New Europe Speaks Up

Solomon Pasi is Bulgaria's foreign minister. The London Telegraph quotes his response to French pressure to toe the "European" line:

In the meantime, Bulgaria has vowed to resist French attempts to bully it into withdrawing support for America's plans to disarm Iraq. Last week the French ambassador to Sofia warned Bulgaria that its pro-American stance could jeopardise its efforts to join the European Union.

"Bulgaria has to consider carefully where its long-term interests lie," Jean Loup Kuhn-Delforge said last week. "When people live in Europe they should express solidarity and think European-style."

Solomon Pasi, Bulgaria's foreign minister, condemned the French as neo-appeasers. "We all remember the hesitancy of the Allies, who weren't sure whether to attack Hitler. They could have prevented so much," he said.

"We're in a situation where we have a moral imperative to act and act now."

In peripherally-related news - could this be a sign that the Franco-German-Belgian anti-invasion bloc is fracturing?

France, Germany and Belgium have blocked Nato's plans to send Awacs surveillance aircraft, Patriot missile batteries and specialist equipment to protect Turkey against chemical, biological and nuclear attack. They argue that this would wrongly signal that war with Iraq was inevitable. The row over the Turkish request has further poisoned relations between Paris, Berlin and Washington.

While diplomats said that there was now no prospect of ending French opposition to military support from Nato for Turkey's defences, they believe that Germany and Belgium, which have so far backed France, may be wavering.

The countries have faced fierce criticism from Nato's 16 other members and have also come under fire from the seven nations recently invited to join the alliance, who accuse them of a "breach of faith" for refusing to grant Turkey's request for help.

"If Germany can be won over," said a senior Nato diplomat, "it's unlikely that Belgium will want to be isolated as the only one of 18 full military members holding out against aid to Turkey."

All of this is happening, as the left continues to pick at the Administration's diplomatic record. A leftist friend of mine said the other day: "The Administration's diplomacy is a disaster! We're still going it alone!". I rattled off all the nations that are currently supporting us, and added in the ones that support defending Turkey (Norway, the Netherlands - neither of them militarily trivial), and asked where precisely the diplomatic failure was. Toss in the possible split of Germany and France, and you're talking a pretty serious diplomatic win, in my book.

(Link via Instapundit)

Posted by Mitch at February 16, 2003 12:28 PM