For Romania’s progressives, meeting an American ambassador now warrants a treason referral. Last weekend, a lawmaker from USR, a party that governed alongside former Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, asked prosecutors to investigate three politicians for treason. Two of them had met Kimberly Guilfoyle, America’s ambassador to Greece, at a Bucharest restaurant on March 31: Sorin Grindeanu, the Social Democratic leader and speaker of the lower house, and the energy minister at the time. The foreign power in this treason story is Romania’s most important ally.
The referral followed a Wall Street Journal report that at an Athens dinner in March, as Bolojan’s government teetered, Guilfoyle remarked: “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here.” Her lawyer disputes the account, and Athens says no threat was ever raised. Taken at face value, the line was an off-the-cuff remark in the heat of an argument, and such remarks by American envoys carry a price, paid in places like Bucharest, where they are turned against the alliance itself.
Within a day, USR leader Dominic Fritz was asking Grindeanu on video: “Did you discuss the motion? If so, what were you promised in return?” He went on to float a kickback from an overpriced gas contract.
This opportunistic spin raises a zombie. For years, the Kremlin and Romania’s pro-Russian fringe told Romanians their country is a colony, its governments installed and removed from abroad, its votes theater. Romania’s progressives helped drive that story out of mainstream politics. Now they have dug it up, because this time it hurts their rivals, and America is cast as the puppeteer. The ambassador provided the words. The leap from a dinner remark to a verdict, and from a restaurant meeting to treason, is a script of Moscow’s writing.
The record does not support them. The Social Democrats, the largest party in Bolojan’s coalition, had fought him openly for months, most recently over the budget. In April they voted overwhelmingly to walk out, and on May 5 parliament removed Bolojan by 281 votes, far above the 233 required. Predicting a collapse that was playing out in public is a long way from causing one. The Bucharest meeting came five weeks before the vote and included a sitting Cabinet minister, and no one has shown that Guilfoyle urged the Social Democrats to leave, or that American favor emboldened them. The decision and the votes were Romanian.
The episode deserves a full accounting, without deference to anyone, and a parliamentary inquiry is the right venue. If it finds evidence of American interference, publish it. If not, stop trading suspicion for votes.
Americans should care, because the smear has a target beyond Bucharest’s feuds. Guilfoyle came to Bucharest to promote the Vertical Corridor, a gas route from Greece to Ukraine, and to sell American liquefied natural gas. Bolojan backed the corridor but balked at buying large volumes, since Romania has substantial gas of its own. The Social Democrats wanted more, and the quarrel fed the breakup. That is ordinary coalition politics, and how much gas to buy is Romania’s commercial call.
The strategic case stands apart: American LNG is a sounder alternative to Russian gas, and it helps anchor the region in a sphere of security and prosperity. Advocating it is fully legitimate. If the ouster story sticks, that advocacy looks like political control, American gas becomes politically radioactive in Romania, and the argument passes to the supplier Washington wants to displace: Russia.
PUTIN CLAIMS A LANDSLIDE, BUT HE CAN’T HIDE THE SMOKE OVER MOSCOW
As I argued in these pages in July, Romania can and should serve as the Black Sea anchor of a leaner American posture: it hosts Aegis Ashore and buys American weapons with its own money. An anchor holds only as well as the seabed beneath it. In Romania, that seabed is a pro-American consensus that has outlasted nearly three decades of governments in both capitals. Turn America into a partisan weapon, and the losing side learns to campaign against it.
Washington has already said the right thing. Its ambassador in Bucharest calls the crisis a Romanian problem that only Romania can solve. Romania’s progressives face a harder task: accepting that they lost a parliamentary vote and ceasing to recast it as a foreign plot. Those who tell voters that foreigners choose their governments have already conceded the argument Moscow most wants to win.
Alexandru Coita is a former Romanian state secretary and adviser to the prime minister. A Johns Hopkins SAIS graduate, he is the founder and managing partner of GANES Strategy, a Bucharest-based geopolitical and sovereign-risk advisory. The views expressed are his own.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
