EurasiaNote 9 - A Peaceful Germany Needs Russian Energy

Putin, Biden hold talks on war; whither Ukraine and Europe's dark dream

• Dreams of European unity grow dark in the absence of energy security

• Plans for greater integration can still go ahead but on an unequal basis

• Germany must realize its eastern promise or it will cannibalize markets at home

Two peoples, attracted and repelled - A. Vasnetsov "Varyags"

Tbilisi, Dec 9, 2021

Much recalibration after the Putin-Biden phone call from those who talked up war. Conflict may have been forestalled but people miss the point that nowadays resources are war. The victor is the one who holds the oil and gas, chemical precursors and fertilizers. The loser is the one whose business falls victim to sanctions.

As I've written before, the achievement of 15 years’ talk of “energy security” has been to leave Western Europe more dependent than ever on imports. So it's hardly surprising the same voices quiver with faux indignation that Russia is hoarding energy as an act of war.

Perhaps talk of war over Ukraine was bluster so that the West could look tough while approving Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. On the other hand, there remain those for whom the issue is not gas pipelines, nor Ukraine but Russia itself: the bête noire.

You know you want it

Russia now dominates so much of the European gas market that it influences the price paid from third parties such as Libya. When you hold the goods, time is on your side. You can wait for the customers to beat a path to your door.

It’s been clear for those same 15 years that this is Russia’s strategy and nothing in the history of U.S. and European sanctions has changed it.

NATO (or the economic interests behind it — see the Atlantic Council) comes out of this with a bloody nose. Its raison d'être evaporates with every Russian business deal. Increasingly Russia’s relationship with Europe is about markets — and selling stuff.

Militarily NATO is on the back foot. France is gravitating towards a European defence force (being one of the top weapons manufacturers). The British have switched to AUKUS and Africa, underlining the reality that military force nowadays is about cobalt and lithium, ie resources.

Germany, as ever, stands on the cusp. Its mighty manufacturing machine needs Russian energy. Russia pumps money out of the ground but it pretty well imports all its non-military tech. It is thus the natural market for Germany. This is the economic relationship that Britain has spent more than 100 years trying to sabotage.

Dark European dream

Unless Germany can realize this eastern promise it will cannibalize markets at home — a deliberate exaggeration but to make a point. Dreams of European federation take on a darker shade in the absence of energy security. Plans for greater integration can still go ahead but on an unequal basis.

A fundamental premise of European integration was that economies would converge as living standards around the Union gradually leveled up. Today that sounds like a fairytale of yesteryear.

Power and wealth resides in a shrinking number of northern states who will call the shots. If they bail out the south they will do so on terms of brutal self interest. There are probably plenty of would-be southern leaders who would sell out their national sovereignty in return for a seat at the high table. They will be the gauleiters of Europe’s southern provinces.

Even if Nord Stream 2 brings stability to European energy markets it will concentrate power in Germany as the hub for Nord Stream 2. Do not doubt that Germany will use such influence, at least internally and perhaps against independent voices within the Union such as Poland and Hungary.

Currency flows are another reality that confronts NATO. A stronger dollar and yuan starve Europe of earnings, weakening its hand in the board game of Monopoly Global as Europe watches BRIC countries trade each others’ coin.

The last thing Germany and Europe needs is a new round of Western sanctions against Russia. The threat to expel Russia from the SWIFT banking service would do untold damage.

Culture clash

Western analysts who accuse Russia of withholding energy, fertilizers and industrial chemicals — even accusing it of preparing for war — fail to understand that this nation’s trading tradition is Asiatic. Business is based not on contracts but relationships. Trust is more important than signatures on paper.

It is not surprising, given the relentless carping of the Atlantic Council-NATO narrative, that Russian corporations instinctively turn their backs.

China of course is a fount of this Asiatic tradition. The Great Leap Forward, an early prototype of the Reset and Build Back Better, never erased “Chinese characteristics." The most cursory glance at Xi Jinping’s China tells you that honour and respect are valued highly.

It is the West that debases itself. The United States of Europe has a very different objective in its own Great Leap Forward with grave implications for the new world order that it seeks to forge.

The European Union seeks to dilute and erase cultures and races — illustrated most visibly by the design of its euro notes that forbade any imagery of recognizable national monuments: an Austrian engraver was tasked with promoting a European identity over national loyalties, as the New York Times reported in 2001, and "painstakingly eradicated all recognizable vestiges of each image, pixel by pixel."

