White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Hello, World! America Doesn’t Have Your Back Anymore

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America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in Western Europe to the struggling masses worldwide, America has always been there to help. Its mission has been to serve and, in its serving, to promote the American brand — freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — and to keep America a revered and special place.

America was there to arbitrate an end to civil war, to rush in with aid after a natural disaster, to provide food during a famine and medical assistance during an infectious disease outbreak. America was there with an open heart and open hand.

If you want to look at this in a transactional way, which is the currency of today, we gave but we got back. The ledger is balanced. For example, we sent forth America’s food surplus to where it was needed, from Pakistan to Ethiopia, and we opened markets to our farmers.

The world’s needs established a symbiotic relationship in which we gained reverence and prestige, and our values were exported and sometimes adopted.

President Trump has characterized us as victims of a venal world that has pillaged our goodwill, stolen our manufacturing and exploited our market. The fact is that when Trump took office in January, the United States had the best-performing economy in the world, and its citizens enjoyed the products of the world at reasonable prices. Inflation was a problem, but it was beginning to come down — and it wasn’t as persistent as it had been in Britain, for example.

Trump has painted a picture of a world where our manufacturing was somehow shanghaied and carried in the depth of night to Asia.

In fact, American businesses, big and small, sought out Asian manufacturing to avail themselves of cheap but talented labor, low regulation, and a union-free environment.

Businesses will always go where the ecosystem favors them. The business ecosystem offshore was as irresistible to us as it was to a tranche of European manufacturing.

The move to Asia hollowed out the old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and New England, but unemployment has remained low. Some industries, including farming, food processing and manufacturing, suffer labor shortages.

We need manufacturing that supports national security. That includes chips, heavy electrical equipment and other essential infrastructure goods. It doesn’t include a lot of consumer goods, from clothing to toys.

Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican and a semanticist, said you couldn’t come up with the correct answer if your input was wrong, “no matter how hard you think.” Trump’s thinking about the world seems to be input-challenged.

The world isn’t changing only in how Trump has ordained but in other fundamental ones. Manufacturing in just five years will be very different. Artificial intelligence will be on the factory floor, in the planning and sales offices, and it will boost productivity. However, it won’t add jobs and probably will subtract them.

Trump would like to build a Fortress America with all that will involve, including higher prices and uncompetitive factories. While not undermining our position as the benefactor to the world, a better approach might be to build up North America and welcome Canada and Mexico into an even closer relationship.  Canada shares much of our culture, is rich in raw materials, and has been an exemplary neighbor. Mexico is a treasure trove of talent and labor.

Rather than threatening Canada and belittling Mexico, a possible future lies in a collaborative relationship with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Canada is looking for markets to the East and the West. Mexico, which is building a coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Panama Canal, is staking much on its new trade deal with the European Union.

Trump has sundered old relationships and old views of what is America’s place in the world order. No longer does the world have America at its back.

This is a time of choice: The Ugly American or the Great Neighbor.

Ukrainian Stray Dogs and Cats Threaten Europe with Rabies

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Amid the war in Ukraine, an epic tale of another war in that country has been unfolding.

It is a tale of “tails,” which is what Ukrainians call their pet dogs and cats: a tale of a great-hearted man and woman who have been battling against the spread of rabies in Ukraine from the exploding stray dog and cat populations and to Europe, where the disease has been largely eradicated.

The great hearts are Dan Fine, a retired tech entrepreneur and founder of the Ukraine War Animals Relief Fund, who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Krystyna Drahomaretska, 27, an architect-turned-manager of the Under the Sun animal sanctuary in Odesa.

Appearing on the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” Fine explained, “Ukrainians are a pet-loving people — some people had nine dogs. But when the Russians invaded Ukraine, over 8 million people were forced to flee their homes and abandon their pets. This resulted in over 1 million stray dogs and cats, and 65 percent of them weren’t sterilized.”

Foraging for food, the surging stray dog and cat populations are contracting rabies from foxes, wolves and other wild animals, whose populations are also surging, due to a wartime ban on hunting. “It’s a perfect storm,” Fine said.

