In further Putinocracy news… There are reports that Putin has offered former Commerce Secretary (and Bush friend) Don Evans a similar position at Rosneft. As of yesterday he was still thinking about it. Let’s hope he doesn’t accept. As for Schroder, world chessmaster Garry Kasparov had this to say in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

One small step for Vladimir Putin, one giant leap for corruption in the West. Just days after being pushed out of office as chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder made sure he wouldn’t add to the high rate of unemployment he left behind. Last week he accepted a top post with Russian energy giant Gazprom, the company in charge of a controversial gas pipeline project that he actively supported as chancellor.

The dubious ethicality of this move and the speed with which it was made lead to many obvious questions about whether or not Mr. Schröder abused his office to set up this deal, especially as he was trailing badly in the polls for most of the campaign against Angela Merkel. But the groundwork for his new job was laid out in advance as part of a well-organized operation that brought in capital before personnel.

Mathias Warnig, as head of Russian operations for Dresdner Bank, first brought in a deal to purchase 33% of Gazprombank in August. (Dresdner also helped the Kremlin pick the bones of the Yukos oil company headed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in a Siberian jail.) Accordingly, Mr. Warnig was given a top position at the North European Gas Pipeline Company. Finally everything was ready for the arrival of Mr. Schröder. The deal keeps everything in the family as Mr. Warnig was a spy for the East German secret police, the Stasi, at the same time Mr. Putin was running agents for the KGB in Dresden. As Mr. Putin himself has said, there is no such thing as a former KGB agent.

In reality this is the lesser story — that Germany’s most powerful politicians and businessmen can be purchased the way a Russian oligarch might buy an aristocratic Bavarian estate to gain entry to high society. The larger picture is of how Mr. Putin has made the nation’s energy resources the center of his ruling clique that has erased the lines between public and private power and assets. Does the state run Gazprom or does Gazprom run the state? Mr. Putin has made a priority of further tightening the unholy bond between his regime’s internal and external goals and the company that provides most of the natural gas to Central and Eastern Europe. They are not state-run companies; they are the state…

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in German public opinion over the long-term, whether or not they will eventually shrug this off.

On the positive side, if the German Social Democrats have any sense of principle at all, they will make Schroder persona non grata after this, and Europe will at least be rid of him politically.

And though I don’t know the in and outs of the legal process there, suits here in the US slow big projects all the time for lesser issues than this.

It’s a question of who has the bigger nads in naked politics.

In re to Iran, the reality is that Germany has had ZERO influence with Iran for some time. This was perfectly exemplified several years ago when a German court found that Iran had sponsored a killing of regime opponents in Germany, recalled its ambassador from Iran, saw Iran give nothing, and instead demand a German apology for the insult. There has never been any indication that I can see that Germany foreign policy has curbed any significant Iranian policy vis-a-vis terrorism or nuclear weapons. A change in German foreign policy would be significant mainly for those in the United States who believe that the U.S. must act against threats only in a “multilateral” way, with “multilateral” being defined as including Germany and/or France.