- European Finance Officials Agree ‘in Principle’ on New Greek Bailout
The New York Times JULY 16, 2015
BRUSSELS — European finance officials pledged support and money for Greece on Thursday, even as the prospects of reaching a final bailout deal were clouded by political uncertainty in Athens andGerman doubts about the need to preserve Greek membership in the eurozone.
Finance ministers of the 19 countries that use the euro currency agreed to “grant in principle” a new bailout package for Greece that could total 86 billion euros, or about $94.5 billion.
And those ministers were joined by finance officials from the rest of the 28-nation European Union in agreeing to give Greece short-term loans of as much as €7 billion to meet its immediate needs.
The European Central Bank, in Frankfurt, offered its support by expanding an emergency line of credit for Greece’s banks by €900 million, raising the running total to nearly €90 billion.
The central bank’s move prompted Deputy Finance Minister Dimitris Mardas of Greece to tell state television later Thursday that the country’s banks would reopen on Monday. A decision on what to do about the limits on A.T.M. withdrawals and restrictions on international money transfers will be made on Friday, a ministry official said.
Those decisions on Thursday came hours after the Greek Parliament acceded to demands from its creditors — and turned its back on the ruling Syriza party’s pledges to end austerity — by passing the first in a series of measures intended to improve the performance of the economy and impose budget discipline on the government.
But all of the positive signals from European finance officials had a tentative tone, in keeping with the tenuous nature of a proposed bailout program that even the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has said he opposes but that he considers a lesser evil than being forced out of the eurozone.
The European Central Bank, for example, extended the emergency line of credit for only one week. The eurozone finance ministers said they were supporting the bailout only on the condition that Athens “swiftly” adopt more measures to overhaul its economy. And the €7 billion in short-term loans must still be confirmed in writing by Friday afternoon.
If that money is dispensed, it might enable Athens, among other steps, to repay about €2 billion in arrears to the International Monetary Fund, as well as €4.25 billion owed to the European Central Bank on Monday.
The central bank’s president, Mario Draghi, said at a news conference on Thursday that he was confident Greece would be able to make those payments. “I want to thank all of the members of the E.U. that have made that possible,” he said.
Payment of those near-term debts by Greece would remove a major source of uncertainty that has weighed on financial markets and the Greek economy. Greece’s failure to pay money it owed to the I.M.F. last month was a warning that the government was almost out of money, and it contributed to a chain of events that led Greek banks to close, suffocating the economy.
But whether Greece can agree to a new bailout program is still far from certain. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, suggested on Thursday that Greece might be better off leaving the eurozone.
Mr. Draghi declined to comment directly on Mr. Schäuble’s comments, which caused a furor in Europe. “Our mandate is to act based on the assumption Greece will be a member of the euro area,” Mr. Draghi said.
Still, even some members of the European Central Bank’s policy board, the Governing Council, are known to be skeptical about the prudence of continuing to provide loans to Greece’s teetering banks.
Asked at the news conference whether the Governing Council decision to increase the emergency loans had been unanimous, Mr. Draghi avoided a direct answer. He said that agreeing to increase the loans, under the central bank’s rules, required only a two-thirds majority. During earlier debates, some members of the Governing Council were in favor of withdrawing all emergency lending from Greek banks, which would have caused them to fail and the economy to collapse.
- Clearing Hurdles to Iran Nuclear Deal With Standoffs, Shouts and Compromise
The New York Times JULY 15, 2015 
Secretary of State John Kerry, center, speaking with Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz on Tuesday in Vienna.CreditPool photo by Carlos Barria
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VIENNA — One by one, the roadblocks to a nuclear accord between Iran and the United States had been painstakingly cleared. But as the negotiations went into their third week in the neoclassical Coburg Palace hotel this month, a major dispute lingered over whether a ban on Iran’s ability to purchase conventional weapons and missile technology would remain in place.
The American delegation, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, insisted on extending the ban. ButMohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister and his country’s chief negotiator, was opposed. Backing him were the Russians and Chinese, equal parties in the talks, who saw a lucrative market in selling arms to Tehran.
A compromise was struck that fully satisfied neither side: a five-year ban on the sale of conventional weapons and an eight-year ban on ballistic missiles.
Privately, Mr. Kerry told his team that any lifting of the ban was bound to inflame many in Congress, where fears of empowering Iran would mix with presidential politics. But shortly before midnight on Monday he called President Obama, and together they agreed that it was not worth losing what they saw as the best chance to roll back Iran’s nuclear program simply because there was a risk that sometime in the future Iran would be able to acquire far less dangerous weapons.
Over the 17 long days here in Vienna, the standoffs, trade-offs, shouts and confrontations — some real, some staged for negotiating advantage — sometimes obscured the fact that the two countries were negotiating with entirely different agendas.
As Mr. Obama made clear again Wednesday, the alternative he saw to the deal was a steady slide toward another war — perhaps, aides thought, in just a year or two as Iran’s nuclear abilities accelerated. Throughout the talks, he had one goal: to diminish the prospect that Iran could develop an atomic bomb — or could race for one before the United States and its allies could react — and buy time to try to restructure the relationship.
