Migrants, part of a group intercepted aboard a dinghy off the coast in the Mediterranean Sea, stand on a rescue boat upon arrival at the port of Malaga, Spain last week. PHOTO: JON NAZCA/REUTERS

BRUSSELS—European Union leaders on Sunday failed to bridge disagreements over the bloc’s politically toxic migration issue, a long-unresolved conundrum now threatening to topple the EU’s most powerful leader, Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Discord over how to deal with incoming ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea as well as which countries should be responsible for migrants already in the bloc is once again causing deep strains between EU capitals, three years after a million people, mostly fleeing the war in Syria, came to Europe, partly encouraged by Ms. Merkel’s open-door policy.

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BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron will attempt a pincer movement on Donald Trump, with China emerging as the likely target of their joint effort to avert a trade war with the United States.

The leaders of Europe’s two biggest economies will visit the president in Washington within days of each other this month as the clock ticks down to a May 1 deadline for European Union (EU) proposals to stop the U.S. from imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum.

A possible solution may lie in White House efforts to forge a “trade coalition of the willing” to stand up to China for what it calls unfair trade practices. The move is gaining favour with the government in Berlin as well as with the EU, which handles the bloc’s trade negotiations, while a bruising trip to China earlier this year may make Macron more likely to lend his support.

The EU is just one front in the U.S. attempt to rewrite international trade rules, with Trump on Thursday (April 5) threatening levies on US$100 billion (S$132 billion) of Chinese goods, shortly after Washington and Beijing outlined tariffs on US$50 billion of each other’s imported products. At stake for the EU are the metal tariffs that could take effect as soon as next month, threatening disruption to total trans-Atlantic trade worth some US$720 billion.

“The Europeans are going to have a very tough decision to make, which is, are they going to play this game,” Edward Alden, a Washington-based senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview. “That’s just anathema to the beliefs of Merkel and Macron.”

All the same, Merkel, in her fourth term as Germany’s leader, and Macron, elected France’s young president on a pro-EU ticket last year, are both under pressure to deliver something in their talks with Trump to calm trade tensions.

At home, Macron is navigating a raft of economic and labour reforms that will determine his fate. A deadly attack carried out in the German city of Muenster on Saturday was a reminder for Merkel of the domestic security agenda that is dominating her coalition’s early days, and which could topple her yet.

A common thread that is likely to feature leads to China. Merkel and Macron have both made China’s inexorable rise a policy priority, with Macron pledging in January at the end of a trip to China to seek more strategic coordination with officials in Berlin on the issue.

On the trade front, the EU took concrete action on Thursday, asking to join a U.S. dispute against China in the World Trade Organization over the Asian nation’s discriminatory technology licensing rules.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine that he is willing to take joint action with Washington against overcapacity in the steel market, and was looking for a unified approach against intellectual property theft. European Commission Spokesman Daniel Rosario said the EU was having high-level meetings with the U.S. that included discussions on overcapacity.

“One of our proposals to the U.S. side is that we should go into talks on how we can face probably unfair trade practices from China,” Juergen Hardt, who oversees trans-Atlantic coordination for Merkel’s government, told Bloomberg Television on March 23.

Top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Thursday that a deal on Chinese tariffs could be realised in part by convincing other major economies to call out the Asian nation for unfair trading practices. “Everybody in the world knows that China has not played by the rules for many years,” he said.

Europe is still steadfast in standing behind WTO rules. A response to the U.S. mustn’t involve “softening or weakening in the face of a unilateral decision” taken by Trump, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told reporters in Paris on Wednesday.

A compromise is all the harder as Berlin and Paris have difficulty communicating with the U.S. due to the turnover of staff in the Trump administration. Macron, 40, may be in a better position for diplomatic maneuvering than Merkel, 63. Trump will host the French president and first lady at Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of the nation’s first president, George Washington, as part of a state visit. Merkel’s trip to meet the president, while still to be firmed up, is understood to have come at her request.