Like all ideologues caught in the act, the European technocrats will deny this but the entire project is pursued by stealth: implement first, reveal later. See my article The Great Reset Is Complete — A Future Retrospective

"The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down or elected.”
— Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, later Vice-President of the European Union Constitutional Convention.

National heritage is to be blended away, along with culture, in the spirit of the United Nations.

"We... still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that's precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine."
— Former UN special representative for migration, Peter Sutherland.

The Great Reset, it seems, will dispense not only with culture but with populations. From Davos we get this revolutionary desire to overturn society — in contrast to China’s Communist Party that seems more intent on cementing the status quo.

Perception disguises reality, of course. The billionaires behind the World Economic Forum are intent on preserving their own status and cementing their wealth. There is much about the Fourth Industrial Revolution that would freeze the social hierarchy in what has been called techno-feudalism.

On a superficial level, nevertheless, the East still has a culture that respects wisdom, years and tradition. The West has cultivated an excessive regard for youth and change for its own sake. You need only look at the slogans that pass for political discourse: hope, change and disruption; the well-documented tyranny of choice in public policy that provides cover for consultants to rip it up and start again.

Defining not output but outcome, a self-interested cadre of bureaucrats creates an excuse to endlessly reinvent the process. They erect ideological barriers that stop them being held to account by setting metrics which lie far off in the some future outcome. And if they meet their key performance indicators they are promoted and remunerated. Common sense, experience and wisdom be damned.

Self loathing

The historically-aware have always been seen the continent's faults — colonialism, slavery and totalitarian tendencies. This narrative was foisted on the broad masses in a more brutal way: the propaganda of the Years of Lead.

Lest they failed to appreciate society’s divisions, decades of post-WW2 bombings kept them in focus: whether Irish republicans or Basque separatists. And now that the Years of Lead are over, the Strategy of Tension has moved into the classroom where educators drill children with guilt for their forebears' crimes.

In the intervening years we discovered that many of these internecine wars — one race against another, this peninsula against that — were part of a military operation to spread division and fear. Even the BBC in 1991 acknowledged what Italian prosecutors had uncovered: many bombings led back to NATO. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist terrorists were a less credible narrative so Operation Gladio morphed into Gladio Two, the War on Terror. [1]

The inhabitants of former colonies now strapped on explosive belts, supposedly traveling far from their lands to express themselves indignant at our music festivals, churches and parliamentary systems: "They hate us for our freedoms," said President George W Bush.

Whither Baltics and Ukraine

As for the European countries on the fringes of the Union, the Baltic States have started negotiations on the increase of electricity imports from Russia and Belarus. Ukraine has probably been told to cut the war talk, along with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Undersecretary Victoria Nuland, and the British war department. Ukraine stands to lose out as it ceases to be a key transit route for Russian gas to Europe once gas begins to flow through Nord Stream 2.

The Soviet Union once held diverse nationalities together. Visiting Moscow nightclubs in the late 1990s I marveled at how music would switch between national genres and nobody missed a beat. Imagine trying that in the West.

But it was imposed from above — Stalin’s brutal legacy. Now that it's lifted, you have those living in eastern Ukraine who are Russian in ethnicity, with a more insular view towards Moscow. In western Ukraine you have the seat of the great Ukrainian diaspora that punches above its weight in so many countries from Poland and Lithuania to Canada and the USA.

Internally, however, politics is faction ridden, tribal and oligarchical and thus competitive and divisive, as the latest tribulations of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy underline.

Ukraine could avoid this centrifugal effect if it could build a strong political hub, centered on the shared heritage of Kievan Rus but that’s not going to happen. Because Ukraine has another axis that reaches from Odessa to Tel Aviv and seen along this axis it can never be allowed to circle in Russia’s orbit.

Will the Minsk Agreement be revived? Internal Ukrainian talks would be the face-saving option for NATO and Europe to acknowledge that eastward expansion has at least paused. Unlikely: this vested interest is on the back foot, Russia having in effect gained a commitment to no NATO membership or missiles on Ukrainaian soil.

This week Republican Senator Roger Wicker took to Fox News to suggest readying nuclear weapons against Russia in case of an escalation of the Ukraine conflict. While peace looks to have been secured, it may energize those interests who will not let go of their centuries-long animosity to Russia.

Two peoples, tied together by history, attracting and repelling in equal measure.

[1] BBC Timewatch, 1991 — Operation Gladio