By Daniel Hannan ~

Eurocrats are starting to realize, with a kind of horrified stupefaction, that Alexis Tsipras really means it. Their assumption had been that the new Greek prime minister, like other politicians, would be accommodated by the system. The EU, after all, is all about compromise, moderation, the postponement of difficult decisions. You rarely find black and white in Brussels; rather, a kind of sfumato, where lines are deliberately blurred, sentences balanced by two apparently contradictory clauses. It’s like inhabiting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Nothing is stated directly, everything elliptically.

Well, not this time. Tsipras, the narcissistic leader of the far-Left Syriza movement moved immediately to dispel any idea of compromise, telling his first Cabinet meeting that he would “not consent to a policy of submission.” Having fallen just short of an absolute majority, he was widely expected to form a coalition with one of the pro-euro…