Some Clarity on the Greek Situation

This piece by the often excellent Roger Cohen does much to illuminate the running Homeric Greek Saga (sorry for the mixed metaphors):

[...] Should European leaders now allow this to happen — keep the cash spigot from the European Central Bank turned off, watch Greek banks become insolvent in short order, see medicines and imported foods disappear from pharmacies and supermarkets within a week or two, force Greece to start printing i.o.u.s or eventually drachmas that might allow the country over time to devalue its way back to competitiveness? Should Europe gamble that as this scenario unfolds — and Greeks see they were hoodwinked by Tsipras into voting on an austerity proposal when in fact they were voting on whether to keep the euro or not — the majority will rise up and throw out the leftist government for one more amenable to a deal? 

Or should creditors, headed by Germany, now cave to Greece — persuaded at last that austerity has its limits and the Greek people have evidently reached theirs, that grievous mistakes have been made by all sides, that the euro may never recover from the loss of one its members, and that, as the International Monetary Fund concluded last week, Greece is almost certainly going to need some debt relief at some stage anyway? Should the troika swallow its pride and say to Tsipras and his ministers that — despite their incompetence, their amateurishness, their arrogance allied to childishness (fatal combo), their insults and their game playing — they have proved their point and won the day and more money is coming? 

The decision is not easy. The abrupt resignation on Monday of Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister, suggests that Greece may now be more serious about negotiation. Much hinges on how expendable Greece, which accounts for just 2 percent of the eurozone’s economic output, is seen to be. In the end currencies are more expendable than countries. Greece will survive without the euro, initially in great misery. The euro may survive without Greece. But, because trust is the foundation of any currency, and joining the euro was an “irrevocable” decision of all its adherents, the euro will have suffered a body blow. It will become little more than a fixed exchange rate system awaiting the next defector. [...]

It was a sentimental illusion to allow Greece into the euro in the first place, but sometimes terrible decisions have to be managed rather than reversed. This is still such a case.