Continued Crossings Highlight Risks Migrants Willing to Take to Reach Europe

The number of migrants trying to reach Europe by sea continues to be high, despite worsening weather conditions. While boat crossings typically decrease in autumn, October saw record numbers of people arriving. Over 218,000 people entered Europe by sea last month alone, compared to 219,000 that made the crossing during the whole of 2014.

KRUGMAN: ‘The European project … has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow.

Talks between Greece and its European creditors are going nowhere. Backwards, in fact. 

REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

And New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman thinks we could be watching the “European project” dissolve before our eyes. 

Weimar on the Aegean

Try to talk about the policies we need in a depressed world economy, and someone is sure to counter with the specter of Weimar Germany, supposedly an object lesson in the dangers of budget deficits and monetary expansion. But the history of Germany after World War I is almost always cited in a curiously selective way. We hear endlessly about the hyperinflation of 1923, when people carted around wheelbarrows full of cash, but we never hear about the much more relevant deflation of the early 1930s, as the government of Chancellor Brüning — having learned the wrong lessons — tried to defend Germany’s peg to gold with tight money and harsh austerity.

Interview With George Soros: 'Greece Can Never Pay Back Its Debt'

REUTERS

Billionaire investor George Soros

Should Greece have a large part of its debt waived? Absolutely, says George Soros, otherwise the country will never recover. The billionaire investor also warns about the rise of extremist parties if Germany does not change its policies towards Europe.

Legendary US investor George Soros has called for comprehensive debt relief for Greece. "Everyone knows that it can never pay back its debt," he said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE. Greece is close to a primary budget surplus after a lot of pain and suffering, says Soros, whose speculation against the pound forced the UK to withdraw from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

Military should run drone strikes, Colin Powell says

US drone strikes should be limited to targets that present a “real, immediate threat to us” and conducted by the military rather than the CIA, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said.
“Drones are a very, very effective weapon and we will continue to use them, but in a more circumscribed manner to make sure that we are going after the high-value targets that present a real, immediate threat to us,” Powell said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

Iran could use a nuclear weapon against Israel and get away with it

Wednesday’s IAEA report offered more proof than ever that Iran is racing toward a nuclear weapon. Even President Obama acknowledges this fact. Yet Obama has refused to endorse the tough approach advocated by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The reason is simple: Israel faces an existential threat of an Iranian nuclear attack, while the United States does not.

With diplomacy and sanctions failing, world leaders still give lip service to the dangers of a nuclear Iran. But they often dismiss the idea that Iran would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel. They believe that Iran is a rational actor, and that Israel’s strong nuclear deterrent is sufficient to safeguard the Jewish state. It is not.

The Resistible Fall of Europe: An Interview with George Soros

On May 12, George Soros was awarded the Tiziano Terzani Prize for his 2012 book Financial Turmoil published in Italy by Hoepli. The following interview is adapted from a press conference held in Udine, Italy, on that occasion.

Illustration by fair use.

INTRODUCTION 

SOROS: I have been very concerned about Europe. The euro is in the process of destroying the European Union. To some extent, this has already happened, in the sense that the EU was meant to be a voluntary association of equal states. The crisis has turned it into something that is radically different: a relationship between creditors and debtors. And, in a financial crisis, the creditors are in charge. It is no longer a relationship between equals. The fate of Italy, for example, is no longer determined by Italian politics – which is in a crisis of its own, I would say – but rather by the creditor/debtor relationship. That is really what dictates policies.

For American Foreign Policy, No Good Options

One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the midst of a quagmire with even more pundits angry at him, and with his approval ratings far lower than they are. If he intervenes now, the results might be even worse. Journalists often demand action for action's sake, seemingly unaware that many international problems have no solution, given the limits of U.S. power. The United States can topple regimes; it cannot even modestly remake societies unless, perhaps, it commits itself to the level of time and expense it did in post-war Germany and Japan.

 

Indeed, Obama has onerous calculations: If I intervene, which group do I arm? Am I assured the weapons won't fall into the wrong hands? Am I assured the group or groups I choose to help really are acceptable to the West, and even if they are, will they matter in Damascus in the long run? And, by the way, what if toppling Syrian leader Bashar al Assad through the establishment of a no-fly zone leads to even more chaos, and therefore results in an even worse human rights situation? Do I really want to own that mess? And even were I to come out of it successfully, do I want to devote my entire second term to Syria? Because that's what getting more deeply involved militarily there might entail.

Is North Korea being more restrained than we think?

North Korea’s threats from the last week have included, among other things, launching “preemptive” nuclear strikes on South Korea and the United States. Its provocations included showing the world its “plan” for strikes against the U.S. mainland, readying rocket forces for battle, announcing that it was operating under “wartime” conditions and stating, for example, “Time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle.”

