Until such time as a court rescinds the Louisiana Purchase, Europe does not have Texan gas or North Dakotan oil. It does not have Oklahoma. Much less favoured than America by Providence — that classy word for dumb luck — it has to do deals with resource-rich nations and manage the strategic consequences. Even as it weans itself off Russia, look at the new friends that Europe is making: in Algeria, in the Gulf.
The continent has an excuse, then. But it wasn’t one that Germany’s UN delegates offered in 2018 when Donald Trump warned against gas dependence on the Kremlin. Instead, they smirked and shook their heads as if to wonder what the old crank would say next. Angela Merkel pressed ahead with the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite his better counsel. She retired nuclear power plants. She put hope in peace-through-trade, as though the Great War had not shown that commercially enmeshed nations can be hostile ones.
As 2022 winds down, the best Germany can say is that other European countries stand no less discredited. This was the year Sweden gave up its official neutrality in world affairs as the untenable conceit that it was. France’s self-image as a bridge to the east, as an expert on the Russian psyche, gets more laughs than results. Britain’s openness to Kremlin-friendly wealth has dated terribly. At EU level, there is less burbling about “soft power” now that the necessity of the hard kind is so distressingly clear.