US: John Kerry to Visit European and Arab Allies

For his first trip as an American diplomatic leader, John Kerry is expected to spend Feb. 24 to March 6 in London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha. Because of the Palestinian conflict, the Department of State has not planned for Kerry to stop in Israel or the West Bank, considering President Barack Obama’s scheduled visit there next month.

In addition to the improvement of historical ties between the United States and Europe, Kerry is expected to discuss pressing international crises at each stop of his “listening tour,” issues which include the wars in Syria and Mali, nuclear concerns in Iran and North Korea, the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, Afghanistan and climate change.

Kerry, who was a senator for nearly thirty years and was a presidential candidate in 2004, is an international relations expert and had thoroughly traveled the world before succeeding Hillary Clinton on Feb. 1 as the diplomatic head of the top world power.

The son of a diplomat, he spent several years of his childhood in Berlin, has family ties with France, speaks French and German, and is considered to be in favor of maintaining ties between these two sides of the Atlantic. In fact, he reserved his first official tour to Europe, while Clinton had followed the “U.S. pivot to Asia” imposed by Obama and first visited the Asia-Pacific region in 2009.

The German Foreign Affairs minister, Guido Westerwelle, suggests that Kerry’s visit to Berlin on Feb. 26, 2013 is a “an important transatlantic signal.”

Meeting with a Russian Counterpart

“This proves everyone wrong, who thought that Europe does not matter anymore for the U.S.,” Westerwelle said to the German daily newspaper Passauer Neue Presse.

The situation is similar in Paris, where “discussions on transatlantic relations” are hoped for when Kerry visits President François Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Feb. 27.

The European-American relationship was strengthened ten days ago when President Obama announced the start of negotiations between the U.S. and the European Union to create a massive free trade zone. Westerwelle considers the possibility of a free trade agreement being reached before the end of the current U.S. president’s term in January 2017 to be “realistic.” One French diplomat, however, suggested that he expected a “long and difficult negotiation.”

In Berlin, John Kerry will also meet his Russian counterpart, Sergueï Lavrov. They are expected to speak about their political disagreements about the situation in Syria and to discuss North Korea and Iran, indicated Victoria Nuland, the current spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State.

This meeting will coincide with talks about the Iran’s nuclear issue between the P5+1 group (the United States, China, Russia, France, the UK and Germany) in Almaty and Tehran.

Syria, however, will be at the heart of the discussion in Rome on Feb. 28 in an international meeting of eleven countries supporting the opposition to President Bashar Assad and in a meeting with a Syrian opposition coalition. The war in Syria also will dominate the subject of Kerry’s interviews with Turkey in Ankara and with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Alarabi in Cairo.

The secretary of state will spend more than twenty-four hours in Egypt, which had strong relations with Washington in the Mubarak era, and whose new successor recently announced legislative elections that will start on April 27. Kerry will finish his tour with U.S. allies in the Gulf, notably with a ministerial meeting with the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia, like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, is still discussing Syria, the peace process in the Middle East that has been frozen since September 2010 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in late 2014.