The West’s Refugee Crisis What happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-refugee-crisis-1441561678
The photograph of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned trying to flee to Greece with his brother and mother, has focused the world on Europe’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis. Demands for compassion are easy, but it’s also important to understand how Europe—and the U.S.—got here. This is what the world looks like when the West abandons its responsibility to maintain world order.
The refugees are fleeing horror shows across North Africa and the Middle East, but especially the Syrian civil war that is now into its fifth year. Committed to withdrawing from the region, President Obama chose to do almost nothing. Europe, which has a longer Middle Eastern history than America and is closer, chose not to fill the U.S. vacuum.
The result has been the worst human catastrophe of the 21st-century. What began as an Arab Spring uprising against Bashar Assad has become a civil war that grows ever-more virulent. Radical Islamic factions have multiplied and Islamic State found a haven from which to grow and expand. More than 210,000 Syrians have been killed, and millions have been displaced inside the country or in camps in neighboring countries.
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The conceit has been that while all of this is tragic, the Middle East has to work out its own pathologies and what happens there will be contained there. But by now we know that what happens in Damascus doesn’t stay in Damascus. First came the terrorist exports, recruited by Islamic State and sent back to bomb and murder in Paris and on trains. Now come the refugees, willing to risk their lives fleeing chaos on the chance of a safe haven in Europe.
The lesson is that while intervention has risks, so does abdication. The difference is that at least intervention gives the West the opportunity to shape events, often for the better, rather than merely cope with the consequences of doing nothing. As difficult as the war in Iraq was, by 2008 the insurgency was defeated and Iraqis were returning to Baghdad. Only after Mr. Obama withdrew entirely from Iraq and ignored Syria did Iraq deteriorate again and Islamic State advance.
Europeans who dislike an America they think is overbearing should note what happens when the world’s policeman decides to take a vacation and let the neighbors fend for themselves. In the modern world of instant communications and easy transportation, the world’s problems will wash up on the wealthy West’s shores one way or another. If Europe isn’t prepared to handle nearby crises, militarily if necessary, be prepared to accept the refugees.
On that latter point, Europeans are by and large generous people who want to help refugees. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown leadership in accepting refugees in her country and trying to work out a plan to propose a quota system for the rest of Europe to apportion the asylum claims now besieging the front-line states of Greece, Hungary and Italy. Germany is expected to take 800,000 this year.
Aylan Kurdi’s death might also finally shame more governments into action. Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday announced Britain is abandoning its refusal to bear a heavier load and will accept “thousands” more refugees, most directly from camps on Syria’s borders. One good idea would be to open processing centers closer to where the refugees start their journeys. But without a clear commitment from states to accept more, the temptation of asylum seekers to resort to human traffickers will remain great.
Yet it’s also true that years of bad economic and fiscal policy mean that Europe is now far less able to cope with refugees than many assume. Europe is unable to police its maritime borders effectively, which is why so many human smugglers are using Mediterranean routes. That’s a function of its long-term underinvestment in naval and coast-guard assets. Collective European spending on defense amounted to some $250 billion in 2014, a $7 billion decline from a year earlier, and it’s going down year after year.
Absorbing refugees also requires a robust economy that Europe hasn’t had in years. Most refugees want to go to Germany, but even Germany is growing at a mere 1.6% annual rate. Unemployment looks low (4.7%) but the labor force participation rate is very low, about 60%, according to World Bank figures. For the rest of Europe, the ability to absorb a refugee influx is even worse.
Without economic reform to produce a growth economy, migration on the current scale is going to strain Europe’s welfare state and further encourage the rise of extreme anti-immigration parties like the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary and the Pegida movement in Germany. It will also begin to threaten such pillars of the modern European Union as its Schengen policy that allows passport-free travel and migration. Schengen has been a crucial economic safety valve that allows young people in particular to move for economic opportunity when their native country is in recession.
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All of which underscores that the migration crisis is far more than a humanitarian issue. By all means Europe needs to do more to end the immediate human suffering. So does the U.S., which could in particular accept Syrian Christians who are targeted for extinction by Islamists.
But the larger problem is the retreat by Europe and America from promoting, and if necessary enforcing, a world order built on Western ideals. The migration crisis shows that this failure will eventually compromise Western ideals at home as well as abroad.
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