In Washington's fever dream, where it is "right" that Germany should instead buy expensive energy that is shipped across the Atlantic and lose its industrial advantage as as result.
It is totally, comically absurd. Untethered from reality.
An experienced politician should know better.
Like every other (sovereign) state.
Self-interest also implies that it works for Russia. It very clearly hasn’t, and could undo the regime.
The level of violence and aggression is like some mid/late 20th century empire building BS.
It's the US that took out international law and beat it to death in sight of the entire world.
define "works".
there's a big divide in the World on this war, it could be considered a victory for Putin, he made friends fight over it, turned allies into adversaries and made enemies even more suspicious of each other. We are at a peak high level of conflict, like we haven't seen in decades.
For example...
edit: I'm not claiming Washington is better than Germany, I'm from Italy, we are still paying the price for both.
My claim is that EU policies were wrong because each country was playing its own game.
It's hard enough to maintain a federation of neighbor states. It's impossible to do that while also catering to the whims of a distant superpower.
Let's put it this way: there were (are) plans on every desk of every Prime Minister or President in Europe that say "we could let Putin take Ukraine and avoid a conflict that could harm us all".
> It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that
I believe one doesn't maintain the spirit of the Budapest memorandum by entering the board of directors of the largest Russian gas supplier and becoming director of the board of Rosneft, largest Russian oil producer, years after Russia invaded Crimea. Don't you think?
But I concede Schroeder that he might have truly believed that he could keep Russia from invading Ukraine. Nonetheless mixing politics and business was a bad mistake on his part.