O mundo segundo Washington: declínio de um imperio - The Washington Post

December 17, 2018

Edited by Max J. Rosenthal and Ruby Mellen BY ISHAAN THAROOR   Trump sparks a debate over the future of American power President Trump will retreat to his Florida resort at the end of this week. Nearing the halfway point of his term in office, his political isolation in Washington is deepening. A slew of candidates balked at taking the job of White House chief of staff — a post of tremendous influence that has in the age of Trump become a poisoned chalice from which few want to drink. A funding spat with the Democrats prompted Trump to vow a government shutdown, much to the chagrin of members of his own party. And the legal inquiries into the president’s campaign and businesses are mounting. It’s not just Trump’s domestic agenda that’s facing scrutiny. Last week, Trump received a stinging bipartisan rebuke from Congress over his administration’s embrace of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the particularly reckless royal holding power in Riyadh. The high-profile climate meetings that took place in Poland only underscored the extent to which this White House has alienated itself from the international mainstream on environmental policy — and highlighted, yet again, how the rest of the world is plowing ahead in spite of Trump, not with him. Of course, Trump came to power vowing to be a disrupter on the global stage. He said he was intent on reforming a post-World War II international order that had outlived its usefulness for Americans. But the White House’s efforts overseas — including its rejection of the Paris climate accord, the waging of trade wars, the unraveling of the Iran nuclear deal, the persistent belittling of allies and the perplexing coddling of autocrats — have unsettled Washington as much as they have disturbed American partners abroad. To be sure, discussions about the waning of the United States as the world’s sole superpower predate Trump. But two years of his tumultuous presidency have intensified Washingtonian angst about the future of American power and how America should seek to lead a more fractured planet — or whether it should try at all. “It’s historical fact that great nations and empires all have a beginning and an end,” said James Jones, a retired U.S. general, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and outgoing chairman of the Atlantic Council, speaking Friday in Washington at a forum hosted by his think tank. “There’s a naive belief in our country that there’s some sort of destiny, that the primacy of the United States is ensured for some reason forever. I don’t think that’s the case.” To that end, the Atlantic Council, an organization deeply invested in the furtherance of American leadership, is planning on floating a new set of principles to safeguard the “rules-based order” — the euphemism often used to explain the status quo authored by the United States more than half a century ago. It wants to “revitalize” and “defend” this order, not just from the rising authoritarian might of China, but in the face of Trump’s own nationalist and protectionist agenda and those of his ilk. At the forum, speakers warned of the White House’s disregard for “values-based” foreign policy — seen both in Trump’s cynical accommodation of figures such as the Saudi crown prince as well as his demagoguery over migrants and refugees coming to the United States. Washington, they feared, was seeing its credibility evaporate among allies. This sentiment was echoed by Jake Sullivan, a former Obama administration official and Hillary Clinton adviser, in a recent essay outlining what a liberal, post-Trump foreign policy ought to look like. “An energized, inspiring, and ultimately successful foreign policy must cut through Trump’s false, dog-whistling choice between globalism and nationalism,” wrote Sullivan. “It must combine the best kind of patriotism (a shared civic spirit and a clear sense of the national interest) and the best kind of internationalism (a recognition that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you need to grab a bucket). And it should reject the worst kind of nationalism (damn-the-consequences aggression and identity-based hate-mongering) and the worst kind of internationalism (the self-congratulatory insulation of the Davos elite).” But that’s a tricky needle to thread. On the right, Trump and his lieutenants have spent their time in power casting the liberal pieties of the Obama era as supposed obstacles to the American national interest and see themselves at the forefront of a nationalist wave taking control across the world. Among the Democrats, there’s a burgeoning debate about what kind of counter to “internationalism” ought to be embraced: It’s easy to scorn the “Davos elite,” but it’s another thing to pursue policies that target the power and privileges of influential multinational corporations or question the shibboleths of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism. It’s sensible to urge American restraint in the Middle East and other geopolitical flash points, but it’s harder to convince official Washington to eschew new military entanglements. And though Trump and his political rivals may not agree on much, both may succumb to the old temptations of the Cold War. At the Atlantic Council’s forum, the specter of China loomed over proceedings. Adm. Michael Rogers, a former head of the National Security Agency, feared China could outpace the United States in its abilities to wage cyberwarfare. Sen. Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.), a figure largely loyal to Trump, described China as “a unique adversary in the world.” Though Cotton’s hawkish views on Iran have earned him many detractors, there aren’t that many lawmakers on the other side of the aisle who would disagree with his antipathy toward Beijing. That the United States is almost inexorably lurching into a great-power confrontation with China ought to be a concern, suggested Emma Ashford and Trevor Thrall of the libertarian Cato Institute. “The growing consensus on China is troubling. Having identified China as America’s biggest strategic challenge, neither party has identified a clear goal,” Ashford and Thrall wrote. “Nor have they articulated how a new approach to China would provide a foundation for a broader vision of American foreign policy . . . The risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on China — through confrontation without purpose — is real.” Analysts liken the febrile moment to an earlier era of 19th century politics, when Europe’s industrializing, imperial powers entered into alliances that ultimately convulsed the world into conflict. “What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post — World War II, post — Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis,” wrote Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. A century ago, that crisis arrived. This time, the current crop of American politicians — Trump included — can still stave off calamity. “Now is the time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change,” Haass continued. “The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not.”