Rabid stray dogs and cats are biting people. Rabies has the highest mortality rate  — almost 100 percent — of any disease on earth. “Bites from rabid animals affect children the most — 55 percent,” Fine noted.

In the spring of 2022, he went on his first mission to sterilize, vaccinate and microchip the stray dogs and cats of Ukraine. After treatment, many are returned to the streets because the animal shelters are overflowing — and were even before the Russian invasion. The Ukrainians, who are a religious people, don’t believe in euthanasia, he noted.

Fine teamed with Drahomaretska, who, along with other volunteers, caught the strays and transported them to clinics set up through his nonprofit Ukraine animal relief group.

Drahomaretska is nonchalant about the dangers of catching stray tails, even on the front lines. “I am the only female catcher on the front lines,” she said in the TV episode.

To catch stray dogs, she explained, she shoots them with a tranquilizer gun, and they run away. She follows them to wherever they drop, picks them up and carries them to her van.

While pursuing a tranquilized dog, she was injured by a landmine, and she is still on crutches. On another catch, she was bitten twice by a dog she was transporting to a clinic. And she had to go through post-exposure prophylaxis after some slime from a rabid dog got into her eye.

Over five missions, they sterilized, vaccinated and microchipped 8,200 dogs and cats. “That seems like a lot,” Fine said, “But you won’t stop this problem unless you do 500,000 over the next four to five years.”

To drive this mission forward, Fine said they need the investment of another organization. “There are about 200 unemployed vets in Ukraine. They could be paid and mobilized, but we can’t do that alone,” he said.

Fine hopes that “War Tails,” a documentary he and Tana Axelle, also a Vancouver resident, produced about the challenge of stopping the spread of rabies in Ukraine and into Europe, will draw the attention and support of the European Union. They have entered the documentary at the Seattle Film Festival, and they plan to enter it at more film festivals and to get it aired on television.

As Fine sees it, “Ukraine wants to enter the EU, and the EU wants them to enter. And the EU has animal and human health standards. So stopping the spread of rabies into Europe is in their interest.”

Somberly, he added that when the war ends and the rebuilding begins, “they will have to do a culling of millions of rabid dogs and cats. And all that goodwill will go away.”

Five Things That Underlie the Anxiety That Is Gripping the Nation

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They say Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.

Yet, they reflect a much broader societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those on the threshold of their lives. I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:

—The presidential election.

—Climate change.

—Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.

—The effect of AI on everything, from job losses to knowing real from fake.

—The worsening housing shortage.

The election weighs on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck, no matter who wins.

President Biden and former president Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub. Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the pro-Russia movement in Congress.

Biden has led on climate change but failed to tell the story. He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and layout, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.

And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.

Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, primarily working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe Trump, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world.

More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him and love holding on to power at any price.

You will know them by their refusal to acknowledge the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.

The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.

The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas and elsewhere.

I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports must be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.

The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, and the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.

Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely, as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.

In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a broader conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?

Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados, and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.

Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough houses.

A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. However, the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.

There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.

This is, ultimately, the decade of anxiety, mainly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.

Hey, Travelers, Summer Isn’t the Only Great Time to Visit Europe

A view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

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The people of the world are planning to descend on Europe this summer. Not, I hasten to say, as migrants but as tourists.

They will jam the sidewalks of Paris, their buses will be bumper-to-bumper in England’s Lake District, and it will be nigh impossible to get into Venice.

It isn’t that Europe is too small to accommodate the surge of tourists but that a few sights are too popular with tourists from the West and now tourists from China. The history and culture of Europe are a magnet, drawing and delivering for tourists, whether they are first-timers or bucket-listers.

Greece is a jewel in this crown, a place of sparkling wonder of human endeavor and natural formations. The country is ground zero for Western civilization, where visitors can trace the origins of Western arts and sciences, as well as democracy. Visitors can also experience the natural beauty of its coasts, mountains and islands.

I met with the Greek minister of tourism, Olga Kefalogianni, in Athens last month, and we discussed the blessings and challenges of tourism, including the problem of what some call “overtourism.” Not only has Greece attracted tourists for millennia, but it also has a huge capacity to absorb visitors. It would just like to spread them out over the year and the country.