The EU’s two most powerful leaders will aim to “shove the U.S. back into the box” of the global trade system even as Trump seeks concessions as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy with Europe, according to Alden. But in the end, Merkel and Macron “may have no choice but to do this on Trump’s terms,” he said. BLOOMBERG

Source: http://www.todayonline.com/world/trumps-trade-war-against-china-could-see-allies-macron-and-merkel

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The tension is largely being driven by the rise of populist nationalism that is now threatening the political character of Europe, long the center of gravity of the democratic community of nations. As Peter Wehner and I wrote in the “Call-to-Action Paper” cited by former President George W. Bush in his Oct. 19 speech in New York City:

“Europe, in particular, is in deep crisis. While ‘the West’ is more about values and institutions than it is about geography, there is no democratic ‘West’ without Western Europe. … Yet five years after the European Union was awarded the Nobel Prize for its historic achievement of banishing war from a war-torn continent, the EU and its leaders seem to have lost their sense of direction.”

On the EU’s western front, London’s negotiations with Brussels over the terms of the United Kingdom’s controversial departure from the EU remain tenuous. Growing numbers of Britons are calling for a new referendum on Brexit, while Prime Minister Theresa May seeks to minimize the damage to Britain that separation will inevitably bring to the United Kingdom.

On the other side of the continent, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are not only back-sliding in their democratic performance but are also engaged in multiple battles with the EU that threaten European cohesion and stability.

All three nations have balked at accepting their share of the millions of refugees in Europe who have fled conflicts in the Middle East, central Asia and North Africa. Whether the EU can compel individual countries to accept refugees is a flashpoint in national politics across the continent. And it has fueled the rise of anti-immigrant, anti-European parties and movements across the continent.

In addition, Hungary has enacted at least two new laws that European institutions say violate democratic standards. A law intended to shutter the Central European University is widely seen as an infringement on academic freedom. The other is a Russian-inspired measure to demonize and obstruct non-governmental watchdog organizations that have been critical of the Budapest government’s embrace of authoritarianism.

The latest flash point is Poland. On Dec. 20, President Andrzej Duda signed two laws that effectively bring the country’s judiciary under the political control of the ruling party. These are very slightly modified from the versions Duda vetoed in July, a move that gave hope that he would resist the politicization of the judiciary that had animated widespread protests across Poland and across Europe.

On the same day, the European Commission announced that it would be launching Article 7 proceedings that could lead Poland to lose its right to vote in EU institutions. Launching this “nuclear option” requires a four-fifths’ vote in the European Council, a threshold observers are confident will be achieved — even if Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia side with Poland, as many expect.

All the major European institutions, and political players are aligned in this effort to pressure or punish Poland. The European Council, the European Parliament and major EU countries are expected to support the commission’s effort to take action. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said they would support the commission if it recommended sanctions against Warsaw.

Whether this united front will persuade the government in Warsaw to alter its course is unclear. The government’s initial response was to ignore the threat and move forward.

But Poland risks losing more than just goodwill in Brussels.

As Jan Cienski reports in the European edition of Politico, “Poland is the largest overall beneficiary of EU cash — set to receive about 100 billion euros in structural, agricultural and other funds during the current seven-year budget ending in 2020. But there is increasing disquiet in parts of Western Europe about sending so much money to a country that violates the EU’s norms.”

Perhaps for this reason, Poland has recently adopted a more measured line of rhetoric in its dispute with Brussels.

Meanwhile, in nearby Romania, President Klaus Iohannis has warned his political rivals who control the legislature that proposed laws to bring the judiciary under political control may lead to a similar result — marginalization from mainstream Europe and another Article 7 proceeding.

The cracks in the edifice of European democracy and integration appear to be multiplying as the year draws to a close. Happy New Year, indeed.

Thomas Melia is a human freedom initiative fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

Source: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/jan/04/the-us-should-wish-the-eu-a-happier-year/

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