Матвей Брынза едет послом на Апшерон ?

[Spezzatura]

Eight Months Later, a U.S. Ambassador to Baku

Since July, when Anne Derse migrated from Baku to Vilnius, there has been no American ambassador to Azerbaijan, which not very long ago was regarded as one of Washington's most important allies. Don Lu, a very capable diplomat whom I met years ago when he was based in Pakistan, stepped in as charge d'affaires. Yet that Lu wasn't ambassadorial rank has rubbed the Azeris the wrong way. The impression in the senior ranks of the Baku government is that Washington simply doesn't rate the country very high.

One sign of the strain showed just a couple of days ago, when Azerbaijan announced that it was canceling military exercises planned next month with the U.S. Azerbaijan is miffed that Washington is pushing Armenia and Turkey to open their joint border, but has failed to include as part of the deal a settlement of the long Azeri-Armenia dispute over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The two republics went to war over the enclave for some five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If a U.S. ambassador had been in Baku, he or she might have smoothed over this tension with Baku.

It hasn't been a matter of neglect. In fact, the Bush-era State Department had sent the name of a diplomat with long experience in the region -- Matthew Bryza, a skilled player of pipeline politics whom I've known for some 13 years -- to the White House as its choice for the Azeri post. But the White House didn't send Bryza's nomination to the Senate, and neither has the Obama Administration.

Until now. I've received confirmation that -- after the clearing of a couple of remaining administrative hurdles -- the White House will officially nominate Bryza as U.S. ambassador. He will then be scheduled for a nomination hearing in the Senate.

The hearings should be lively. For starters, Bryza himself has been something of a lightning rod of attention. This blog has written about his time as deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

Over recent years, I received fairly frequent emails griping about this or that impolitic (read: anti-Russian) speech that Bryza delivered on his journeys, and his inexhaustible supply of rationales for building the ill-fated Nabucco natural gas pipeline. Bryza seemed to rub the Foggy Bottom crowd the wrong way when he made no secret of his desire for the Azeri post, and when it seemed he might get it since he was a favorite of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

Getting past these intramurals, the 2008 Georgian-Russian war is likely to be a key subject of the confirmation hearings. Bryza was extremely close to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and Bryza's critics assert that he helped to mislead Saakashvili into thinking he could expect U.S. military assistance should he run into trouble while he attacked South Ossetia in August 2008. As we know, no such assistance arrived as a considerable swath of Georgian territory was overrun by the Russian military. The fiasco was an enormous blow to U.S. prestige, because it led governments throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia to understand that, contrary to what at least some of them believed, they couldn't expect U.S. help in a confrontation with Russia.

In his own defense, Bryza will deny that he led Saakashvili to any such conclusion. It was the opposite -- Bryza will point to numerous occasions in which he told Saakashvili not to use force in his conflict with South Ossetia.

In the end, Bryza has been watching and working on the region's most important topics for more than a decade from the inside. He can hit the ground running, the first order of business being smoothing over the tension over the Turkey-Armenia accord, which itself appears to be in trouble. The likelihood seems that all the topics will be aired, and Bryza will be confirmed.

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[Admin]

То о чем так долго говорили все армяне произошло, его наконец-то официально послали послом в Баку.

[Arsen.Ambartsumyan]

он будет утешением для них, когда США признают НКР независимым

пусть скажут спасибо что хоть Брайху ему оставили, да и жена у него турчанка, там ему и место

в колыбели древней цивилизации тюрков

Edited April 24, 2010 by artsakh.in