The Atlantic: Trump Is Choosing Eastern Europe

The statement was just the latest in an unusual series of moves by Grenell. He spoke at a lunch for Jens Spahn, Germany’s minister of health and a prominent critic of Chancellor Angela Merkel; he has also been photographed with Spahn on several occasions. In a breach of protocol, Grenell asked to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Berlin’s airport. (Netanyahu only gave him a meet-and-greet after meeting with Merkel.) Grenell also hosted a lunch honoring Austrian Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz, and praised him by name in the Breitbart interview. To put Grenell’s activities in context: This would be like Emily Haber, the newly appointed German ambassador to the United States, kicking off her tenure by promising to empower American liberals, meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Dulles before meeting Donald Trump, holding a lunch honoring the Mexican president, and hanging out with Senator Jeff Flake, a vocal critic of the president.  

Grenell is early in his tenure, and may yet turn things around. But the Breitbart episode is a symptom of a broader problem. With rogue ambassadors, a president who praises Vladimir Putin, a bureaucracy that supports nato, and an ongoing trade war, nobody really understands Trump’s policy on Europe. [...]

One would have to go back to the Suez Crisis of 1956 to find a time when the special relationship with Britain was in worse shape, for instance. Rhetorically, the Trump administration supports Brexit. In practice, it has pursued a predatory policy in response to Brexit, designed to exploit the government’s need for new trading arrangements. Essentially, the Trump administration is using Britain’s need to join the World Trade Organization as an individual state to force it to accept painful concessions in a number of trade and services sectors, exploiting the fact that it has less leverage outside the EU. Meanwhile, in bilateral trade talks, the Trump administration is pushing Britain to accept the U.S. regulatory framework, or at least opt out of the EU single market and customs union. This will benefit U.S. economic interests in the short term, but make it much tougher for London to reach an agreement with the rest of the EU.

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Politico: How Brexiteers lost control of Brexit

At the beginning of May, Cabinet Brexiteers, including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, openly derided the prime minister’s favored “customs partnership” proposal — which would involve the U.K. collecting tariffs on the bloc’s behalf to avoid a hard Irish border — and backbenchers threatened a leadership challenge should she sell them out. Come the end of the month, those same critics had swallowed the PM’s Irish border backstop, which would keep Britain inside part of the EU customs union after 2021 if no other arrangement is agreed. [...]

But, despite all the noise, May and her team believe they have found a fudge that the majority of her Cabinet can stomach, partly because some pro-Leave Tories didn’t realize what was happening, because others came around to May’s approach, and because the rest did not have a plan to stop it. [...]

No. 10 convinced them the commitment to “full alignment” with EU regulations in the absence of agreed solutions was merely a form of words to move talks on, Brexit-backing MPs say. In reality, the December text, coupled with the abandonment of the prime minister’s much-loved mantra that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” firmly set the U.K. on a path toward a close regulatory relationship with Brussels after Brexit. [...]

In a major win, May convinced some Brexiteers they should sign up to a deal they may not love in the short term, but that gives them a chance to diverge in the years ahead, according to officials in Downing Street and allies of Leave-supporting Cabinet ministers. She warned them that not doing so would see them end up with political turmoil and the possibility of no Brexit at all. To turn a phrase, “a bad deal is better than no deal.”  [...]

The problem for those who subscribe to this view is they have little leverage to force May to change tack. Despite having the numbers to trigger a confidence vote that could topple the prime minister, most hard-line Brexiteers agree she would likely win the support of a majority of Tory MPs. What’s more, in the event that a challenge succeeds and installs a Brexiteer in Downing Street, this faction does not have enough votes in the House of Commons to get through their vision of Brexit, and that would not change without another general election.  

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Big Think: The fascist philosopher behind Vladimir Putin’s information warfare

 Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder gives a crash course in Ivan Ilyin's philosophy of fascism and explains why this worldview is so appealing to Putin: it defines freedom as knowing your set place in society, asserts that democracy is a ritual and not a reality, and maintains that there are no facts in the world. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this is how new technology—like Facebook—is turning old fascism into political warfare.

VisualPolitik: How does DIRECT DEMOCRACY work in LIECHTENSTEIN?

Despite being a constitutional monarchy, most of the political decisions in this Principality are done through referendums. This includes economic policy, social spending and even… Citizenship!

Even the right to self-determination can be guaranteed by referendum. This means that any of the 11 municipalities inside of Liechtenstein can hold a popular vote to decide whether they want to stay in the country or become an independent nation. Sounds pretty crazy, right?