• Here’s how Haass sets up his history lesson on the Concert of Europe:  “If the end of every order is inevitable, the timing and the manner of its ending are not. Nor is what comes in its wake. Orders tend to expire in a prolonged deterioration rather than a sudden collapse. And just as maintaining the order depends on effective statecraft and effective action, good policy and proactive diplomacy can help determine how that deterioration unfolds and what it brings. Yet for that to happen, something else must come first: recognition that the old order is never coming back and that efforts to resurrect it will be in vain. As with any ending, acceptance must come before one can move on. "In the search for parallels to today’s world, scholars and practitioners have looked as far afield as ancient Greece, where the rise of a new power resulted in war between Athens and Sparta, and the period after World War I, when an isolationist United States and much of Europe sat on their hands as Germany and Japan ignored agreements and invaded their neighbors. But the more illuminating parallel to the present is the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, the most important and successful effort to build and sustain world order until our own time. From 1815 until the outbreak of World War I a century later, the order established at the Congress of Vienna defined many international relationships and set (even if it often failed to enforce) basic rules for international conduct. It provides a model of how to collectively manage security in a multipolar world. "That order’s demise and what followed offer instructive lessons for today—and an urgent warning. Just because an order is in irreversible decline does not mean that chaos or calamity is inevitable. But if the deterioration is managed poorly, catastrophe could well follow.” • A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office, report my colleagues: “The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel hasn’t said if it endorses the findings. It plans to release it publicly along with another study later this week. "The research — by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm — offers new details on how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.” • At a time when Congress is trying to challenge Trump’s pursuit of war in Yemen, my colleague Liz Sly points in a lengthy piece to a hidden war that the president has advanced in Syria: “The commitment is small, a few thousand troops who were first sent to Syria three years ago to help the Syrian Kurds fight the Islamic State. President Trump indicated in March that the troops would be brought home once the battle is won, and the latest military push to eject the group from its final pocket of territory recently got underway. "In September, however, the administration switched course, saying the troops will stay in Syria pending an overall settlement to the Syrian war and with a new mission: to act as a bulwark against Iran’s expanding influence. "That decision puts U.S. troops in overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria, a vast expanse of mostly desert terrain roughly the size of Louisiana. "The Pentagon does not say how many troops are there. Officially, they number 503, but earlier this year an official let slip that the true number may be closer to 4,000. Most are Special Operations forces, and their footprint is light. Their vehicles and convoys rumble by from time to time along the empty desert roads, but it is rare to see U.S. soldiers in towns and cities. "The new mission raises new questions, about the role they will play and whether their presence will risk becoming a magnet for regional conflict and insurgency.” • An investigation by the New York Times digs up damning evidence of how the powerful U.S. consulting firm McKinsey abets anti-democratic regimes and practices. It kicks off its story at a desert retreat for the company’s associates in China: “For a quarter-century, the company has joined many American corporations in helping stoke China’s transition from an economic laggard to the world’s second-largest economy. But as China’s growth presents a muscular challenge to American dominance, Washington has become increasingly critical of some of Beijing’s signature policies, including the ones McKinsey has helped advance. "One of McKinsey’s state-owned clients has even helped build China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, a major point of military tension with the United States. "It turns out that McKinsey’s role in China is just one example of its extensive — and sometimes contentious — work around the world, according to an investigation by The New York Times that included interviews with 40 current and former McKinsey employees, as well as dozens of their clients. "At a time when democracies and their basic values are increasingly under attack, the iconic American company has helped raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe, sometimes in ways that counter American interests.”

