Report: Bryza for Baku
Politico (Washington, DC)
April 23, 2010
Laura Rozen On Foreign Policy
The outgoing Bush administration recommended that a U.S. diplomat
heavily involved in U.S. policy to Georgia and the Caucasus during the
2008 Georgian-Russian war Matthew Bryza become the next
U.S. ambassador to Baku.
But the nomination didn’t materalize, and the U.S. has had no
ambassador in Baku since last fall. Until now, former Wall Street
Journal and New York Times Caucasus and Central Asia correspondent
Steve LeVine reports on his blog:
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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