How is all of this possible? How can you manage to guarantee such a stable political system when people can vote in any crazy law they want with a referendum? Well… This is what we were wondering here at VisualPolitik...

And we figured the best way to answer these questions is by going to the country and asking. So, we did just that!

Politico: What populists get wrong about migration

As part of the medical team that rescues and cares for the migrants that arrived in Sicily, I heard countless stories of abuse, violence and rape. Many were detained in Libya, where people are routinely forced into slavery and tortured for ransom. None boarded our vessel with the bags that Salvini would have them repack. [...]

As my patients’ stories attest, the EU’s tunnel vision when it comes to cutting the number of people migrating to Europe creates increasingly dangerous and deadly journeys for those compelled to flee their countries. Its decision to cooperate with Libya, in particular, has led to flagrant human rights abuses. [...]

The EU has tied development assistance to harsh migration policies in the transit countries of the Sahel. Niger — the main transit country for the majority who travel north to Europe — for example, has become the largest per capita recipient of EU foreign aid. Algeria, in recent months, has dropped thousands of people in the desert without food or water.  

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EUobserver: EU failed to clean up diesel cars, report says

The paper said that 91 percent of all cars approved with a Euro 6 label not only exceeded the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission level associated with that label, but were even higher than the less strict Euro 5 label which preceded it.  [...]

Remote sensing allows for mass-checking. According to the report's authors, they collected some 750,000 records in France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, although that figure also includes vans and trucks, not only cars.  [...]

"For the particular aspect of NOx emissions of diesel vehicles the European emission legislation therefore must be considered as an almost complete failure until now," Tomasz Husak, the head of cabinet of industry commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska, said in a confidential paper EUobserver reported on last year.

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statista: The worst countries to be gay in Europe

The latest edition of ILGA Europe's Rainbow List has found that Malta, Belgium and Norway are the most LGBTI-friendly countries in Europe. The annual review ranks 49 European countries on a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent. Those closer to 0 percent are considered worst for gross violations of human rights and discrimination while the other end of the scale respects human rights and full equality.

LGBTI people planning a trip are best advised to avoid Turkey, Armenia and Azerbeijan. The latter is rock-bottom of the ranking with 4.70 percent. Russia, host of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, also scores poorly on the list with 10.90 percent.

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Haaretz: How Russia Angered Iran in Syria and Had to Pull Its Troops From the Lebanese Border

The situation was resolved on Tuesday when Syrian army soldiers took over three positions where the Russians had deployed near the town of Qusair in the Homs region on Monday, one of the officials, a military commander, told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

It appeared to be a rare case of Russia acting out of sync with President Bashar al-Assad's Iran-backed allies in the war. Iranian and Russian support has been critical to Assad's war effort. [...]

Russia and Iran-backed forces such as Hezbollah have worked together against the insurgency. Hezbollah deployed to Syria in 2012. The Russian air force arrived in 2015 in support of Assad.

But their different agendas in Syria have become more apparent of late as Israel presses Russia to make sure Iran and its allies do not entrench their military sway in the country.

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Vox: Study: Christianity in Western Europe is as much about identity as belief

In a telephone survey of more than 24,000 people in Western Europe, Pew discovered that, particularly when it came to Christianity, beliefs about God and identification as a Christian didn’t always overlap. In Western Europe in particular, the poll suggested, Christianity serves as a kind of cultural and nationalist identity marker as much as, if not more than, it does a religious faith. [...]

Just 64 percent of church-attending identified Christians believe in God as described in the Bible, while a mere 24 percent of non-practicing Christians do. (By contrast, 80 percent of American Christians say they believe in the biblical God.)

Among church-attending European Christians, high percentages express views that suggest a degree of nationalism: 72 percent say that it is important to be ethnically linked to a given country in order to be considered “fully” a member of that country (thus, for example, Germans “should” have German ancestry), and 49 percent believe that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their culture. These numbers drop among non-practicing Christians — just 52 percent say someone’s full membership in a country should be predicated on their ethnicity, and 45 percent say Islam is incompatible with their culture.

The answers to those two questions drop even further among the religiously unaffiliated — down to 42 and 32 percent, respectively. More broadly, churchgoing Christians in Europe tended to have more negative views about Muslims, Jews, and immigrants than their non-churchgoing Christian counterparts, who in turn had more negative views than the religiously unaffiliated.

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