USA-RPDC: bye-bye Premio Nobel da Paz? - Washington Post

Trump’s North Korea diplomacy quietly stalls

Rapprochement with North Korea has been perhaps the biggest foreign-policy achievement of President Trump’s tenure. But a number of quiet developments over the past few days suggest that there are major problems in the diplomatic process. Indeed, the United States and North Korea may have grown further apart since Trump’s historic summit with Kim Jong Un on June 12.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was scheduled to meet North Korea’s nuclear negotiator, Kim Yong Chol, in New York on Thursday. According to the State Department, Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart were to “discuss making progress on all four pillars of the Singapore Summit joint statement, including achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of [North Korea]."

Pompeo said he expected to make “some real progress” at the meeting, which would be used to plan for a second Trump-Kim summit tentatively scheduled for early next year. “I’m confident that we’ll advance the ball again this week when I’m in New York City,” he told CBS News' Face the Nation.

Instead, just minutes after midnight on Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert announced that the Thursday meeting would not take place. “We will reconvene when our respective schedules permit,” she said.

It was yet another sign of how diplomacy has stagnated in the months since the summit. Pompeo has traveled to North Korea and held high-level meetings with his counterparts, much like the one coming up in New York. But at the working level, where the details are actually hammered out, progress has been slow at best.

The Trump administration had hoped to move things along by appointing a dedicated special envoy, Stephen Biegun, to lead negotiations. But Biegun has not yet been able to secure a meeting with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, who is supposed to be leading North Korea’s working-level delegation.

Many U.S. observers had chided the Trump administration for starting with high-level talks rather than with working-level meetings. Now, it seems that North Korea is the one dragging its feet on the more detailed negotiations. “My own concern is the leaders are so way out in front,” Joseph Yun, a former U.S. envoy on North Korea policy, said at a forum in Seoul last month.

The issues with this approach were reinforced last Friday, when North Korean state media suggested that the “arrogant” behavior of the United States could lead Pyongyang to restart its “byungjin” policy — simultaneously focusing on economic development and its nuclear program. It was effectively a warning that North Korea could soon resume the weapons and missile tests that led to so much tension in 2017.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and State Department specialist on Korea, wrote that the commentary was a new level of warning from North Korea. It “goes to the heart of Pyongyang’s concern that the US has been moving backwards, away from the agenda the two leaders laid out in the Singapore Summit joint statement,” Carlin wrote in a post for the North Korea-focused website 38 North.

The latest warning followed a number of other jibes from North Korean state media, including one that took the unprecedented step of criticizing Trump by name. As NK News noted, it was the “first negative casting of the American president on U.S.-DPRK diplomacy since the Singapore summit took place,” suggesting that even the high-level goodwill between Trump and Kim could be falling short.

For Trump, the breakdown in North Korean diplomacy would be a personal failure. The U.S. leader long suggested that he could solve the North Korea problem if he met with Kim himself — and he had a point. His willingness to meet the North Korean leader face-to-face this year set things in motion in a way previous U.S.-North Korea meetings, which involved officials at a lower levels, did not.

But as the Singapore summit recedes further into the past, its flaws are becoming more apparent. The brief, vague statement that Trump and Kim signed — just 400 words — did not provide a clear path for resolving the key issues in the standoff between the United States and North Korea. Both sides are still arguing over what “denuclearization” means and when it will happen, just as they were before the summit.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before their meeting in Pyongyang on Oct. 7.

The U.S. president, always an unpredictable speaker, is also reported to have raised North Korean hopes about declaring an official end to the Korean War. That would grant Pyongyang some legitimacy, but many in Washington oppose such a move because of its implications for the U.S. military presence in South Korea. A Korean Peninsula formally at peace might be one on which U.S. troops would no longer be welcome.

For Pyongyang, the most important issue right now appears to be sanctions relief. But that is fundamentally at odds with the U.S. position, which says that Washington cannot ease economic pressure on North Korea because it would lose its greatest leverage over Pyongyang. Just this weekend, Pompeo emphasized that the United States would not lift sanctions until it could verify that North Korea had given up its weapons. North Korea, though, is hoping for sanctions first to be lifted.

The larger problem is that both sides are divided not only over what happens next, but also what has happened so far. The Trump administration viewed the Singapore Summit as a triumph of its “maximum pressure” sanctions policy and portrayed North Korean denuclearization as a fait accompli. But North Korea believes it forced Trump into a meeting with the success of its ramped-up nuclear capabilities, an advantage it is unlikely to give up.

