EU epitaph?

The headline of what the Wall Street Journal bills as an insider narrative of the escalating European debt crisis is "Dithering at The top Turned EU Crisis into Global Threat."  I'm not sure dithering is quite right. The story suggests that European leaders couldn't agree not because they were indecisive per se but because their national interests were at odds and each was answerable to his or her own people. At one moment, French President Nicholas Sarkozy expressed the problem succinctly:

Finnish premier Jyrki Katainen also complained. His parliament wanted collateral in exchange for more Finnish lending to Greece. "No collateral, no agreement from me," he said.

Mr. Sarkozy was peeved. "All our parliaments can cause problems," he said.

Hope, frustrated

This lede brought a long-percolating bit of pattern recognition to the forebrain:

U.S. President Barack Obama sought to ratchet up pressure on China over its currency and trade policies, warning Chinese President Hu Jintao on Saturday that Americans were growing "impatient and frustrated" over economic relations.

This was, shall we say, not the first time Obama invoked or betrayed frustration -- his own, or Americans'.  There's Netanyahu (Nov. 8):

There's no doubt that Obama is frustrated and angry in the extreme with what he perceives to be Netanyahu's recalcitrance when it comes to Arab-Israeli peacemaking (Nov. 11).

Economic stagnation:

While protesters and police battled on the streets of Oakland, in the pre-recorded interview Leno asked Obama for his views of what was behind the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Look, people are frustrated. And that frustration expresses itself in a lot of different ways. It expressed itself in the tea party, it's expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street... Everybody needs to understand that the American people feel that no-one is looking out for them right now.