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Europe Must Defend Itself Against A Dangerous President

 
 
Seems like that's what Trump thinks of all negroes, even the monte ones.
 
I’ll put this here.

Can I Ruin Your Dinner Party?: One of the two pillars of the West is in jeopardy.


ROME — I’ve found lately that I can ruin any dinner party. It’s like magic. Just get me going on Trump or Putin or climate change and I can put a frown on every face and a furrow in every brow. I do weddings and bar mitzvahs, too.

So I thought I’d come to Italy for a little sun and risotto. I made the mistake, though, of spending a few days with Italian government and international experts trying to understand the refugee crisis that is fracturing the European Union, much of which originates in Italy. And guess what? Now I can ruin your dinner party — and breakfast!

Because what you find when you take a close look at the situation here is something profoundly worrying. I was born in 1953 and have been living my entire life inside the community of democracies that came to be known as “the West” and eventually spread to include democracies around the world, such as Japan, Brazil, South Korea and India. At the core of this community were two pillars: the U.S. and the group of European democracies that became the European Union.

“The West” was not just a state of mind. It was an association of countries with shared interests, institutions and values — particularly the values of liberty, democracy, free markets and the rule of law — which made the post-World War II world, though far from perfect, a steadily more prosperous, free and decent place for more and more people. This community of democracies was also a beacon, a refuge and a magnet for those who wanted to embrace its values but were denied them where they lived.

But the European pillar of this community of democracies has never been more under assault — so much so that for the first time I wonder if this European pillar will actually crumble.

From Italy you can see all the lines of attack: Donald Trump coming from the West, Vladimir Putin from the East and environmental and political disorder from the south — from Africa and the Middle East, where the reckless 2011 French-British-U.S. decision to topple Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and not stay on to help build a new order in his place, now haunts Italy.

Toppling Qaddafi without building a new order may go down as the single dumbest action the NATO alliance ever took.

It took the lid off Africa, leading to some 600,000 asylum seekers and illegal migrants flocking to Italy’s shores in recent years, with 300,000 staying there and the rest filtering into other E.U. countries. This has created wrangles within the bloc over who should absorb how many migrants and has spawned nationalist-populist backlashes in almost every E.U. country.

Democracy was never the dominant driver of the uprising against Qaddafi. It was much more a revolt by anti-Qaddafi tribes in eastern Libya. But when you just let a tribal revolt rage in a country with few real institutions, you end up with what you have in Libya today: multiple tribes and militias all competing for power and control of oil, creating vast zones of disorder, which both African and Arab refugees and economic migrants can take advantage of to reach the Libyan coastline to try to catch a human trafficking boat to Italy.

Italian officials will tell you that Libya now really has only three effective institutions: a state-owned oil company; a central bank that distributes its proceeds to the government and indirectly to various tribal militias; and a coast guard that the Italians have propped up to help stop refugee boats from leaving Libya for Italy. Human trafficking is the second-largest industry in Libya today, after oil.

In 2017, the biggest migrant groups to arrive in Italy mostly via Libya were from Nigeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Eritrea.

An Italian official expressed great disgust to me over the fact that Italy’s economy has lost hundreds of millions of euros by participating in E.U. sanctions on Russia — to help deter Russia from encroaching on Central Europe — while Central European E.U. countries, like Hungary, have refused to take a single one of the migrants who have sailed to Italy’s shores.

Italy has the anti-immigrant government it has, an Italian refugee expert explained, because the world and the rest of the E.U. “turned its back on Italy,” where unassimilated migrants are now visible in the streets, squares and train stations.

“There have to be shared E.U. migration quotas,” he added, consistent E.U. “legal pathways” for immigration and a strategy to improve effective and accountable governance in Africa, not just paying off warlords there to collar refugees.

“The movement of people will happen,” said another Italian official. “The question is: Do we manage it or not?”

That’s for sure. The total population of Europe/Russia today is about 740 million people, according to the United Nations, and Africa’s is 1.2 billion. By 2050, Europe-Russia will shrink to around 700 million and Africa will double to 2.4 billion. If disorder spreads in Africa, the current crisis will seem tame and manageable by comparison.

Mind you, countries like Italy actually need more workers and should welcome them. Some 60 percent of Africans are under age 24, while 27 percent of Europeans are. But the latest African/Arab flow has come faster than Italian and other European societies can absorb them culturally and politically, and politicians have risen up to take advantage of the backlash and create hysteria.

Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that Putin, who has long had a foreign policy goal of weakening and discrediting the E.U. — in order to diminish it as a vibrant alternative to his kleptocratic, nationalist autocracy or as an inspiration for former Soviet satellites like Ukraine — has encouraged the rise of anti-E.U. parties in Italy as well as the U.K.’s Brexit.

In March, Italy’s annual security report warned of foreign online “influence campaigns” in its elections then. The vote brought to power the most pro-Putin, anti-immigrant, anti-E.U. coalition ever to rule Italy: the League and the Five-Star Movement.

