AMB. JOHN BOLTON: We Shouldn't Rescue Europe
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The Greek financial crisis is really a European Union ("EU") political crisis as much as it is economic. European Monetary Union, creating the Euro, was designed to facilitate "ever closer union" as well as to create a common currency.
Under the Euro, individual EU member governments continued to pursue their own fiscal policies without having to worry about consequences for the values of their national currencies, because everything was masked by the Euro.
Now, as Greece's unsustainable situation becomes clear, and as others -- Spain and Portugal, for example -- the Euro itself is under challenge. That is not surprising, given the Euro's peculiar status as a currency without a government.
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Now the European union must decide whether to change its structure or save its currency. It will be a painful decision for them to make either way, but they are the ones who created the problem. And they are surely capable of solving it. As a European problem, and very much a political one, it should not be solved by the United States.
There is no United States interest in rescuing the Euro or European political integration, certainly not with American taxpayer dollars. In fact, the IMF is involved in the Greek rescue package only because the EU, and particularly Germany didn't want all of the responsibility.
That is not a sufficient reason to the U.S. to rescue Europe from its own mistakes.
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John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the U.N., is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Fox News contributor. He is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
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