| | | | The Strange Thing About the Trump-Putin Summit | | The White House announced Thursday that President Trump will meet with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16. But don't expect more than a photo op, writes Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg. "[T]here is no agenda for them to discuss, much less a substantive goal for their talks."
"The reason the US can't concede anything to Putin has little to do with principles and values, or with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation…Instead, no give and take is possible because Putin has nothing to offer the US as there is no part of the Trump agenda that Russia could help advance," Bershidsky argues.
"In Trump's trade wars, Russia, a big aluminum and steel producer, is a passive victim. In supplying energy to Europe, it is inevitably a US competitor. In the Middle East, it can only be a situational ally if it betrays its current military alliance with Iran and stops trying to fix oil prices with Saudi Arabia. Both are impossible."
"The meeting will inevitably be compared to the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which is regarded as the beginning of the end of the Cold War. But that gathering, though it was unsuccessful on the surface, had a specific arms-control agenda." "Just having the summit is a win because he's perceived to be at the same level with the President of the United States and that feeds his ego. In Putin's case, he wants to be perceived as an equal to the United States, even though his economy is the size of Italy's and he certainly doesn't have the weight to throw around the world that the Soviet Union had, but he wants to be perceived that way and perceived to be defending Russia," Hoffman writes.
| | The Myth of the Migration Crisis | | | "Migration could be a 'make or break' issue for the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an impassioned speech Thursday ahead of a critical EU summit," CNN reports. There's just one thing – it's not clear there's a migration crisis anymore, Patrick Kingsley suggests in The New York Times. "The precipitous drop in migrant arrivals doesn't mean that Europe is without real challenges. Countries are still struggling to absorb the roughly 1.8 million sea arrivals since 2014. Public anxiety has risen in countries like Germany after high-profile assaults involving migrants, including the killing of a 19-year-old German student and the terrorist attack on a Christmas market that killed 12 people," Kingsley writes. "But what is striking is how many leaders, particularly in far-right parties, continue to successfully create the impression that Europe is a continent under siege from migrants, even as the numbers paint a very different picture." | | Britain's Military Fantasy | | | As NATO leaders prepare to gather next month, military officials in Britain are looking for a boost to the country's military spending. But they need to get real, writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Britain needs to learn to live with Russia, and abandon its dreams of a global military role. "The present tension with Russia is largely due to NATO recklessly pushing its border eastwards after 1989. To assume that the US's nuclear umbrella would always cover this advance was unwise. Yet to pretend that a British deterrent is a substitute for an American one is absurd," Jenkins writes. "If armed conflict erupts in Europe, it will be over messy borders and disputed strips of territory. Washington will not commit great armies to Europe merely because a Moscow tank has arrived in a Russian-speaking Baltic town, any more than it did in Ukraine. No serious person can anyway imagine NATO fighting a massed confrontation with Russia in central Europe, let alone at the behest of an Erdoğan of Turkey or Orbán of Hungary. The lesson of history is that Europe has to live with Russia, good or evil. If it goes to war, Russia wins." | | What Kim and the Middle East Have in Common | | | The Middle East and the Korean Peninsula may be in very different parts of the world, but they offer a similar lesson, write Max Boot and Sue Mi Terry in The Washington Post. President Trump isn't going to get a "deal of the century" in either place. Baby steps are the best way forward. "[W]e have not seen any evidence that Kim will prove any bolder or more courageous than the Palestinian leaders in seeking peace. Unelected autocrats cannot easily afford to dissolve the ideological glue holding their ramshackle regimes together no matter how many riches we dangle before their eyes. When it comes to both the Palestinians and North Korea, the best we may realistically hope for is to manage the conflict — with Hamas, for example, perhaps agreeing not to rocket Israel, and with Kim perhaps agreeing to scale back his nuclear arsenal." | | The Problem with Mexico's Presidential Race Front-Runner | | | Mexico is already polarized. The last thing it needs in Sunday's presidential election is for fiery left-wing front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) to come out on top, writes Andrés Velasco for Project Syndicate. "AMLO's approach to corruption is textbook populism: social problems that seem complex have simple solutions, and they have not been solved only because traditional elites do not want them solved. Elect a strong leader with sufficient willpower, and those problems will conveniently melt away," Velasco writes. "Populism is a kind of identity politics. It thrives on division. It is always us against them. The kind of divisive speech that blames all of society's ills on someone else – bankers and businesspeople, foreigners and immigrants, Muslims or Jews, pious folk or atheists – is the common thread that binds together right-wing populists like Trump or Hungary's Viktor Orbán with left-wingers like Hugo Chávez or Ecuador's Rafael Correa." | | | | | | |
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