As for Trump, he has no appreciation for how important the E.U.-U.S. partnership has been to catalyzing the global cooperation and rule-making that has made America, Europe and the world as a whole steadily freer, more stable and more prosperous since World War II.

Trump actually pressed British Prime Minister Theresa May to make a sharp Brexit from the E.U., if she wanted to have a free-trade agreement with the U.S., and he characterized the E.U. not as a partner on trade but as a “foe.” Trump seems to prefer that the E.U. fracture so he can try to strike better trade deals with the countries individually. How else to explain these irrational moves?

One of the first foreign visitors to come to Italy to high-five its new government of Euro- and NATO-skeptics and anti-immigrant populists was Trump’s former brain, Steve Bannon, who reportedly said of the ruling coalition: “If it works in Italy, it is going to work everywhere. … It is going to break the backs of the globalists.”

This is such foolish talk. It was the U.S. and what became the E.U. that took the lead in not only repelling communism but in shaping the rules and catalyzing institutions that managed the key global issues after W.W. II — like trade, migration, environment and human rights — helping more people around the globe grow out of poverty faster than ever before.

We need the U.S. and the E.U. — joined by the other Group of 20 nations — to play a similar role today. The change in the pace of change in the climate, globalization and technology has thrown up a whole set of new challenges very fast — extreme weather, cybercrime, crypto-currencies, social networks, deepfake technologies, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, biological design tools and questions of how to distinguish among refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers. These can be managed only through global cooperation and new rules.

If the community of democracies fractures, and we return to a more 19th- and 20th-century great power competition, who will write the new rules for the 21st century? Who will help Libya or the struggling countries of sub-Saharan Africa create governance and nurture their human capital to escape disorder, so their people don’t feel the need to emigrate to survive or thrive. Russia? China? I don’t think so. There will be a global leadership vacuum, a free-for-all, with terrible consequences.

It will be hard enough dealing with these issues with a community of democracies leading the way again, but it will be impossible to do so if Trump, Bannon and Putin, and their fellow travelers, succeed in breaking it up. So sorry to ruin your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
 
In the short term, breaking up the global order is basically an "I've got mine, screw you" move by the rich countries. We all built our economies on exploiting cheap resources and cheap labor in the rest of world. If the West closes the doors and pulls up the drawbridge now, then it can probably maintain something like the current global inequality level for another generation or so. After that, however, the demographic reality of shrinking Western populations and ballooning Asian and African populations, coupled with the loss of foreign markets to loot for resources/export to, will erode and eventually destroy the Western economic and military advantage. Winner: almost certainly China.
 
In the short term, breaking up the global order is basically an "I've got mine, screw you" move by the rich countries. We all built our economies on exploiting cheap resources and cheap labor in the rest of world. If the West closes the doors and pulls up the drawbridge now, then it can probably maintain something like the current global inequality level for another generation or so. After that, however, the demographic reality of shrinking Western populations and ballooning Asian and African populations, coupled with the loss of foreign markets to loot for resources/export to, will erode and eventually destroy the Western economic and military advantage. Winner: almost certainly China.


Good thing we pulled out of the TPP.





Not.
 
Axios:

1 big thing: Americans want Trump to stop hammering allies

Americans are more worried about the rupturing of international alliances and agreements than they are about being pushed around by other countries, according to a new Axios/Survey Monkey poll.


Data: Survey Monkey online poll conducted August 15-17, 2018 among 2,096 U.S. adults. Total margin of error is ±3.0 percentage points. Modeled error estimates: Republicans ±4.5, Democrats ±4.0, Independents ±7.0; Poll methodology; Chart: Chris Canipe/Axios

Why it matters: President Trump claims his combative foreign policy — tariffs and threats for allies and adversaries alike — is necessary to correct for years of being "ripped off" on the world stage. Trump's base tends to see things his way, but a majority of Americans (56%) are more worried about damage being done to alliances and agreements.

More from the poll...

Overall, 41% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of foreign policy, down from 46% when we last asked in May and slightly below his overall approval rating of 43%.

Two-thirds of Americans say it’s very (40%) or somewhat likely (27%) that the Russian government will attempt to interfere in the midterm elections, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have warned they will.
Worth noting: Most Americans are unlikely to be thinking about foreign policy as they make up their minds ahead of the midterms. Just 5% of voters said it’s the issue that matters most to them.
So what do the allies think?

35% of Germans view the U.S. favorably, per a Pew poll from last year, compared to 57% during Barack Obama's last year in office. Just 11% say they have confidence in Trump.
The trends are similar in Japan (72% approval under Obama, 57% now), the U.K. (61%-->50%) and France (63%-->46%).

Most Canadians and Mexicans now view the U.S. unfavorably. Approval has fallen from 65% to 43% in Canada and 66% to 30% in Mexico since Trump's election.

Outliers include Poland, where 73% still view the U.S. favorably, and Israel, where 81% view the U.S. favorably — the same percentage as under Obama.

Counterpoint: Most allied leaders, at least publicly, tend to take the longer view. Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau et al. say they'll continue to work with the U.S., push back when necessary, and hope sunnier skies lie ahead.
 
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