[Townhall] "Fortress Europe is an illusion."So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday editorial: "Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis."
The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: "The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to come."
Can Europe not repel this unwanted home invasion from the Global South?
It is "delusional" to think so, says the FT. Europe must be realistic and set about "providing legal routes for migrants and asylum seekers."
What occasioned the editorial was Greece's rough resistance to Turkish President Erdogan's funneling of thousands of Syrian refugees, who had fled into Turkey, right up to the border with Greece.
Erdogan is threatening to inundate southeastern Europe with Syrian refugees to extract more money from the EU in return for keeping the 3.5 million Syrians already in Turkey away from EU frontiers.
Another Erdogan objective is to coerce Europe into backing his military intervention in Syria to prevent President Bashar Assad from capturing all of Idlib province and emerging victorious in his civil war.
In the human rights hellhole that is Syria today, we may see the dimensions of the disaster wrought when Wilsonian crusaders set out to depose the dictator Assad and make Syria safe for democracy.