A free-trade agreement with Turkey, Israel and Cyprus would remake Alexander’s world Shutterstock.comThe heart of the Byzantine Empire.The marriage counselor has failed. The rear-guard battle to keep Europe and Greece under one roof is over, even if next week’s referendum fails to make this plain. The world has seen enough to understand that the experiment of forcing social strangers into financial union cannot stand. As this column warned when the Greek crisis was still young, for the euroEURUSD, +0.2171% currency union to work and last its members must share a government, replete with a taxing machine, a central borrowing engine, and one spending system. The European Union never created these, and produced instead a deformed version of the American union. While their European partners defame them as lazy and unreliable, in the Levant the Greeks are recalled as respected merchants, seafarers, farmers, and entrepreneurs. Americans pay most of their taxes to the federal government, and 10% at most to their respective states. Europeans pay only to their own state governments, which make transfers to Brussels but retain individual armies, air forces, navies, secret services, foreign services and border patrols, to mention but a few of the exorbitant expenses from which 50 American states are exempt, because theirs is a real union. Europe’s was never a real union. Mincing some two dozen tongues, cultures, mentalities, and historical memories, what began as a humble trade union became a messianic quest to reshape history by erasing national identity and defying political gravity.Hence the Tower of Babel whose collapse is but a matter of time. Rather than unite nations, the EU became a neo-colonialist oppressor that imposes the foreign on the local and the rich on the poor.A Levantine trade association begs to be formed, in the spirit of the Greek vision that gave rise to Alexandria, the metropolis that Alexander the Great planted at the heart of this region while turning it into the center of the pre-Roman world. Now, considering that a “no”’ vote in next week’s referendum means an immediate Greek retreat from Europe, and a “yes” vote means the same thing only more slowly and painfully, the question is: where does Greece go next? And the answer should be that Greece’s future, like its past, lies not in Europe, but in the Levant.