EU-DIGEST

For the better part of 16 years, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a "self-styled economic reformer", and the world’s great hope for Muslim democracy, had a compelling story—and for most of that time, everyone bought it. Everyone, that is, except Turkey’s old guard—the secular establishment, the billionaires, generals, and educated elites who stood to lose their monopoly on power, wealth, and influence.

Now, however, it looks like Turks got more than they bargained forAfter a run that brought in more than $220 billion of foreign investment, tripled gross domestic product, and returned inflation to single digits, Turkey’s economy is again ailing—its democracy even more so.

With the nation heading to snap elections on June 24, the lira is sinking, inflation is running at double the central bank’s target, and companies are struggling under more than $300 billion in foreign debt.

Turkey’s ranking on nearly every index of democratic governance has plunged. There’s no longer talk of a peace process with Kurdish separatists.

Buoyed by a seeming imperviousness at the polls, Erdogan has become ever more autocratic, his style of leadership more personal, prickly, and intolerant.

He has ruled using emergency law since a failed military coup in the summer of 2016, jailing more journalists than any country in the world and widening censorship powers to include the internet.

If people don't wake up in time to the fact that Erdogan is driving Turkey over the cliff and vote him out of power - it could mean this beautiful country will be going in na tailspin towards certain disaster.

READ MORE: Why Investors Have Become Skittish About Turkey - Bloomberg

USA: Donald Trump's "Mein Kampf" : the startegy of a mad man ? - Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It.

The new president’s cabinet nominees are a similarly worldly lot, being either generals or multimillionaires (or both), or simply, like their president, straight-out billionaires. Rich people jet off to exotic places for vacations or to make deals; generals are dispatched to all points of the compass to kill people. With an estimated net wealth of more than $13 billion,

Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: The military men in his proposed cabinet—former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary)—have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.

As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate… circa 1817. Still, the media have bent over backward to find as much diversity as they could in this panorama of homogeneity. They have, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.

In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continue to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: It’s about to declare war on the world.

Don’t be fooled by the surface cosmopolitanism of the new president and his appointees. For all their international experience, these people care about the planet the way pornographers care about sex. Their interactions are purely transactional, just the means to an end. There couldn’t be less empathy for the people out there involved in the drama. It’s all about the money and that piercing sense of conquest.

The Trump team’s approach, a globalism of the 1 percent, benefits themselves even as it reinforces American exceptionalism. Their worldview is a galaxy distant from the sort of democratic internationalism that values diplomacy, human rights, and multilateral cooperation to address planetary problems like climate change and economic inequality. Such a foreign policy of mutual engagement is, in fact, exactly what’s under immediate threat.

As with Obamacare, the incoming administration wants to shred an inclusive project and substitute an exclusive one for it. In so doing, it will replace a collection of liberal internationalists with something worse: a confederacy of oligarchs.

For such an undertaking that so radically privileges the few over the many, the next administration needs a compelling rationale that goes beyond assertions that the status quo is broken, international institutions are inefficient, and the United States is the indispensable power on the planet. America isn’t facing just any old crisis like failing banks or nuclear wannabe nations. For someone like Donald Trump, the threat has to be huge, the biggest ever.

So brace yourself for a coming clash of civilizations. The new president is circling the wagons in defense of nothing less than the Western way of life. As if it were a town in South Vietnam in 1968, Trump aims to destroy the international community in order to save it.

Read more: Donald Trump’s Strategy? Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It. | The Nation

The North Korea- US Summit: A reality check on Korea nuclear talks

When President Donald Trump and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in first agreed to meet in Washington Tuesday, they seemed to genuinely believe they might be on the brink of a major rapprochement with the North. Now, there are concerns over whether the much-touted summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un scheduled for Singapore on June 12 will happen at all.

With hindsight, Pyongyang’s announcement last week that it might pull out of the meeting should have been less of a surprise. North Korea has spent decades using similar tactics to shape the diplomatic agenda with the South and Washington, raising hopes of a breakthrough – then sparking a crisis and moving the goal posts.

It’s still less than a month since Moon and Kim engaged in what appeared a successful summit in the
demilitarized zone, both pledging to work towards the complete denuclearization of the peninsula. Last week, however, Pyongyang furiously denounced Washington for demanding the North’s unilateral disarmament, particularly as a precondition for potential U.S. economic aid.

Read more: Commentary: A reality check on Korea nuclear talks | Article [AMP] | Reuters