Word: diplomats
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...last weekend China's Deputy Foreign Minister snubbed his counterparts from the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and Germany and sent only a low-level official to a meeting called to discuss new efforts to pressure Tehran. "The meeting we had last weekend was not great," says a European diplomat. "The Chinese sent someone along who said, 'I can't make any decisions.' " Worse, the Chinese have become allergic to the very mention of sanctions. After last weekend's meeting, a senior European diplomat speaking on background with reporters declined even to utter the word sanctions for fear of upsetting Beijing...
...what options does Obama have left? Some European and American diplomats hold out hope that they will be able to bring China around. But privately they say the U.S. and its allies may need to move ahead on their own, without China. "No one wants to go there," says the European diplomat, but "what we're saying to the Chinese now explicitly is there's no point in going forward together" if the current approach isn't changing Iran's behavior...
...striking out independently of his country's NATO partners, it's notable that his outbursts critical of Israel draw little comment from the U.S. and Europe. That suggests "there is a sense that Erdogan is saying things that someone needs to say to Israel," says a European diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity. Just last month, Erdogan left an upbeat meeting with President Barack Obama, rode to a downtown Washington hotel and gave a speech lambasting Israel for "inhuman" deeds in Gaza. "The timing doesn't suggest someone who is unaware of what he's doing in an international context...
...This week's drama was provoked by a bizarre p.r. stunt on the part of Israel's right-wing Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Ayalon called in Turkey's ambassador to Israel and staged a demeaning photo op calculated to humiliate the Turkish diplomat as a rebuke for negative portrayals of Israel on a Turkish TV drama. Only Ayalon's last-minute apology prevented the resulting furor from causing a diplomatic breakdown. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East...
...Given the stakes in the diplomatic spat, Ayalon's defiance potentially carried a high cost. But it took a behind-the-scenes intervention of the proverbial grownup in the Israeli establishment - President Shimon Peres, who served for decades as Israel's key diplomat - to orchestrate a climbdown. Peres called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman and urged them to defuse the crisis. But domestic politics was in play: not only was Ayalon's initial action calculated to burnish the nationalist appeal of his and Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, but Netanyahu's need to maintain that party...