Europe's reliance on US gas is as serious a risk as Russian gas used to be | Hacker News Reader

Europe's reliance on US gas is as serious a risk as Russian gas used to be

euobserver.com

15 pointsvrganj8 comments

Trump and Putin are sides of the same coin.

Reliance on any of them is not just a risk, is a tragedy waiting to happen.

There is a significant difference: Trump is term-limited, and Putin is not.

That doesn't make the US more reliable. It may well make it less reliable. Putin cannot live forever, but Trumpism can. What makes America unreliable isn't one politician, or even a cabal of politicians, but a large section of the electorate who wants exactly what Trump is giving them. They will continue to vote for that even if he dies.

Even if his opponents take over, it will only be temporary. Trump's constituents will always be seeking to win the next election. And since the American system is designed to prevent a President from taking absolute control, it's practically impossible for Trump's opponents to make deals that can be relied upon.

A cute snarky comment in twitter yesterday:

>Europe's leaders have succeeded with an incredible geopolitical hat-trick: They made themselves dependent on Russia for energy, China for trade, and the USA for their security, and somehow managed to fall out with all three at the same time. >A pure masterpiece in self-destructive behavior.

I'd wear two out of those three as a badge of honor.

Too bad badges are also produced in China. Being moral leader of the world is a nice frosting over a cake that is overwhelming industrial and military might.

But you have to have the cake. Right now we are bargaining with USA and China as if we are in position of strength.

Europe has not forgotten how to wage war. We just don't like doing it. But if we ever have to - reluctantly - wage war again I'm pretty sure we could. America and China are no factor in that. The United States will swing back to normal at some point or it will go down in flames. It is hard to predict which way that will go but either way we can't let that influence our own stance. There are multiple potential flashpoints in the world and unfortunately one of those is in Europe. We will need to deal with that, one way or another. But I would caution against underestimating how much the EU has on standby. We're not advertising it as much as other parties and we don't engage in continuous sabre rattling about what we could do. But the capability is there. At the same time: the Ukrainian war has shown that we will need to modernize and this is going to be costly.

I am European too. We are outproduced by China, outgunned and outai-ed by USA, outai-ed by China. All of our trade goes trough chokepoints someone else controls and we have meager at best own hydrocarbon sources. And the majority of the renewables we can install are produced in China. Out economic growth is meager, social payments exploding, our asylum and migration policies are creating a ticking timebomb.

I am not sure where do you see this "how much we have on stand by" - our pipeline of innovation (thankfully we still have smart people) to commercialization/militarization is deeply broken.

Between Airbus, ESA, Thales, Rheinmetal, ABB, the Ruhr area in general, France's very independent military, the UK, Poland, the Nordics, the Baltics and whole raft of other large enterprises that span the continent the EU is still a force to be reckoned with. Where it goes wrong is that russian money injected into our political system is driving division and that there is a lot of noise on social media that keeps talking down EU capabilities as though they are non-existent.

But the EU has been instrumental in keeping Ukraine supplied, with weapons, intelligence, funding and training. The amount of French, Swedish and German hardware in Ukraine is very substantial and the Ukrainians are making extremely good use of it.

We're involved in all ways except one: boots on the ground (not counting volunteers). And that's both a source of frustration for Ukraine and a line that Europe will not lightly cross.

I agree with you that we need to do much more about our independence than we've done so far. But compared to five years ago there is already a massive difference and if I'm grateful to trump for one single thing then it is that he has helped a lot of skeptics here to finally smell the coffee.

In particular:

- We need more fab capacity, NXP and some small fry elsewhere is not enough

- We need to recover manufacturing capability even if that means more costly goods

- We need authentic EU based AI capability, both research and inference hosting, not the stupid re-packaging of Chinese models that we do today (there are some real efforts underway on this subject)

- We need to deal with russian influence in EU politics, boldly and permanently

- We need to replace our US bought weaponry

- We need more satellites that are under our control and better and cheaper access to space, our launch capabilities are insufficient.

And probably others that I've missed.

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