How Ukraine shattered Europe's balance of power
How Ukraine shattered Europe's balance of power
The European Union was impotent in the face of crisis, while Britain remained agile.
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In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.
It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.
While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him -- prior to Russia draining down Germany's storage and then using it as leverage -- that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won't have been the one to identify it; he'll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.
The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.
Ehhh. I think that that's stretching things.
There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.
I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it's also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn't a monolith, either: some member states did move.
And the EU-as-an-institution isn't static and unchanging, either. Like, I don't know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don't normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn't going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it'll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, maybe mandates on some minimum level of supply diversification, dunno.
In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal.
For all that talk of dependency preciously little happened when Russia closed the valves. There's press reports about BASF going into gas saving mode but that's a bit misleading -- actual gas saving mode would be to change their processes on a fundamental level (they have plans and infrastructure for that), what they did do is to use the flexibility in their standard processes to not rely on gas as precursor where there's more readily available options -- as they've been doing for literal decades, depending on market prices they're using more of this, or more of that. They pulled a lever over to one side, they didn't build a whole new set of levers to pull.
Germany ended up having more gas reserves at the end of the winter than usual because people were quite mindful when heating their homes, mindful as in "it doesn't need to be t-shirt temperature in here, 20C suffices", not as in "let's heat our homes like English pensioners". Gas prices actually sunk, presumably due to lower demand companies invested in things like waste heat recycling.
The whole concept of Wandel durch Handel relied on the assumption that economical entanglement makes war ruinous, and thus states are heavily disincentivised to be belligerent. You can now interpret that in two ways: a) It didn't stop Russia, therefore, it failed or b) it succeeded in ruining Russia's economy because all their what ball bearing companies went belly-up during entanglement, German ball bearings being cheaper (not necessarily unit price, you also have to take lifetime, service costs etc. into account) and now they have severe shortages (that's simplifying quite a bit but that's the net effect).
In the end there's only one thing to take away: Policy can't influence non-rational actors. All you can ensure is that if an actor becomes irrational they're shooting themselves in the foot.
As I recall: Mitt Romney was the first public person who really came out and called Russia a threat in the US in the 2011/2012 election cycle. Which at the time he was laughed at because Russia was still seen as an ally and the major threat was China.
Now they are both openly hostile and Germany is cozying up to fucking China.
Germany: just do what the rest of the west (and China) does and bribe the Canadian government to hand over raw resources to you.
Germany: just do what the rest of the west (and China) does and bribe the Canadian government to hand over raw resources to you.
Exactly what we're doing. Also Namibia, besides having (as Canada) excellent conditions for renewable energy, being (as Canada) a proper democracy, they're also an ex-colony so we're using the opportunity to help bootstrap their local energy infrastructure to industrialised levels (it's currently hit and miss), also, they'll have absolute energy independence. Also stuff like Africa's first hydrogen-based steel furnance. Which would make Namibia a more developed economy than Australia who somehow are still exporting raw ore.