| | | | Fareed: How Trump Should Handle Putin | | Donald Trump's trip to Poland and then the G-20 meeting in Hamburg this week give the president a chance to do the right thing in policy terms and make himself look good at the same time, Fareed says. The question is whether he will seize these opportunities.
"If Trump is going to be statesmanlike, the thing to do would be to stand there in Poland, as the representative of the United States, and tell his hosts that they have done an amazing job coming out of communism," Fareed says.
"He should tell Poland that it is a poster child for economic reforms and also security reform. After all, it is one of the few European countries that spends the two percent on defense that NATO calls for. In addition, Polish troops have been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The country has been an incredibly firm U.S. ally. So President Trump could use the trip to reaffirm the importance of market reforms, of political change, and to talk about NATO's Article 5 on collective self-defense.
"Of course, to many people watching Trump's trip to Europe, the Poland visit will feel like a sideshow. Instead, they'll be watching his meeting on Friday with Vladimir Putin. The problem for Trump here is that he has boxed himself in.
"The fact is that President Trump's behavior has at times been both strange and self-defeating. For example, on domestic policy, he could have come into office and immediately reached out with a big infrastructure plan – that would have confused the Democrats and helped get the country behind him. But he chose not to. Similarly, on Russia, the president could have taken the statesman-like position that he may have benefited from Russian interference this time, but made clear that he was there to protect America's interests. He could have very clearly told Russia that it can't do this kind of thing.
"Looking ahead to this meeting, Putin obviously wants an end to sanctions and an end to this paralysis in U.S.-Russia relations. But it's difficult for Trump to do the kind of sensible reaching out and pragmatic deal making that you need to do with any country because of the optics -- what would it look like back home if he gave Putin what he wanted?
"What Trump should do is to make sure that he doesn't give anything away on this. Instead, what the United States needs is for the Russians to back off over Ukraine and for the East Europeans to feel reassured. So it's a high stakes game. Putin has a big ask, and Trump has to be able to handle that carefully."
| | Is Poland a Little Too Excited to See Trump? | | Poland's leadership might have scored a PR coup by securing a visit from President Trump. But the rest of Europe is unlikely to be as happy, suggests Wojciech Przybylski in Foreign Policy.
"[I]t's undeniable that some members of the Polish government also see the Trump visit – his first stop on only his second time overseas since assuming office – as both an implicit endorsement, and a chance to thumb their noses at the European elites based in Brussels and other capitals of western Europe," Przybylski writes. After all, he notes, Trump's visit "comes less than a month after the EU launched legal proceedings against three member states, Poland, Hungary and Czechia over their unwillingness to accept refugees, and takes place against the backdrop of Poland's ongoing feud with French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently chastised eastern Europe for treating the EU as a supermarket."
"And it's here where Poland's enthusiasm about Trump is not just misplaced, but dangerous. American presidents have previously found that exploiting European divisions is useful for the United States, precisely because it undermines Europe's collective interests." - And the next rich nation will be…Forget the BRIC countries -- Poland is likely to be the next rich nation, argues Ruchir Sharma in the New York Times.
"With a population of nearly 40 million and a half-trillion-dollar economy that is already the world's 24th largest, it is now big enough to put all of Eastern Europe on the global economic map," Sharma says. "Poland is working its way up just as the Asian miracles did, as a manufacturing power, even though this path is much harder now."
| | Kim's Missile Test Alarming, But Changes Little: Bowden | | | North Korea's test Tuesday of what the United States believes was its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is alarming. But it ultimately won't change much, suggests Mark Bowden in The Atlantic. Kim Jong Un "possessing an ICBM, and eventually a nuclear-tipped one, was likely to happen sooner or later."
"It will give Kim more leverage in his dealings with South Korea. One of his long-term strategic goals is to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, something President Trump's belligerent tweets…may actually help accomplish," Bowden writes.
"If Kim were ever able to pressure [South Korean President Moon Jae In] into disinviting American forces from Korea, he would be a step closer to reuniting the peninsula under his rule. Neither scenario is likely, and South Korea alone is already more than a military match for its northern cousins.
"So the standoff will remain." | | Why Mexico's Murder Rate is Soaring | | With someone being murdered around once every 20 minutes in the first five months of this year, Mexico's murder rate has soared by almost a third compared with 2016, the Wall Street Journal's Robbie Whelan reports. "After a few years of declining violence under Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, the drug war has come roaring back to life."
"Many of the causes of the resurgence are long standing, including the growing market for opioids in the U.S. and a bloody competition among rival trafficking groups touched off by the death or arrest of senior leaders," Whelan writes.
"There is also a counterintuitive dynamic at work, say scholars of the drug trade: In recent months, voters have thrown out of office allegedly corrupt state and local leaders of President Peña Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. That, in turn, has led to the breakdown of unofficial alliances between drug gangs and politicians -- what some are calling a pax mafiosa -- that had kept the killings in check."
| | Europe Has a New "Strongman" | | From the viselike handshake with President Trump to the plain talking to the rapid decimation of the country's "old political class," it's clear there is a new strongman in Europe. But this time, he's a liberal, writes Paul Taylor of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron "seems determined to show himself as much the alpha male on the global stage as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but in the cause of liberal values -- multilateral governance, open trade, human rights and diversity -- that make him the antithesis of their nationalist ideologies," Taylor writes for Politico EU.
"He is determined to carry out a 'Jupiterian presidency,' a reference to the king of the gods in Roman mythology. The term evokes a leader who sets a long-term course, speaks only occasionally in public and stays aloof from daily affairs. It is an intentional contrast with his predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, who gave a running commentary in the media on daily events, micro-managed government and party business, but were unable to enact a strategic plan to reform the country." | | | | | | |
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