Three Seas and a pond

Until Donald Trump visited Warsaw last week, few Czechs had ever heard of the Three Seas Initiative. This was by design. The CR took part in the official launch of the initiative in Dubrovnik last Aug., but Prague wasn't represented on a high diplomatic level. The foreign ministry sent Deputy Min. Václav Kolaja, who had been in charge of cyber security until two months earlier. He got to pose for pictures with the presidents of Croatia (Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović) amd Poland (Andrzej Duda), but Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia also sent mid-level officials to the gathering. The Czech foreign ministry doesn't even mention the Three Seas Initiative in its foreign-affairs policy statement, and neither does the Association for International Affairs (AMO) in its Agenda for Czech Foreign Policy 2017. The Czech foreign-policy community simply isn't thrilled with the Three Seas Initiative but doesn't want to offend the initiators, Croatia and Poland, by saying so out loud. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Miloš Zeman decided last week to trade Three Seas for a pond and a rubber raft.