by David Martin Jones
If truth is the first casualty of war, then the collapse of political illusions must be the second. War and its outcomes are never certain. From Thucydides to Clausewitz, connoisseurs of the phenomenon have counselled against its recourse unless it is informed by clear and achievable goals.
Violence clarifies. In the case of Vladimir Putin it has exposed the illusion of Eurasianism, the failings of Russian hard power, its loss of markets for its arms industry, and threatens the integrity of the Russian Federation, ultimately reducing it to a satrapy of Greater China.
In the case of Europe, war has clarified not only its relationship with post-Soviet Russia, but also the delusions informing its net-zero energy policy and its future economic security. Significantly, this is not the case with the US (or for that matter Canada and Australia) which despite their commitment to various international environmental protocols remain secure in their fossil fuel and uranium energy resources.
As a result of three decades of punitive environmental governance, Europe faces a very difficult winter and an uncertain political and economic future. All European wars since the eighteenth century have been resource wars (whether over population, coal or iron and now oil and gas).
This is a basic fact of modern European history that its elites and the history’s fools that advise them ignore at their and their electorates’ cost. The Ukraine war, and the misconceived sanctions regime, immediately exposed Western Europe’s dependency on Russian gas and oil. Consequently, despite recent Russian reverses on the battlefield, Europe remains ambivalent in its support for Ukraine, democracy and freedom.
The energy issue is a case study in how a political elite, infused with abstract norms and transnational idealism about the end of history, created the perfect conditions for the revenge of political realism. Whilst Europe eschewed the hard truths of geopolitics, geopolitics happened on its doorstep.
At first, of course, Western European diplomats continued to argue about whether Putin represented a threat to peace and stability at all, despite the repeated warnings of those closer to Russia’s border. As European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen confessed in her State of the Union speech in September: “We should have listened to those who know Putin … voices inside our Union—in Poland, in the Baltics, and across Central and Eastern Europe.”
European delusion has quickly assumed the form of an utterly avoidable energy crisis. For the EU it represents a regional political humiliation, whilst in the UK it is a very British one, a direct result of a generation of cross-party policy failure.
Together Western Europe’s political elites conspired to deliver a perfect storm. In Germany it reflects the influence of a red/green lobby that inspired the ostensibly conservative Merkel administration to close all its nuclear facilities, which provided 13 per cent of its energy, by 2022. Three nuclear power stations closed in 2021.
Germany is of course central to the European economy. Germany faces a staggering 65 per cent collapse in industrial output if Putin turns off the taps completely, potentially plunging the country into a deep recession. The Scholz government’s seizure of three Russian-owned oil refineries on German soil in late September, in order to secure their oil holdings, indicated the extent of political panic.
Asset appropriation is usually the preserve of rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and indeed Russia, both before and since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is unusual in a Western democracy.
Elsewhere, in Italy, business and domestic users currently face huge hikes in energy prices, although its deluded former Minister for Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, declared that the movement away from gas represented only “small sacrifices for large rewards”. Not surprisingly, the economy, Ukraine and EU energy regulations played a decisive role in the Italian elections that gave the populist coalition led by Giorgia Meloni a comprehensive victory. Matteo Salvini’s League, which forms part of the new populist coalition, considers energy sanctions are contributing to “il suicidio Italiano”.
Meanwhile the UK, which left the EU in 2020, remains committed to the net-zero carbon agenda to the detriment of its energy security. Grave errors by past energy ministers range from: opposition to nuclear power in 2001; refusal to back new clean coal plants in 2009; supporting wood pellet plants over new gas in 2012; the end of carbon capture funding in 2015; the closure of the Rough gas storage site for reserves in 2017; the gas fracking ban in 2019.
For the full article in pdf, please click here:
David Martin Jones is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London. He is the author of History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of History (2020)
Comentarios