Clearly, Kefalogianni loves her job and was, to an extent, born to it. She is the scion of a very prominent Greek family that owns hotels in Crete, the largest and one of the most inviting of the Greek islands.

The last thing Kefalogianni, who did a stint as a lawyer in New York, wants to do is to discourage tourism. It accounts for 20 percent of Greece’s economy, and the country can absorb untold hundreds of thousands more tourists than it already does.

But there are choke points. And in future planning, the minister told me, she is working to enhance the industry by promoting Greek food, wine and its wide-open spaces for safe outdoor recreation like hiking, climbing and canoeing.

The first thing, she said, is to tell the world how diverse Greece is and how much it has to offer not only in terms of its history but also natural beauty and simple things like walking in its villages.

She wants visitors to spread out and enjoy all of Greece. “Do you know you can ski in Greece?” she asked me. Indeed, the country has 25 ski resorts.

She also said Europe has much to offer year-round besides the summer. In truth, the summer in southern Europe can be extremely hot.

One challenge for the Mediterranean ports is the cruise ships, which are now to be found all over the sea: vast, floating cities with eager sightseers, keen to disembark and spend a few hours in a destination.

They are becoming a challenge for host countries. They dock and disgorge their eager passengers, but they bring problems, from pollution to stressed port infrastructure. Also, the cruisers are ashore so briefly that they spend very little money, considering how many there are: Many prefer to eat all their meals on board, and their principal expenditure is on souvenirs and bus tours.

The cruise ships need more regulation, Kefalogianni said. Recently, I observed the problem firsthand. I — yes, on a cruise — fetched up in Santorini when five other huge ships did likewise. A cable car (or foot or donkey) at the port takes people up and down from Fira, the island’s capital. Well, with thousands in line, the result was chaos. Instead of a visit to a heavenly place, it was a version of hell.

Also, Greece and other European countries’ cities want the ships to base at their ports, provision there, and embark and disembark their passengers there. The beneficial economic effect would be greater that way.

The tourism minister wants visitors to know that Greece (and I would add the rest of tourist-haven Europe) has year-round attractions. She noted that the shoulder seasons of spring and fall offer all the summer attractions with fewer people. On the mainland and on the Greek islands — there are 6,000 of them; 227 are inhabited and 100 have more developed tourism facilities — you can swim early in the year and late as well. In February, I saw people swimming at a beach near Athens. They allowed the water to be cold, but not impossibly cold.

Mediterranean Europe is a place for all seasons. As the British writer Christopher Hitchens told me once, “It’s where it all began.”

The Ghost of Jimmy Carter Haunts Natural Gas Decisions

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The ghost of Jimmy Carter may be stalking energy policy in the White House and the Department of Energy.

In the Carter years, the struggle was for nuclear power. Today, it is for natural gas and America’s booming liquefied natural gas future.

The decisions that Carter took during his presidency are still felt. Carter believed that nuclear energy was the resource of last resort. Although he didn’t overtly oppose it, he did damn it with faint praise. Carter and the environmental movement of the time advocated for coal.

The first secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, a close friend of mine, struggled to keep nuclear alive. But he had to accept the reprocessing ban and the cancellation of the fast breeder reactor program with a demonstration reactor in Clinch River, Tennessee. Breeder reactors are a way of burning nuclear waste.

More important, Carter, a nuclear engineer, believed the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — then an established expectation — would lead to global proliferation. He thought if we put a stop to reprocessing at home, it would curtail proliferation abroad. Reprocessing saves up to 97 percent of the uranium that hasn’t been burned up the first time, but the downside is that it frees bomb-grade plutonium.

Rather than chastening the world, Carter essentially broke the world monopoly on nuclear energy enjoyed — outside of the Soviet bloc — by the United States. Going forward, we weren’t seen as a reliable supplier.

Now, the Biden administration is weighing a move that will curtail the growth in natural gas exports, costing untold wealth to America and weakening its position as a stable, global supplier of liquified natural gas. It is a commodity in great demand in Europe and Asia and pits the United States against Russia as a supplier.

