The Soviet Union was a reliable energy supplier to (West) Germany even at the height of the Cold War. Ostpolitik was the dominant mode of thinking across party lines. The West has never had any qualms about buying oil and gas from the worst regimes in the world. This outrage over buying from Russia while turning a blind eye to Arab monarchies seems rather perfomative.

> outrage over buying from Russia while turning a blind eye to Arab monarchies seems rather perfomative

The Arab monarchies largely keep their messes in their own backyards. When there has been leakage, it has been limited. Russia rolling tanks into Europe is so harebrained it creates a new category of security risk we haven’t had close to home in a while: that of a madman.

I wouldn't call 9/11 "limited". Nor is Yemen, or, earlier, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran etc.

The fundamental of all of these is oil and now, gas. Removing the demand for these will remove the necessity of engaging with these propped up monarchies and autocracies.

> wouldn't call 9/11 "limited"

Relative to what's going on in Ukraine, it is. 9/11 was a massive terrorist attack. Next to the scale of state-on-state warfare (a category it does not belong in), it was a rounding error.

Agree that de-carbonising our economy will remove our need to support these regimes.

> creates a new category of security risk we haven’t had close to home in a while

And Europe is reacting to it appropriately.

My point was that it's ultimately about geopolitics, not the feigned morality the GP was alluding to.

>The Arab monarchies largely keep their messes in their own backyards. When there has been leakage, it has been limited.

9/11

What do you mean by "performative"?

I mean the "How can you buy oil and gas from a murderous dictator?! He bombs innocent people!" style virtue signalling.

Lots of reasons. It was at the time the least authoritarian regime. The alternatives are Saudi-Arabia, where as I understand the gas is harvested with the help of human rights violations, and other nearby suppliers like Norway were already and still are at capacity.

At the same time, gas is a relatively enviromentally safe, when compared to others, and since the relations to Russia were mostly friendly, the slight problems in the regime were ignored.

Now germany is reliant on them, and that was a mistake they are realizing. But if germany stops accepting gas today, the germans will freeze in the winter when the gas runs out, so its a complicated situation.

The issue is not people freezing. Wear a sweater and suck it up. Buy an electric heater. There are ways to hack your way through it.

The much larger problem is industrial manufacturing, in clusters like Ludwigshafen, where you have companies like BASF and Benckiser that rely on Russian gas for their refinery operations.

Fertilizers, chemicals, lubricants, etc.

You turn off Russian gas, you turn off the German industrial complex. Literally over night.

And that’s the reason why the German is so cagey about stopping the import of Russian gas. They can’t, because they don’t have an alternative.

Yeah, it is surreal to see many of the predictions from the US state department and the DOD come true. As an American who lived in Germany, I wish the Germans would have been correct, but I am happy to see our institutions have a few smart people remaining… sigh

>How many years has Merkel remained in power?

And yet there are still people, in this very thread, that say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas but could not do anything about it. For 16 years!

>This awkward situation is all her doing, but still nobody will mention her name.

There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,[1] than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.

[1] Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby