A mess that threatens West needs leadership
PARIS — President Donald Trump headed to Hamburg, Germany this week for the G-20 Summit and his first meeting since his election with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The most critical item of discussion between the two leaders is the one that will have the greatest impact on the very soil on which they’ll be standing: the fact that U.S.-backed conflict is threatening the existence of Europe, and hence Western civilization, as we know it.
Having lived in Paris for nearly a decade, I don’t have to look far to see how much the demographics have shifted in that time. Europe is the cradle of human rights, but when did respecting human rights become synonymous with open borders? Is the guy who looks out the peephole of his home and wants to ascertain the identity of anyone wanting to enter now considered a jerk?
If Europe is going to be humanitarian to the point of cultural suicide, then it needs to stop enabling humanitarian emergencies. Just like if you have a propensity for eating a whole bucket of ice cream, you probably shouldn’t buy it.
Western nations with a propensity for generating humanitarian emergencies in countries with very different cultures from their own, all under the guise of regime change, need to get out. Go back to the drawing board and brainstorm some ways to get governments to bend to your economic and political will through more sophisticated means. No more CIA-backed coups; no more bombing as a negotiating tactic to get the guy in power to leave. Please find another way, because Europe is being sacrificed in the interests of your long-term future. And because your short-term calculations have proven to be abysmal, with minimal return, we’re pretty sure that you’re just spitballing it at Europe’s expense.
The more regime change that takes place in the Middle East and North Africa, the more those populations are driven into Europe. And every time we think that the tide is stemming, we get hit from another direction.
At first, the migrants came mainly from the Middle East through Greece, but that flow dried up last year after the European Union made a deal with Turkey in March 2016 to take in rejected refugees. More recently, migrants from North Africa have started coming by sea from Libya to Italy, to the point where Italy’s interior ministry is claiming to be overwhelmed. The situation is so out of control that Italy’s neighbor, Austria, has threatened to send troops to the border with Italy to prevent migrants from entering Austrian territory.
The migrants are being driven by opaquely funded charitable organizations that rescue them from the water.
Italy is threatening to close its ports to migrant-carrying NGO ships — and why shouldn’t it?
And why are the NGOs obligated to ferry the migrants to Europe? The NGOs can just as easily take the migrants back to Libya. Data from the European Union border agency Frontex show that most of these migrants aren’t Libyans fleeing conflict in Libya, but rather Africans fleeing other African nations.
This was exactly what former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi warned about before he was killed in a regime change involving some of the same Western nations that now suffer from the result: Africans fleeing Africa simply because they can.
Gadhafi demanded money — some 4 billion pounds a year — from Europe in exchange for holding back the immigration tidal wave. The EU caved in and paid him, but then Gadhafi was killed, and now the floodgates have opened again.
Russia has been on the right side of it all, opposing the sort of regime change that has led to the destabilization that we’re now witnessing.
When Trump meets Putin, expected today, he needs to make the ultimate deal, doing whatever it takes — including dropping anti-Russian sanctions if need be — to clean up this mess that now threatens the West.