Can such different views of negotiations be reconciled? Perhaps, especially given Trump’s own personal investment in talks. With the political test of the midterms over, Trump is likely to turn toward foreign policy again — and any big moves will ultimately come down to his choices.

The Washington Post se ocupa de Bolsonaro, como a Economist - Ishaan Tharoor

Edited by Max J. Rosenthal and Ruby Mellen   BY ISHAAN THAROOR   Is Brazil about to elect its own Trump? We’re entering the run-up to perhaps the most important election in the Western Hemisphere this year. Next month, Brazilians will elect new governors and legislatures in each of the country’s 27 states; all 513 members of the lower house of Congress; some two-thirds of the Senate; and, most importantly, a new president. The first round of the presidential election will be held on Oct. 7. For now, there’s only one politician who most expect to qualify for the two-candidate runoff on Oct. 28: 63-year-old Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right nationalist whose ascent echoes the rise of right-wing populists across the West, including that of President Trump. Brazil has been wracked by years of tumult: A vast corruption scandal has caused presidential impeachments and rolling political feuds. Economic havoc has led to a recession and millions of Brazilians are backsliding into poverty. Meanwhile, crime rates have soared. But, despite the mounting public anger and waves of mass protests that have hit the country’s major cities, little has fundamentally changed. While some establishment politicians are now in jail, dozens of others implicated in allegations of graft may win reelection to their seats in Congress. A poll last year found that only 13 percent of Brazilians were satisfied with their democracy. That backdrop has given Bolsonaro, a former army captain who eked out most of his career on the fringes of politics, his moment to shine. Like Trump, Bolsonaro has marshalled widespread disaffection to build a viral, anti-establishment movement. He, too, promises sweeping, bludgeoning reform — including the privatization of major state-owned companies — while pandering to a socially conservative base of voters, particularly an increasingly influential bloc of evangelical Christians. His campaign has, at least informally, sought the counsel of former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. And Bolsonaro himself has welcomed comparisons to the U.S. president, whom he hails for challenging “political correctness” and the “rotten media” elite. Bolsonaro’s supporters see him as a “messiah” who will make Brazil great again. Others are not so convinced. A new cover story in the Economist branded the populist front-runner as “Latin America’s latest menace.” Two weeks ago, Bolsonaro survived a near-fatal stabbing attack while on the campaign trail. The ordeal added to his sense of epochal purpose. “What’s at stake? It’s not my future,” said the wounded candidate, speaking from his São Paolo hospital bed. “We live in a time when the future of more than 200 million Brazilians is at stake." Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s critics — and there are many — point to the rather unseemly side of his politics. Brazil’s top court recently ruled he would not have to stand trial for racist remarks he made during a speech in 2017, during which he said “that members of rural settlements founded by the descendants of slaves, called ‘quilombolas,’ are ‘not good even to procreate,'” according to the Associated Press. “He also talked about the weight of those slave descendants using a measure that Brazilian farmers apply to animals.” Bolsonaro does still have to go to court over accusations of slander and incitement to rape, dating back to a 2014 incident when he attacked a left-leaning congresswoman, saying he would not rape her because she was ugly and “didn’t deserve it.” He’s also well-known for his disparagement of LGBT Brazilians: Bolsonaro has said he would prefer a dead son to a gay one and has likened the right of gay couples to adopt to pedophilia. He has attacked immigrants as “scum” and has proposed selling off the lands of indigenous Brazilians. Unsurprisingly, Bolsonaro’s backers have framed his grossly offensive rhetoric as plain-speaking banter meant to cut through the platitudes of the corrupt and out-of-touch political class. Arrayed against Bolsonaro is a cast of centrist and center-left challengers. One potential opponent in the second round is Fernando Haddad, a former mayor of São Paolo and a key figure within the left-leaning Workers Party. Haddad was tapped to run by popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who languishes behind bars on a corruption conviction his supporters insist is politically motivated. A Bolsonaro vs. Haddad showdown raises the prospect of a bitter left vs. right clash. “Many thought that by the time we got close to the election, some middle ground would be found, and that is not what we are seeing,” said Monica de Bolle, director of Latin American studies program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to Reuters. To the alarm of his opponents, Bolsonaro has spoken admiringly of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, which ruled for multiple decades and disappeared and tortured countless leftist dissidents. His running mate, retired army general Hamilton Mourão, has even floated the idea of a coup against the judiciary and rewriting Brazil’s constitution to constrain civil liberties. “Bolsonaro represents a new brand of populism in Latin America, one that returns to its fascist origins across the world,” wrote Federico Finchelstein, a historian at the New School. “Bolsonaro’s rise should serve as a reminder that we are experiencing a worldwide crisis of democracy, one not limited to Trumpism or the rise of the extreme right in Europe.” “If Brazil falls, if Brazil goes authoritarian, I would worry a lot about the rest of the region,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky said to HuffPost. “People in Latin America ― militaries in Latin America, demagogues and democrats in Latin America ― will be paying close attention to Brazil. It would have devastating regional consequences.” Like far-right leaders in Europe, Bolsonaro could still stumble at the final hurdle, with a critical mass uniting against him in the second round. “The ‘outsider’ option seems particularly attractive to many citizens. In Brazil, the ‘outsider’ candidate will probably make it to the second round,” noted Felipe Krause and Andre Borges in The Post’s Monkey Cage blog, before pointing to centrist French leaders who beat back far-right challenges. “But the nation’s constraints on extremists suggest whoever else reaches that round will be Brazil’s Jacques Chirac or Emmanuel Macron.” Still, in an era of virulent nationalist rage, it would be naive to count Bolsonaro out.

