactive musical,” during which most of the audience will sit on cubes (called “percussion chairs”) that double as instruments and so will be encouraged to drum (and even get up off those chairs to dance) along with the performers! Wow!

Right, so how have the reviews been so far? Of the two I can find, the one from the home-town paper the Frankfurter Rundschau (Border of Gaiety) cannot truly be regarded as independent, since the musical’s producers announce right on their site’s “News” page that the FR is a “mediapartner.” Yes, Barack Obama’s story (and a parallel plot-line about the troubles of a South Chicago community) does turn out to be a suitable subject for a musical, opines reviewer Judith von Sternburg, even though back in the real world, after a whole year in office, ugly Reality has already caught up with the President. Von Sternburg is independent-minded enough to label Hillary Clinton’s portrayal (performed by American actress and “Evita” veteran Tracy Plester, who needs only a quick wardrobe-and-wig-change to render Sarah Palin as well) as “a caricature.” Van Sternburg also manages to pick up on, and mention in her piece, the line spoken by the actor representing a son fighting in Iraq, who comes back home just as Obama is elected and declares that surely the war will soon be over now – something the stage-side English-to-German translator at the premier performance skips.

The other review is from the Financial Times Deutschland (Out of Office: Obama Mia!), by Willy Theobald, who it emerges did not attend the actual premier but rather a previous dress-rehearsal. At least that enabled him also to grab an interview with the show’s producer and director, Roberto Emmanuele, who declares to him “Musicals I generally find boring” – as indeed does Herr Theobald – but “I want to make a musical that is fresher [knackiger] and more innovative than all the others.” He goes on: “Our music has quite a lot of hit-potential,” and Theobald does admit that he finds many of the songs “rather infectious” (richtig mitreißend). In the end, the FTD reviewer gives those behind “Hope” a lot of credit, although he can’t resist wondering whether the work will soon need to add another act at the end – one about Yemen.

The verdicts so far out of Germany, then – as few as they are – seem largely positive. Is it perhaps time to go on-line to order your tickets as well as a round-trip flight to Frankfurt-am-Main? Here’s a final YouTube tidbit to help you make your decision:

                          

American relations with Kenya will always be of special interest during the term of the Obama administration because of Obama’s personal ties and family history there, as will be relations with Indonesia for the same reason. However, and very interestingly, so far this effect is operating in the opposite way that you would expect. It almost seems as if both countries need to suffer a little bit, just to show that Obama is not going to play any favorites. In mid-November, for example, the American president is scheduled for an important tour of Asian countries: China, Japan, Korea, of course, also Singapore – but not Indonesia. Of course, it’s merely the most-populous Muslim nation; perhaps Obama is taking a break now from his “Arab outreach” efforts that previously featured a speech to Iranians and a speech directed to the Arab World, given in Cairo.

And then there is Kenya and the ANP report. The US “threat” is namely directed against high government officials and other “high-earners” there, and amounts to a refusal to give them visas anymore to visit the US. That apparently really hurts; rich Kenyans just love to head to the States to spend their money. But in the judgment of the US government nothing has been done to bring about promised reforms ever since the mess of the disputed national election at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008, which led to violence in which around 1,300 people died. In fact, no one has even been prosecuted in connection with that violence. So a fire needs to be lit under some people there.

The thing that caught my eye here, though – other than that it involves Kenya, homeland of Barack Obama Sr. – was the US official charged with paying a visit to Nairobi to deliver the bad news: Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Of course he’s not the real Johnny Carson (also note the different spelling), or he would be showing up just to practice his golf-swing. He’s merely a distinguished American career diplomat, a multiple award-winner for his service (including for directing the US Government’s anti-HIV/AIDS efforts in Kenya), who previously served as American ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

                          

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often.

There are but a few additional factual bits to add to the story from the El País treatment, by the paper’s correspondents in Havana, Miguel González and Mauricio Vicent, although they are interesting enough. Like perhaps the reaction to Obama’s initiative from Cuban President Raúl Castro, as conveyed afterwards by the Spanish Foreign Minister (who met with him for three hours)? Remember, now: we’re in the realm of diplomat-speak here. Moratinos: “Raúl Castro received Obama’s election positively, and has great respect for him, and has also greeted in a satisfactory manner certain actions and decisions he [Obama] has taken.” That’s it.

Otherwise, there’s the interesting tidbit that Moratinos actually had the chance to speak with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Obama and Zapatero had met in the Oval Office, but before he went to Cuba; strangely, the two foreign ministers spoke of the situation in the Honduras and the Middle East, but not about Cuba. (I think that right there shows you how serious an initiative this was meant to be by Obama, namely not very: it was really only something that simply occurred to him when he was meeting with Zapatero and learned that his foreign minister would soon have talks with Castro.) Also, Moratinos took the occasion of his visit in Havana to announce that Spain would make it one of its priorities, during the six months as EU president that will start in January, to bring about an “association agreement” between the EU and Cuba.

That is easier said than done, and the El País piece does provide some good background about this whole issue of Cuba vis-à-vis the EU. For the EU, Cuba is supposedly not a matter of foreign policy, but rather domestic, claim González and Vicent, I suppose because of the great interest Spain holds in it. Yet it will be hard for Moratinos to fulfill his “association agreement” promise, for at least two reasons: 1) Several EU countries are not willing to concede so much to Cuba as long as it holds political prisoners and abuses human rights. (Germany, Sweden, and the Czech Republic are specifically named here); and 2) Spain might not get its EU presidency next year anyway, since the Lisbon Treaty – if ratified in time – will do away with country-presidencies and substitute instead an actual one-person “President of the European Council,” elected by EU member-states (represented by their governments) for a two-and-a-half-year term.