From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:
Europe’s Refugee Crisis Will End When the Middle East Empties Out
Hungarian authorities say they detained 60 migrants for attempting to illegally enter the country’s southern border with Serbia by breaching a razor-wire fence, AP reports.
Gyorgy Bakondi, homeland security adviser to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said the authorities caught 45 people trying to cross at the southern border and 15 deeper in the country.
They got across by damaging the fence and are now in police custody and are being charged with committing offenses under the new laws. The authorities are repairing the spots where the fence was damaged, Bakondi told a news conference.
Serbia has warned it would not accept anyone turned back from Hungarian territory.
“That’s no longer our responsibility,” Aleksandar Vulin, the minister in charge of policy on migrants, told the Tanjug state news agency, according to Reuters.
“They are on Hungarian territory and I expect the Hungarian state to behave accordingly towards them.”
These poor folks are going to be walking in circles between two sets of border guards telling them “turn around and go back.”
Maybe, just maybe, European leaders are starting to wake up and realize that quasi-pacifist isolationism doesn’t build a safer world. Instead, the problems show up, right at your door. Clemens Wergen, the Washington bureau chief for the German newspaper Die Welt, writing in the New York Times:
After World War II, Europeans grew accustomed to the United States’ taking the lead in addressing security threats in and around Europe. That has nurtured a complacency in Europe’s foreign and security posture, the dangers of which have now been fully exposed. With Washington unwilling to act, Europe could no longer pretend that someone else would step in, as happened so often in the past.
The Syrian conflict, and the resulting refugee crisis, should serve as a reminder that Germany’s foreign policy doctrine of recent decades, a much softer version of the Obama doctrine, urgently needs a reassessment. It would be too much to expect Berlin to become a confident military power in the foreseeable future. Even limited intervention in Syria to enforce a no-fly zone and thereby push for a political settlement always was a tall order, given Germany’s limited capabilities…
This probably won’t be the last time that Germany will be called upon to show more proactive leadership. President Obama’s past reluctance to act in the Middle East might only be the first phase in a long-term American withdrawal from the region because of its growing energy independence.
And given political volatility in this part of the world, Syria might not be the last country to slide into a brutal civil war. Indeed, today Central and Western Europe is surrounded by a belt of insecurity ranging from Ukraine in the east to Libya and parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the south.
The mess with the refugees stems from the mess in Syria… which stems from the West’s determination to not intervene during the uprising against Assad. That crisis got worse because everyone, including the U.S., was eager to leave Iraq and not deal with rebuilding that country or the Arab world as a whole.