• The Economist runs through the other major candidates in the Brazilian presidential race: “Mr Haddad, his likeliest opponent in the second round, has a bigger party behind him and was a successful mayor. He promises to put debt ‘on a downward path.’ But his party is less reform-minded than he is. He will struggle to shake the perception that he is Lula’s puppet. "The other main candidates are less polarizing, and less likely to push voters into the arms of Mr Bolsonaro in the run-off. All have drawbacks. Ciro Gomes, a left-wing former governor of the north-eastern state of Ceará, favours interventionist policies of the sort that aggravated Brazil’s economic crisis, such as subsidized lending. "Two centrists are mirror images of each other. Geraldo Alckmin, a former governor of the state of São Paulo, is competent and backed by an enormous coalition, which bodes well for his ability to enact economic reforms. But he is colorless and belongs to the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), which is among the most tarnished by Lava Jato [or ‘Car Wash,’ the major corruption scandal that roiled Brazilian politics]. More inspiring is Marina Silva, a former environment minister who was born into an illiterate rubber-tapping family in the Amazon and learned to read when she was 16. Ms Silva shares Mr Bolsonaro’s unwillingness to engage in pork-barrel politics, which will make governing hard. She is more likely than the populist to stick to her resolve.”

Turquia vs USA, ou Erdogan vs Trump: um combate assimétrico -

Erdogan fights a losing battle with Trump

Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post, August 13, 2018

On Friday, the Turkish lira suffered its biggest one-day devaluation in nearly two decades, dropping more than 14 percent against the dollar. The minister of finance — the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — couldn’t avert the slide, delivering a halting speech that did little to boost confidence.

But Erdogan, as he so often does, placed the blame on a foreign scapegoat: the United States.

“Shame on you, shame on you,” he declared at a rally. "You are swapping your strategic partner in NATO for a pastor.”

The pastor in question is Andrew Brunson, an American clergyman who has been in Turkish custody since 2016. He is charged with espionage and other crimes — charges that he and U.S. officials reject. Attempts to win his freedom have so far failed.

According to my colleagues, Ankara hoped to swap Brunson for Hakan Atilla, a banker convicted in the United States for his role in a scheme that skirted U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. But the Trump administration resents Turkey’s use of Brunson as a political hostage. A high-level meeting in Washington last week with a visiting Turkish delegation ended abruptly after the Americans demanded the pastor’s immediate release.

President Trump then announced increased tariffs on Turkish aluminum and steel, which sent the value of the lira plummeting to a historic low. Turkey’s economic woes are of its own making, but the tariffs made things worse — and Trump was only too happy to take credit.

Erdogan continued his complaints in a New York Times op-ed, railing against “unilateral actions against Turkey by the United States, our ally of decades.” He recited the familiar catalog of affronts, including Washington’s unwillingness to hand over Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric accused of fomenting a failed 2016 coup against Erdogan, and continued American support for Syrian Kurdish factions. He then delivered a clear threat, urging Washington to “give up the misguided notion that our relationship can be asymmetrical and come to terms with the fact that Turkey has alternatives.”