What it won’t do is curtail so much as 1 cubic foot of gas consumption anywhere outside of the United States.

The argument against gas is that it is a fossil fuel and fossil fuels contribute to global warming. But gas is the most benign of the fossil fuels, and it beats burning coal or oil hands down. Also, technology is on the way to capture the carbon in natural gas at the point of use.

But some environmentalists — duplicating the folly of environmentalism in the Carter administration — are out to frustrate the production, transport and export of LNG in the belief that this will help save the environment.

The issue the White House and the Energy Department are debating is whether the department should permit a large, proposed LNG export terminal in Louisiana at Calcasieu Pass, known as CP2, and 16 other applications for LNG export terminals.

The recent history of U.S. natural gas and LNG has been an industrial and scientific success: a very American story of can-do.

At a press conference in 1977, the then-deputy secretary of energy, Jack O’Leary, declared natural gas to be a depleted resource. He told a reporter not to ask about it anymore because it wasn’t in play.

Deregulation and technology, much of it developed by the U.S. government in conjunction with visionary George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, upended that. The drilling of horizontal wells using 3D seismic data, a new drill bit, and better fracking with an improved fracking liquid changed everything. Add to that a better turbine, developed from aircraft engines, and a new age of gas abundance arrived.

Now, the United States is the largest exporter of LNG, and it has become an important tool in U.S. diplomacy. It was American LNG that was rushed to Europe to replace Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In conversations with European gas companies, I am told they look to the United States for market stability and reliability.

Globally, gas is a replacement fuel for coal, sometimes oil, and it is essential for warming homes in Europe. There is no alternative.

The idea of curbing LNG exports, advanced by the left wing of the Democratic Party and their environmental allies, won’t keep greenhouse gases from the environment. It will simply hand the market to other producers like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

To take up arms against yourself, Carter-like, is a flawed strategy.

Electricity Can Help Africa’s Growing Population Crisis

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A population catastrophe is in the making in Africa that could engulf the world, Europe first. The United Nations predicts that between now and 2050 the populations of 26 African countries are expected to at least double their current size. Nigeria will overtake the United States to become the world’s third most populous country in 2050.

By the year 2050, according to the United Nations, annual increases will exceed 42 million people per year and total population will have doubled to 2.4 billion. “This comes to 3.5 million more people per month, or 80 additional people per minute. At that point, African population growth would be able to refill an empty London five times a year,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper calculates. Poor Africa, with so little to support a doubling population, is on its way to new horrors of food shortage, lack of jobs and misery.

This is not just crisis for Africa but very much one for Europe, and in time one for other countries.

African migrants, fleeing broken societies and imminent famine, have been crossing the Mediterranean in rickety craft, flooding Europe. This flood will grow and it will be joined by people seeking survival from deeper in Africa; not just from the north, but from the center and the south.

Desperate people move. Take the Royhinga refugees, walking with what they can carry from Myanmar to Bangladesh: a journey from unsafe to unwelcome. It is already happening in Africa and it will dominate in future.

India, which knows something about population explosions (the population there has grown from 400 million, when the British pulled out in 1947, to 1.3 billion), has looked for a way of improving expectations as a means of population stabilization. Their solution has not been droves of family planners with suitcases of condoms, but rather a bold, high-tech solution: electricity and lots of it.

In New Delhi, this strategy was explained to me by a professor at the University of Delhi. As an American, I was aghast at the poverty and the minimal lives lived by tens of millions. Almost verbatim, this is what I was told, “We have a solution to this misery: an electric grid. When we electrify a village, everything changes. Someone gets a television — maybe an old black-and-white one, but Indians are good at keeping things running — and then expectations go up, hygiene improves, and birth rates go down.”

He added, “It works.”

That, maybe, is why today India is one of the leaders in building electric capacity of all kinds, including an ambitious nuclear program.

Electricity provides a solution in Africa, but much of the installed electric capacity is old, serves only urban areas and dates back to the colonial era.

In Africa and South America, I have seen electricity transform lives. An electric supply leads to the ability of villages to move basically from the Iron Age to the Ion Age.

