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Updated Saturday, November 21, 2009 12:47 am TWN, AFP

U.S. now knows who to place calls to in Europe

BRUSSELS -- Now that the European Union has a new president and foreign policy supremo, the U.S. State Department might finally learn exactly who to call when Hillary Clinton wants to talk to Europe.

“I'm waiting anxiously for the first call,” the EU's first-ever president, Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, said to break an uneasy silence when EU leaders were asked about the question attributed to Henry Kissinger.

In the 1970s, then secretary of state Kissinger was said to have complained: “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?”

Van Rompuy was questioned as he sat with Catherine Ashton, the new foreign policy chief, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden who holds the EU's rotating presidency, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

As reporters laughed, and the leaders looked to one in another in embarrassment, Barroso finally said: “The Kissinger issue is now solved.”

As Kissinger had been U.S. secretary of state, Barroso said, “the secretary of state should call Cathy Ashton, she is our foreign minister.”

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