The AP via Iran Focus is reporting that Iranian Vice-President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh "signalled" that Tehran would no longer cooperate with the IAEA following his meeting with IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei:

At the same time, according to Alalam News, Aghazadeh expressed optimism regarding the possibility of reaching a negotiated settlement to the issue:

I mentioned previously that if Iran really wanted to pull the rug out from under the West's negotiation position, it would provide the IAEA with full and transparent access to its nuclear program. In so doing, it would become compliant with its NPT obligations, thereby removing jurisdiction over the issue from the UNSC.

If the AP report is true, and that's a big if, the Iranians seem to be taking the opposite approach. Most likely this will be spun as Iranian stonewalling, and it's possibly the case. But it's also possible this is an attempt to sweeten the pot on the diplomatic track by making it the only way the West has to contain the Iranian program. A lot will be clarified by the Iranians' position at upcoming talks between Javier Solana and Saeed Jalili. If the Iranians are more forthcoming, stonewalling the IAEA is probably a tactic to promote the negotiation track. If not, it represents a pretty high stakes double or nothing on the part of Tehran, where nothing is basically a dare to launch a military strike.

Alex Taurel and Shadi Hamid have a CSM op-ed discussing what's at stake in the upcoming Turkish Supreme Court judgment on the ruling AKP party's legal status. I agree that a ruling outlawing the extremely popular and effective reformist party would send a horrible message to moderate Islamic parties trying to integrate the democratic process throughout the region. Taurel and Hamid don't mention it, but it would also come at a very inopportune time, as Turkey is becoming an increasingly active and helpful regional actor. So I hope and imagine that we're trying to influence the outcome in some way or other.

But I'm not sure it's the United States' role to publicly weigh in on what mounts to an internal constitutional process in an established, if flawed, democracy, as Taurel and Hamid suggest. More practically, Turkey is a fiercely independent country, so I'm not sure what impact our taking a position would have other than to undo the progress made over the past year of restoring relations between Washington and Ankara that were frayed by the Iraq War and the PKK conflict.

To follow up a bit on Barack Obama's Berlin speech, Nikolas Gvosdev flags something that caught my eye as well:

Now, I think there's some signalling going on here: the need to listen and learn from each other, for instance, but especially the reference to strong institutions (ie. multilateral legitimacy). But it's not quite clear, when push comes to shove, who will listen to whom. Is it America who will listen to Germany before launching another unilateral intervention? Germany who will listen to Obama and double down in Afghanistan? A tacit understanding that once reasonable people are back in charge of American foreign policy, the one will dovetail with the other?

Obviously, this is loaded territory for Obama, who is already taking incoming from the usual suspects for giving the speech to begin with. So while a period of restraint in American foreign policy might be advisable, it would have been political suicide for him to openly call for one, especially in front of a overseas audience.

But beyond that, these are the kinds of questions that don't get answered in speeches, but through actions. What's fascinating about Obama's foreign policy vision is that while he has repeatedly expressed a realist bent, his rhetoric fits squarely into the tradition of American exceptionalism that is almost irreconciliable with the idea of restraint. (That's I meant when I said I'm uncomfortable with his recurring theme of "remaking the world.")

Gvosdev directs us to an article he wrote for Atlantic Community, in which he wonders whether an activist France under Sarkozy that pursues compatible but independent foreign policy initiatives presents more of a problem for America than the obstructionism of Chirac. Now, I happen to think that this is precisely how America can achieve its objectives while still exercising restraint: by using the dynamism and agility of its allies and partners to do move the ball forward, secure in the knowledge that we will remain indispensable for sealing the deals and doing the heavy lifting.

I admit that I got chills up my spine when I heard that 200,000 people showed up to hear Barack Obama speak in Berlin. I don't know what it feels like to have almost a quarter of a million living, breathing human beings, spread out in front of you off into the distance, hanging on your every word. For that matter, there probably aren't too many people alive who know what that feels like. But I imagine it's not you're ordinary, everyday kind of adrenaline rush. (The only video I found so far of the event is kind of anti-climactic, though, since the audience is a little offbeat in their applause, probably due to the language barrier, but also due to the sheer time it took for the sound to reach them, and it seemed to hamper Obama's delivery.)

Anyway, I read a transcript of the speech, and truth be told wasn't that impressed. It hits all the right notes in terms of repairing the mistrust within the trans-Atlantic alliance, which Obama implicitly but correctly identifies as existing on a popular level. (The arrival of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy has already largely repaired the damage on a political level.) The two areas where he got bold were on global warming (on which he basically said, "Our bad, we'll get it right next time."), and Afghanistan, where he called for Europe and NATO to double down. On the first, I'm in agreement, on the second, I'm not.

After years of using the removal of military resources from Afghanistan as a club to beat the Bush administration over the head with for its conduct of the war in Iraq, Democrats (and increasingly Republicans) have come to believe that with more troops in Afghanistan we can achieve our objectives. I'm far from convinced that that's the case, and think that the claims of how important success there is to NATO's future are exagerrated.