If the United States won’t change its approach, Erdogan warned, Turkey will “start looking for new friends and allies.” Indeed, the Turkish president has beefed up ties with Russia, attempted to mend fences with key Western European governments and, as a significant importer of Iranian oil, could undermine American efforts to isolate Tehran.

But this posturing will win him even more enemies in Washington, where Erdogan is already a deeply unpopular figure. Congress has passed legislation making a critical sale of F-35 jets to Turkeycontingent upon terms that include Brunson’s immediate release. Erdogan critics in U.S. foreign-policy circles loathe his creeping authoritarianism. And Trump, unlike previous presidents, has shown an endless willingness to bully erstwhile allies whenever he disagrees with them.

“Washington has generally tried to calm global markets in such moments, especially when investors are gripped by fear of contagion,” noted the Wall Street Journal. “Trump instead squeezed Ankara further.” This had global ramifications: Turkey’s wobbles stoked wider fears of fragility in other emerging markets and raised alarms among some major European banks that hold Turkish debt.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Aaron Stein, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, suggested Erdogan had badly miscalculated the situation. “The power balance is asymmetric, totally in the U.S. favor,” Stein said. “There are no guard rails to escalation on the U.S. side, and that’s where the Turks have completely, completely messed up in their understanding of what’s going on in the U.S.”

Erdogan’s appeals to NATO partnership ring especially hollow, given both Erdogan’s testy relations with Europe and Trump’s carping about the alliance. "For an administration or a president that doesn’t give much value to NATO, the value of Turkey as a staunch NATO ally also has declined,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics told Bloomberg News. “The Trump administration isn’t going to walk an extra mile to save an organization it doesn’t value.”

Analysts hope cooler heads prevail. “Turkey’s economic and legal problems are obvious, but sanctions by the U. S. are unlikely to help anything,” observed Turkish commentator Mustafa Akyol. “Rather they may be counterproductive, boosting Turkey’s nationalist mood and pushing the country further towards the Russian axis. More diplomacy is needed, not sanctions.”

But productive diplomacy is in short supply. Much of Erdogan’s politics now hinge on stirring nationalist sentiment to justify his tightening grip on the country. He won re-election in June with the backing of ultra-nationalists, arguing that greater control would help him steer Turkey’s flagging economy out of trouble. Instead, things have only gotten worse.

“The current crisis is the culmination of Erdogan’s reckless stewardship. Fixing it will take years — a task that will require new leadership and an entirely different mentality,” wrote Aykan Erdemir, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and an Erdogan critic.

Nevertheless, even as Turkey suffers, Erdogan may not take much of a political hit. “Turkey’s toothless opposition ... fails to provide much hope,” Erdemir noted. “Without strong political forces to push him out, Erdogan will almost certainly continue to dig himself and the Turkish economy into a deeper hole.”

Trump also may gain more by refusing to compromise. He may relish the chance to act tough and appeal to his core supporters by squeezing a prominent Muslim leader over the fate of an American pastor.

“Backing Brunson plays to the American president’s base — all the more conspicuously so given that NASA scientist Serkan Golge, a dual Turkish–U.S. citizen, is also being held in Turkey, serving out a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for charges similar to those being brought against Brunson,” wrote Elmira Bayrasli, a professor of international affairs at Bard College.

Of course, she noted, there’s a key difference: “Golge is Muslim, unlike Brunson, whom Trump has called ‘a great Christian’ and ‘innocent man of faith.’ The Trump administration has said nothing about Golge’s detention.”

America First is America Alone - Ishaan Taroor (WP)

Trump’s NATO trip shows ‘America First’ is ‘America Alone’

Ishaan Taroor, The Washington Post, July 11, 2018

https://www.facebook.com/ishaantharoor?wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1

President Trump arrived in Brussels with a clear message: It is time America stopped footing Europe's bill. His complaint is not new for European leaders, who have weathered Trump’s attacks on the transatlantic system for more than a year, but it is becoming more and more troubling.

The NATO summit that starts Wednesday will be shadowed entirely by Trump's irritation with the alliance and the inability or unwillingness of many of its members to set their military budgets at the recommended 2 percent of gross domestic product. Ahead of Trump's arrival in Brussels, he issued tweets linking his antipathy toward NATO with his broader anger over trade relations with the European Union:

European observers are worried by Trump's linkage of the two issues, a position still based on a misunderstanding of how the alliance works. “If it’s really a threat linking security to trade, that can destroy the basis of NATO,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to NATO, to my colleague Michael Birnbaum.