For the president, everything else — Iran’s support for terrorism, its imprisonment of dissidents and even some Americans, its meddling in Iraq and Syria, its arms trade — was secondary.
For the Iranians, this was a negotiation first and foremost to get rid of what Mr. Zarif often called the “unjust sanctions” while trying to keep their nuclear options open. And while they treasured their nuclear program, they treasured the symbolism of not backing down to American demands even more. But Mr. Zarif was walking his own high-wire act at home. While he had an important ally in Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, hard-liners did not want to reach any deal at all; many were making a fortune from the sanctions because they controlled Iran’s black markets.
And conservatives around the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were looking for any signs that their Americanized chief negotiator, who studied at the University of Denver, was ready to give away too much nuclear infrastructure without getting Iran the sanctions lifted in return, as the ayatollah had decreed.
There was no single event, no heart-to-heart conversation between adversaries or game-changing insight that made the Iran deal happen. Instead, over a period of years, each side came to gradually understand what mattered most to the other.
- Japan Moves to Allow Military Combat for First Time in 70 Years
The New York Times JULY 16, 2015
TOKYO — Defying broad public opposition and large demonstrations, Prime MinisterShinzo Abe won a crucial vote in Parliament on Thursday for legislation that would give Japan’s military limited powers to fight in foreign conflicts for the first time since World War II.
Mr. Abe’s party and its allies in the lower house of Parliament approved the package of 11 security-related bills after opposition lawmakers walked out in protest and as demonstrators chanted noisily outside, despite a gathering typhoon. The upper chamber, which Mr. Abe’s coalition also controls, is all but certain to endorse the legislation as well.
The vote was the culmination of months of contentious debate in a society that has long embraced pacifism to atone for wartime aggression. It was a significant victory for Mr. Abe, a conservative politician who has devoted his career to moving Japan beyond guilt over its militarist past and toward his vision of a “normal country” with a larger role in global affairs.
Mr. Abe has pressed this agenda, though, against the wishes of much of the Japanese public, and his moves have generated unease across Asia, especially in countries it once occupied and where its troops committed atrocities. Final passage of the bills would represent a break from the strictly defensive stance maintained by the Japanese military in the decades since the war.
Critics, including a majority of Japanese constitutional specialists, say it violates the country’s postwar charter, which renounces war. But the legislation is supported by the United States, Japan’s wartime foe turned ally and protector, which has welcomed a larger role for Tokyo in regional security as a counterweight to a more assertive China.
Mr. Abe has spent considerable political capital pushing the bills through. Voters oppose them by a ratio of roughly two to one, according to numerous surveys, and the government’s support ratings, which were once high, fell to around 40 percent in several polls taken this month.
Mr. Abe has presented the package as an unavoidable response to new threats facing Japan, in particular the growing military power of China. He seized on the murder of two Japanese hostages by the Islamic State militant group in January as an example of why Japan needs to loosen restrictions on its military, suggesting that the military might have rescued them if it had been free to act.
“These laws are absolutely necessary because the security situation surrounding Japan is growing more severe,” he said after Thursday’s vote.
China condemned passage of the bills, describing them as a potential threat to peace in Asia and invoking Japan’s wartime aggression.
“We solemnly urge the Japanese side to draw hard lessons from history, stick to the path of peaceful development, respect the major security concerns of its Asian neighbors, and refrain from jeopardizing China’s sovereignty and security interests or crippling regional peace and stability,” Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said in a statement.
With opposition lawmakers boycotting the vote, the bills passed with the support of the Liberal Democratic Party, led by Mr. Abe, and its smaller coalition partner, Komeito, which control a majority of seats in the legislature’s lower house, the House of Representatives. To become law, they must still be approved by the upper chamber, but in the unlikely event that the package is rejected, the lower house can override that decision.
The upper house is scheduled to debate the legislation for 60 days, keeping the issue in the public eye and potentially fueling more protests. “There is plenty of time for this newfound appetite for opposition to the Abe government to grow,” Sheila A. Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said online.
In an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress in April, Mr. Abe pledged that he would enact the legislation to strengthen Japan’s already close ties to the United States. But “a deeply divided Japanese public over alliance cooperation is not the outcome U.S. policy makers hoped for,” Ms. Smith wrote.
The legislation would allow the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, to cooperate more closely with United States forces by providing logistical support and, in certain circumstances, armed backup in international conflicts. It complements guidelines in a bilateral agreement governing how Japanese and United States forces work together, which was signed by the two nations this year.
Mr. Abe has failed to dispel concerns of the Japanese public that looser restrictions on the military could embroil Japan in damaging and unnecessary wars. The United States-led war in Iraq is often cited by critics as a cautionary example, although Mr. Abe and his supporters say the many caveats contained in the bills would prevent Japan from fighting in such a conflict.
Under the legislation, Japan could fight to defend allies, but only when not doing so would threaten “the lives and survival of the Japanese nation.” Mr. Abe’s opponents counter that the criteria are vague.