More practically, calling for greater troop contributions from Europe ignore the fact that it's not going to happen. England's looking to reduce its engagement, Germany has already ponied up, and France has already downsized the contingent it committed to send at the April NATO summit.

The Afghanistan reference is pure Obama, who often uses his privileged iconic position to deliver a gentle chiding lecture. In that, it might disabuse his German listeners of what Josef Joffe calls in The New Republic "their infatuation with Obama":

Finally, Obama closed with a call to "remake the world once again," a theme that I'm not terribly comfortable with. The speech probably works from a political perspective, in that by making demands of Europe and not assuming unilateral responsibility for the challenges the trans-Atlantic alliance has faced, he hasn't provided John McCain with any ammunition to use against him. It also probably did nothing to diminish his popularity in Europe. But if Afghanistan becomes central to Obama's European policy, he's in for some tough sledding.

It hasn't exactly been a great month for nuclear energy here in France, with no less than four incidents involving radioactive leaks and exposures. The most recent one involved 100 employees exposed to apparently minor levels of radioactive particles, but it was the second incident at the plant in question, where earlier this month water containing unenriched uranium leaked from an underground pipe. In investigating that leak, authorities found levels of radioactivity that couldn't be explained by the quantities involved. (Cue scary music.)

So what better time to announce the planned construction of France's second European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), as Nicloas Sarkozy did earlier this month? According to the article, on a national level, France doesn't actually need the reactor, and would be better served by a gas- or coal-fired plant that can be operated to meet peaks in demand. But on a European level, the plant will allow France to export carbon-free energy to its nuclear-phobic neighbors. It also serves to demonstrate France's commitment to the EPR, which it is aggressively selling abroad but only has one currently under construction itself.

The point, I suppose, is to demonstrate how great it is to be green, even if it is a green that glows in the dark.

In case you hadn't heard, that unofficial meeting between a visiting delegation of Syrian officials in Washington in a "private capacity" and a State Department "player to be named later" was abruptly cancelled yesterday. State Dept. spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos wins today's Diplospeak Quote of the Day award with his explanation for why:

Gonzalo will also be the second addition to my newly minted list of Favorite Foreign Policy Names, joining Turkey's Foreign Minister, Ali Babacan.

Yesterday Marc Lynch over at Abu Aardvark advised us to "keep an eye on those kurds" (sic), who walked out on the Iraqi parliament's vote on the provincial elections law to protest the provisions dealing with the status of Kirkuk, and the use of a secret ballot to pass them. Today comes news that the Iraqi presidential council, headed by President Jalal Talabani (himself a Kurd) but joined by Shiite Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, vetoed the law, sending it back to parliament for reworking (via today's WPR Media Roundup). That effectively rules out any elections before next year, dealing a setback to the Bush administration, which was counting on elections to deliver tangible proof of political progress in Iraq.

Instead what we have is tangible proof of political process in Iraq, which to my mind is more revealing and probably more valuable. To begin with, I'm not convinced by the administration's logic on two counts. It's very possible that the Sadrist current, despite recent setbacks, might have scored a strong enough electoral showing to cast doubt on the consensus narrative of Nouri Maliki's recent consolidation of power. Second, the assumption that progress in Iraq represents a zero-sum advantage for John McCain (and consequently a disadvantage for Barack Obama) no longer seems to be operative given the developments of the past week regarding withdrawal timetables. (The elections were originally scheduled for October, although they had already been pushed back to December.)

The fact that the veto, as opposed to a car bombing or major combat operation, is the day's major news out of Iraq is testament to the progress made over the past year, and to the evolving nature of the Iraq War, which at this point has essentially become a massive holding action. But the Kurdish walkout also demonstrates the amount of delayed maintenance that has accumulated in Iraq's political reconciliation, and thereby underscores the degree to which almost all of the progress of the past year has taken place at the most basic and fundamental level of security. And that's a bitter pill to swallow given the duration and costs of our engagement to date.

I find it unfortunate that Iraq policy is now being filtered almost exclusively through the lens of American presidential politics, so I'll limit my remarks to the following. The facts on the ground in Iraq are increasingly dictating a forward-looking policy, ie. what do we do now to advance America's strategic interests while minimizing the risk of sacrificing the progress we've made in Iraq? The two candidates offer contrasting approaches in response to that question, both accompanied by compelling supporting arguments and inherent risks.

The political miscalculation, as I see it, is that the McCain campaign, by basing its Iraq pitch on his support of the Surge, is essentially engaging in last year's debate. Obama, to be sure, emphasizes his initial opposition to the war, but centers his Iraq pitch on his vision for the way forward. And while his withdrawal timetable was formulated last year, it has managed to maintain its political relevance to the debates of today and tomorrow. Those are the debates the Iraqis are focusing on now, and they're the debates the candidates should be focusing on, too.