“The fear is not only that Mr. Trump will spoil the ‘unity’ of the summit with harangues before flying to Helsinki for a far friendlier meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin,” observed The Washington Post’s editorial board. “It is that, having shrugged off the strong support for NATO among his national security team, he is bent on wrecking a multilateral organization he regards as obsolete and a means for European nations to freeload at the expense of the United States.”

Meanwhile, Trump has also made a habit of rebuffing allies like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues including trade, climate change and the Iran deal. The tariffs he has slapped on European steel and aluminum, which took effect on Friday, seem likely to trigger a trade war.

Such moves have “been corrosive to relations with allies who increasingly believe that Trump — on trade, NATO and diplomacy — is undercutting the post-World War II order in pursuit of short-term, and likely illusory, wins,” my colleagues reported over the weekend.

“It’s like your parents questioning their love for you,” said Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the foreign-affairs committee in Germany’s Parliament, to the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser last month. “It’s already penetrated the subconscious.”

After Brussels, Trump heads to Britain for a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose government could be on the brink of collapse over internal disputes over Brexit. He will then travel to Helsinki for his first formal summit with Putin, a meeting Trump himself has quipped may be “the easiest of all.”

Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that its “America First” agenda does not really mean “America Alone,” Glasser noted, “increasingly, it is.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive aboard Air Force One ahead of the NATO Summit, at Brussels Military Airport in Melsbroek, Belgium, on July 10. (Francois Lenoir/Reuters)

In the months to come, Trump's stop in Brussels may only be remembered as a footnote to the Putin meeting. “Because the meeting occurs after the NATO summit, any achievements in Brussels could be easily wiped out by promises Trump makes to Putin on a whim,” wrote Rachel Rizzo of the Center for New American Security in Washington. “Given Trump’s negotiating style, allies are rightly concerned that he may tell Putin that he will remove some U.S. troops from Eastern Europe, or halt U.S. participation in NATO exercises as a sign of good will. This would send European allies into a frenzy.”

There are also fears Trump could somehow recognize Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. “It’s such a fundamental issue,” a senior NATO diplomat told Birnbaum. “It would legitimize a whole range of actions. If you have the power, the raw conventional military power, you can do what you want.”

“Now I’m depressed,” the diplomat added. “The fact that we’re even thinking about it.”

Some American allies have tried to push back. Ahead of Trump's arrival, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg offered a polite, if anodyne, defense of the alliance, published by the Wall Street Journal.

“After many years of decline, allies have ended the cuts and started to increase national defense spending,” he wrote, arguing indeed Europe is doing far more to buttress its own collective security. “Last year NATO allies boosted their defense budgets by a combined 5.2 percent, the biggest increase, in real terms, in a quarter of a century. Now 2018 will be the fourth consecutive year of rising spending.”

Stoltenberg concluded “it’s no secret that there are differences among NATO countries on serious issues such as trade, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal,” but he insisted the West’s shared history has “taught a simple yet powerful lesson: United, we are stronger and safer.”

Some analysts do not believe it is worth appeasing Trump's “bullying.”Europe's new efforts to beef up its own defense outlays will never satisfy the president, they argue.

“If the Europeans parked a brand-new aircraft carrier off the coast of Mar-a-Lago and tossed the keys onto the 18th green, Trump would simply charge them greens fees,” wrote Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In the end, he doesn’t believe in the idea that America should defend Europe, so why should the United States pay anything at all? He is only interested in it if it brings in a profit.”

European Council President Donald Tusk holds a press conference in Brussels, on July 10. (Aris Oikonomou/AFP/Getty Images)

European Council President Donald Tusk, who has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump, made no apologies in a speech on Tuesday, where he mounted a defense of Europe before the start of the NATO summit.

“Dear President Trump: America does not have and will not have a better ally than Europe. Today Europeans spend on defense many times more than Russia and as much as China,” Tusk said. He urged Trump to think more clearly about “who is your strategic friend and who is your strategic problem,” a direct nod to the coming summit with Putin.

“Dear America, appreciate your allies,” Tusk said. “After all, you don’t have that many.”