Kim Jong Un, center, accompanied by military officers, inspects air drill at an undisclosed airbase in North Korea. (AP Photo/KCNA via KNS)

Pretty scary stuff. But North Korea’s actual actions, though certainly provocative, appear to have shown much greater care, caution and restraint than their rhetoric would suggest. Here’s Stephen Haggard, a North Korean expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics:

Israel’s apology to Turkey was a mistake

The Israeli apology will hardly stop Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regular Israel-bashing rhetoric

Activists pose on Mavi Marmara Photo: Reuters

Israel’s apology to Turkey for “operational errors” in the Mavi Marmara incident is a diplomatic mistake both in terms of substance and timing. It’s hard to understand or justify Israel’s weekend apology to Turkey. While the use of Israeli force in the Mavi Marmara “flotilla” incident was not very elegant, it was perfectly legitimate – as the UN-appointed “Palmer Commission” unequivocally determined. Moreover, the incident was a Turkish provocation that warrants a Turkish apology, not an Israeli one.

Could Cyprus reignite the eurozone crisis?

Each of the crisis-hit eurozone countries shares some responsibility for its predicament. Italy used membership of the single currency as an excuse to go slow on pushing through much-needed structural reforms of its economy. The Irish and Spanish were excessively relaxed about their booming housing markets. Greece and Portugal were simply not sufficiently converged with the rest of the eurozone to be able to flourish within it; they should not have applied to join or been allowed in. At the same time, all were to a greater or lesser extent victims of the structure of the currency union and the tardy response of its member-states.
But Cyprus is different. The country really is the architect of its own misfortune. This makes finding a workable solution to the crisis even more difficult, and explains why a country with a population of around 1 million could pose a systemic threat to a currency union of 400 million.

Top Iranian leader says no power could stop Iran from having nuclear bomb if it wanted it

Iran’s Supreme Leader said Saturday that his country is not seeking nuclear weapons, but that no world power could stop Tehran’s access to an atomic bomb if it intended to build one.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, told a group of Iranians at his home in the Iranian capital, Tehran, that his country backs the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy

North Korea's state-run media reported Sunday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered the country's top security officials to take "substantial and high-profile important state measures," which has been widely interpreted to mean that North Korea is planning its third nuclear test. Kim said the orders were retaliation for the U.S.-led push to tighten U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang following North Korea's missile test in October. A few days before Kim's statement emerged, the North Koreans said future tests would target the United States, which North Korea regards as its key adversary along with Washington's tool, South Korea.

North Korea has been using the threat of tests and the tests themselves as weapons against its neighbors and the United States for years. On the surface, threatening to test weapons does not appear particularly sensible. If the test fails, you look weak. If it succeeds, you look dangerous without actually having a deliverable weapon. And the closer you come to having a weapon, the more likely someone is to attack you so you don't succeed in actually getting one. Developing a weapon in absolute secret would seem to make more sense. When the weapon is ready, you display it, and you have something solid to threaten enemies with.

Urging Economists to Step Away From the Blackboard

 Brendan Greeley 

Ronald Coase published his career-making paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” 75 years ago. He won the Nobel prize for economics in 1991. In a lecture in 2002, he argued that physics has moved beyond the assumptions of Isaac Newton, and biology beyond Darwin. (Not that he knew them.) But economics, he said, had failed to advance past the efficient-market assumptions of Adam Smith. This year Coase, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School, is attempting to start a new academic journal ambitiously titled Man and the Economy. The premise: Economics is broken. Coase’s journal is still just a plan, but his frustration with orthodox economics has energized his followers.

Avoiding the Wars That Never End

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that the United States would transfer the primary responsibility for combat operations in Afghanistan to the Afghan military in the coming months, a major step toward the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Also last week, France began an intervention in Mali designed to block jihadists from taking control of the country and creating a base of operations in France's former African colonies.

The two events are linked in a way that transcends the issue of Islamist insurgency and points to a larger geopolitical shift. The United States is not just drawing down its combat commitments; it is moving away from the view that it has the primary responsibility for trying to manage the world on behalf of itself, the Europeans and its other allies. Instead, that burden is shifting to those who have immediate interests involved.

The Interview: Stephen M. Walt

By Zachary Keck

Stephen M. Walt discusses American alliances in Asia, U.S. - China relations, Iran and more.

The Diplomat's Zachary Keck spoke with Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government Professor Stephen M. Walt.

You have written a lot about alliances in your academic work. I am wondering how important you believe alliances will be in U.S. Asia Policy as Washington seeks to deepen its commitment to the region in the years and decades ahead?

North Korea has a new name for North Koreans: ‘space conquerors’

North Korean state media present an easy target, but the latest from the official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, is a doozy even by the DPRK’s already-monumental standards of lunacy. A recent editorial in the paper repeats the usual exhortation to each and every North Korean to “devote oneself to building an economic giant with burning patriotic enthusiasm to fully demonstrate Korea of the sun.”

This 1999 North Korean stamp is a small but telling indication of the regime’s obsession with achieving a successful launch into Earth orbit, which it finally got in December. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP Images)

What’s interesting is that the state-run Rodong Sinmun seems to employ a new, unofficial name for the North Korean people: “space conquerors.” In only 365 short words, it refers to North Koreans five different times as “space conquerors,” according to the official English translation. To give you a sense of how firmly the paper is hammering this home, here are two successive paragraphs (my emphasis added):

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

Last week I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe. I received a great deal of feedback, with Europeans agreeing that this is the core problem and Americans arguing that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.