I saw this acutely in my childhood in Africa. An electrified village can keep its food supply from rotting, grind its grain instead of shipping it to a mill, allow local businesses to get a footing, and limit family size. But mostly the young, whether through television or radio, are inspired to greater expectations, to horizons beyond the squalor and poverty that has been their inheritance.

The European media have been covering the African population flood with intensity, particularly the BBC. Yet much of this has had a hand-wringing quality.

As we see the lethality of electricity failure in Florida, following Irma, we again get a sharp lesson in the value to human life of electricity, unique in service to human kind.

If Africa is not to become a huge and permanent humanitarian crisis, affecting the whole world, it needs to get in on the electric solution. Ideally, this should be first with the fuels available: sun and wind. These are peculiarly suited to Africa: poor, desperate Africa where people hurt so much, every day.

 

Photo: ACCRA, GHANA – MARCH 4, 2012: Unidentified Ghanaian people at the market in Ghana. People of Ghana suffer of poverty due to the unstable economic situation. Credit: Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM POTUS Channel

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Llewellyn King on SiriusXM, POTUS Channel 124

Listen below for the segment, where Llewellyn discusses his column, “Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump” which can be read on this website, or on HuffPost here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/europeans-feel-they-cant-trust-us-in-the-time-of_us_595f8399e4b0cf3c8e8d57e2

Press the play button below to listen.

The Myth of Immigrant Assimilation

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By Llewellyn King

In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.

Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari’a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.

Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.

In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.

Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.

But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.

If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.

The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.

Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.

Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.

As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”

When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.

No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer. — For InsideSources


The Future of Britain is on the Ballot

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By Llewellyn King

Long before our election in November, a much greater upheaval may hit Britain. Probably in late June, the country will vote on whether to stay in the European Union. Leaving is called “Brexit” in the British press.

While polls have consistently shown that voters favor Britain remaining a member of the 28-nation bloc, there are signs that things are changing. British business, which has until now seen its future as being in the EU, is beginning to rethink its support for British membership. A recent poll shows industry believing it could prosper out of the EU.

This is a big problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has promised dramatic changes in Britain’s membership, which will be announced at the European summit next month.

Britain wants less-oppressive regulations and a change in immigration policy. It wants an end to what has been a fundamental part of the European structure: the freedom of movement between countries. In short: no more immigration to Britain from Europe.

It is a complex negotiation which Cameron believes he can win; particularly when Europe is in shaky shape after the economic crisis in Greece and from the surge of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Although Europe’s political elites may have to hold their refined noses, the chances are better today than ever that they would rather their unruly island neighbors stay in than further damage the European project by withdrawing.

Predictably some economists say that Britain will do just fine without Europe, while others see dire economic consequences.

When the referendum comes, it will be a free vote with about half of Cameron’s Conservative Party voting to withdraw. These are the rambunctious “Euroskeptics” that have bedeviled British elections for generations and have made the role of Conservative prime ministers particularly trying.

The opposition Labor Party is divided on a Brexit. But Labor has so imploded under the extreme leftist Jeremy Corbyn that it is likely to go along and lend its support — feeble though it is — to the forces wishing to stay in the EU.

The Scottish Nationalists will also support continued membership. They hope that if they break away from the United Kingdom, they will get succor from the EU.

But the forces for exiting the EU are powerful and articulate. They are emboldened by Europe’s problems and the fact that they will no longer be bound by the dictates of, as they say, “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.”

The wild card in the referendum may be England’s wild man: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Now finishing his term as mayor of London, Boris Johnson is a lovable version of Donald Trump. He has gone from scrape to scrape and has come out ahead of the game. For instance, three years after having won a seat in Parliament in 2001, Johnson was sacked by the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, for allegedly lying over an affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson called newspaper stories about the affair “an inverted pyramid of piffle.” He was also sacked from his editorship of The Spectator, where the piffle took place.

But being elected to higher office is such a compensation, so Johnson, a bicycle-riding, tradition-loving maverick got himself elected mayor of London. In this office he saved the iconic double-decker buses, presided over the 2012 Summer Olympics, and endeared himself to an even wider audience.