A Italia fabricando uma nova crise europeia - Sebastian Mallaby (WP)

Italy’s new government could be the force that finally breaks Europe

By Sebastian Mallaby

The Washington Post, May 23 at 5:43 PM

Europe has weathered so many shocks — the near breakup of the euro zone, the chaotic influx of 2.5 million refugees, the Brexit referendum — that it is tempting to dismiss the latest existential crisis unfolding in Rome. But Italy’s emerging radical-populist government could be the force that finally breaks the continent’s cohesion. When the man proposed as Italy’s new finance minister declares that “Germany has not changed its vision of its role in Europe since the end of Nazism,” it is time to wake up.

Whether or not Paolo Savona gets the finance job, there is no doubt that he represents the populists’ outlook — one that could have a devastating effect on Europe’s financial position. The two halves of Italy’s new coalition — the right-populist League and the left-populist Five Star Movement — disagree on many issues, but they are united in blaming Italy’s problems generally on the European Union and specifically on the Germans. After Savona’s outburst was published in an Italian newspaper this week, Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, took to a Roman rooftop and announced on Facebook Live that Savona is “an economist, an expert recognized in Italy and the whole world . . . His only fault? He dared to say that this E.U. — as it is — doesn’t work.” 

This growling cannot be dismissed because, if shorn of the gratuitous reference to Nazism, it contains much truth. The European Union comprises one brilliant success (a single market that facilitates trade not just in goods but also in services); a series of useful collaborations (in policing, scientific research, student exchanges and so on); one brave but politically risky principle (the free movement of people); and one outright catastrophe (the common European currency). Britain is crazy to leave the European Union, because it is not in the currency zone and its flexible labor market allows it to absorb European immigrants effectively. But Italy is different. 

Indeed, Italy is the poster child for the flaws in Europe’s construction. It has amassed terrifying government debts not because it has the privilege of printing the world’s reserve currency (as the United States does); nor because it has a national central bank that can be relied upon to suppress borrowing costs (as Japan does); nor yet because it hid its borrowing behind Wall Street financial engineering and fake statistics (as Greece did). Rather, Italy has been plainly and openly reckless, because such were the incentives created by Europe’s monetary system. 

Europe’s policy mix acknowledges this problem. A single central bank with a single interest-rate policy links the borrowing costs of weak and strong countries, so that the weak can run up debts too easily. Recognizing this temptation, Europe has imposed caps on government borrowing, but these have failed in two ways. First, they have ensured that the main word that national politicians hear from Brussels is “no!” — no to government pensions, no to infrastructure spending, no to teacher pay raises. Second, because any budget rule is arbitrary, the caps have not been enforced in practice. They combine maximum friction with minimum effectiveness. 

Meanwhile, other European policies have actively promoted recklessness. The European Central Bank treats German government debt and Italian government debt equally, boosting the demand for Italian bonds that would otherwise be considered riskier. The central bank also encourages the presumption that, in a crisis, it would rescue Italy, dampening market discipline further. To get investors to believe Italy could plausibly default one day, Europe would have to break the “doom loop” between government and the banking system, so that the government could go bust without the banking system imploding. But that would require European-wide bank backstops. Despite much earnest discussion about centralized euro zone deposit insurance and a euro zone bond that banks could hold instead of dubious national bonds, neither is in the cards. 

In the absence of both political discipline and market discipline, Italy has — guess what — borrowed. When the euro was launched in 1999, Italy had a public debt to gross domestic product ratio of 105 percent; today it is 133 percent. The same incentives are evident elsewhere: In France, for example, the debt ratio has gone from 59 percent to 97 percent. When Italy’s newly elected populists promise to cut taxes and raise spending, they are merely extending the pattern. Their principal innovation is to be brazen about it — and to compare modern Germans to Nazis even as they flout German-backed deficit caps. This will only harden Northern European opposition to centralized bank backstops and so paradoxically entrench the doom loop that perpetuates those incentives for the Italian government to borrow.

How does this game end? In the short term, Europe’s economy is enjoying a cyclical upswing and the central bank is buying bonds via its quantitative easing program, so a crisis is unlikely. But in the longer term, Italy’s debt ratio seems headed into the stratosphere. When the next downturn comes, Europe may find itself dealing with a basket case many times the size of Greece during the last crisis. Greece was small enough to be containable. Italy will be too big to fail, and perhaps too big to save.

Read more:

Anne Applebaum: Watch what happens in Rome. It could be our post-Trump future.

Mario Monti: Former Italian prime minister: The election result will be a nightmare for the E.U.

Davide Casaleggio: A top leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement: Why we won

Judy Dempsey: Angela Merkel is becoming Europe’s weakest link