> Germany took note of the danger and decided it would do better without that dependency.
So they just swapped dependencies. And it's not that the new dependency will have no strings attached.
Diversifying while keeping russian energy in the loop, as part of a risk-management strategy, would make more sense. Completely cutting off russian energy just gives more bargaining power to their new energy provider.
If we put half the effort into shoring up our institutions and reinforcing our shared norms and cooperative values as we are into "de-risking" everything, right now, and all at once, we'd all be in a much better place. Overnight we all just accepted that this new transactional, mercantile, hostile mentality was the way of things and the only way it can be. This is a self-fulfilling fatalistic prophecy and is going to move us backwards into a much worse, less prosperous world, empowering the bullies and the tyrants even more.
Greed got us here. There's a rules based world possible where Russia sells gas to Germany. Russia did not transform from an free and democratic society with respect for human rights and the international community into an authoritarian dictatorship overnight; we turned a blind eye to this when it suited our short term economic needs and that is how we allow ourselves to sleepwalk into the situation we are now. Had we held first to our principles we'd have either had the impact the neoliberal trade focused policies were supposed to eventually deliver or at the very least not ended up with dependencies that gave such governments leverage and eventually blow up in our faces. Had we instead put human rights first and foremost we would not have created and empowered these monsters.
Same thing with Trump's reelection in the US. By all rights in a functioning democracy Trump should be sitting in jail right now along with the January 6th insurrectionists. The Biden administration had 4 years to prosecute, but felt it was not politically expedient to do so. Likewise what is left of the GOP within the republican caucus right now faces a similar choice between short term benefits and upholding the principles which nearly everyone in congress and even the Trump administration has previously claimed they would uphold.
So they just swapped dependencies. And it's not that the new dependency will have no strings attached.
Diversifying while keeping russian energy in the loop, as part of a risk-management strategy, would make more sense. Completely cutting off russian energy just gives more bargaining power to their new energy provider.