The British revere Johnson’s eccentricity and voted him back into Parliament in the last election. Now people talk openly of him being Cameron’s successor after the referendum.

Johnson has hedged his bets on British membership in the EU. Just this week he declared that he will not lead the “Out” forces, but he does not totally endorse the “In” forces.

Here is the possible scenario: Cameron has to produce a deal that satisfies some of the Euroskeptics and set a date for referendum. Then the vote. Then the hangover, one way or another. Then Johnson makes his move – unless some schemer, like the current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has not outmaneuvered the charming and brilliant Boris.

Cleverly Johnson has written a long political treatise comparing London to Athens, and leaving room for people to believe he has the qualities of Pericles, without actually claiming the great Greek’s mantle. Then, just to be safe, he has knocked off a highly laudatory biography of Churchill, which invites the idea that Johnson shares some of his hero’s traits.

This kind of effrontery makes British politics a perpetual night in the pub. Cheers! — For Inside Sources

Europe Faces Winter on the Edge of the Abyss

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BURGENLAND, Austria –There is another world crisis brewing – and one for which President Obama cannot be blamed. The Europeans and have made a mess of things, and now the wolves are at the door.

The first snarling wolf is deflation. Europe’s economies are so weak, so close to recession, that the very real danger of deflation – falling prices – has its economists petrified. It ought also to have its politicians in anguish, but whether it does is less clear.

Europe’s big-driver economy, Germany, as well as France and Italy, are on the edge. The German miracle is ailing, and Berlin may have been writing the wrong prescriptions for the rest of the 18 countries that share the euro as their currency. It has been aided in this effort by the International Monetary Fund.

That prescription, which often seems to harm the patient, as in Greece and Spain, is for austerity – which appears to work better on paper than in the real world. Germany worries about profligate borrowing throughout the European Union. But if the German economy is to escape recession, Chancellor Angela Merkel may have to borrow some money herself and inject it into infrastructure spending to keep Germany competitive and its workers on the job.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has been slow to institute a badly needed program of buying qualified bonds, known as quantitative easing. In the United States, the Federal Reserve, in a program that is now ending, has pumped more than $1 trillion into the economy and helped pull the economy out of recession. But ECB has been timid because it has no clear direction from the European political establishment — pointing up how cumbersome and directionless the European Union structure has become. It has a parliament, which has no power, and is increasingly attracting members who are actually opposed to the European project.

The European Commission has arguably too much power centered in the bureaucracy in Brussels, but no clear direction form its controller, the Council of Ministers. Trouble is the ministers can disagree and veto needed courses of action.

The economic crisis points up the ungovernable nature of Europe and its present institutions. If Washington is gridlocked, Europe is by structures that cannot deal with crisis and what often appear to reflect as many policies as there are members (28) in the EU.

But it is not just the economic wolf that is at Europe’s door. The Russian bear is there, too. Already there is an undeclared war raging in Ukraine.

At the Association of European Journalists' meeting here, a spokesman from the Ukrainian government, who asked not to be identified by name, expressed the sense in Ukraine that it has been betrayed by EU bungling.

“Europe sees Ukraine as its European neighborhood partner. But in Ukraine, the truth is different: Ukraine’s view is that Europe let us down. We are hurt, bleeding. We have been betrayed by a neighbor that, six months ago, we saw as a brotherly nation,” he said.

What was not said was that Europe may freeze this winter if the Putin regime — a growling wolf — wants to punish Ukraine and its neighbors. Europe is hopelessly dependent on Russian gas, which is used mostly for heating. Germany gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, and Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia get 90 percent. Russian gas makes its way — largely through Ukraine — down into Italy, and even the United Kingdom has some small exposure.

If the gas goes off, Europe freezes and its economies go south in an avalanche. The most hopeful thing for Europe this winter is that with the world oil price falling, Russia’s own fragile economy may dictate that it keeps the gas flowing — but it will force up the price where it can.

Washington, with a new Congress, might want to brace for Europe’s winter of crisis and disaster. If Europe goes into severe recession, can the U.S. economy escape major harm? The new Congress will be on a sharp learning curve. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate