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> Russian gas accounted for 55% of Germany's gas imports in 2021 and 40% of its gas imports in the first quarter of 2022, Reuters reported. The country has pled

> Russian gas accounted for 55% of Germany's gas imports in 2021 and 40% of its gas imports in the first quarter of 2022, Reuters reported. The country has pledged to end the use of Russian gas by 2024, the Habeck said in a March 25 press release. Some in this thread have asked how Germany could be so foolish to tie its economic destiny to such a problematic country as Russia. The answer seems to be "one step at a time." And Germany is not unique. Take the United States, for example, and its near total dependency on Chinese manufacturing for, well, just about everything. The US offshored manufacturing capacity hand-over-fist. In exchange the US got cheap goods (and low inflation), and continued supremacy of the dollar in world trade and as a reserve asset. Both of those benefits are looking shakier by the week. Inflation is ripping higher, and the sanctions on Russia have prompted what some observers are calling Bretton Woods III, or a brand new economic order that minimizes the position of the US dollar. But the worst part of all is the enormous leverage China has over the US. The US can protest human rights violations or even an attack on Taiwan, but any serious action taken against China will visit upon the US the same fate as Germany now faces. The brave threats can not be made good on because of an economic hole dug over the course of a generation or two. The irony is that if you wind the clock back 25 years or so, this situation is the same in direction (although possibly not in magnitude) as policy makers wanted. Free trade was supposed to make conflicts more difficult because of mutual dependency. And it has worked. Just look at the disconnect between the saber-rattling German/US rhetoric and the tepid German/US actions.

baybal2 5y ago
lobochrome 5y ago
Now consider that Germany has a huge dependency not only on the supply side to China but also on the demand side for machinery equipment and vehicles. In addition, we have a huge dependency on the US for national security. So we are dependent on Russia for Energy, on China for Manufacturing and industrial demand of our most important industrial sectors and are protected by the US from a National Security point of view. The army is a national laughing stock, the car industry is begging to be disrupted, and chinese equipment and machinery companies have completed their IP theft programs and are now almost at par from an innovation level. All while international media hailed Merkel and her useful idiots for their international leadership.
- mort96 5y ago
  Wait what's the contradiction here? Merkel's and Germany's international leadership can be good at the same time as Germany's dependency on Russia and China is problematic from a national security perspective. Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
  - lobochrome 5y ago
    Maybe. I guess you can celebrate her for her "international leadership" (what are we exactly celebrating by the way?) and at the same time acknowledge that she completely missed the interests of her constituency.
    - randomopining 5y ago
      Yeah I don't see how she made any strategic decisions that set up the long term success for Germany and EU. She's remembered bigly internationally for letting all the migrants in.
      - timeon 5y ago
        Bordering countries like Italy and Greece were becoming overwhelmed by migration wave. They were crying for help for quite some time til anyone even noticed the problem. So to ease the pressure there was plan to redistribute them in to EU. This was refused by several countries so 'Merkel' took some of them to Germany. It was not ideal but better then nothing. That crisis was caused by instability in Middle East. Which was caused by several other factors like climate (farms without water in Syria) and international politics of Russia and USA. But like now everyone was blaming Germany.
        petre 5y ago
        She should have thrown money and equipment at the problem like the US does. That works most of the time. When it doesn't, let French diplomacy handle it. Or even better, just do both at the same time. Italy and Greece, just take this money and patrol ships and do coastal patrol. Hungary, just take this money and build a barbed wire fence, if you think it works. Border states were guarding the Schengen Area dreamland. Instead they paid Turkey tribute to allow it to blackmail and took the migrants in, assingned quotas which made everyone unhappy about it.
jonhohle 5y ago
During the previous six years, it struck me as completely bizarre that there was any pushback for bringing manufacturing or energy production back locally. It doesn’t have to be nationalist, it’s just adding redundancy in case your trading partner realizes they have over powered leverage. No business wants to concede to a vendor that they are irreplaceable. Edit: Likewise, watching Germany dismantle its nuclear infrastructure over the last several decades for… what reason exactly? Replacing a clean, cheap, on-demand energy source for dependence on foreign energy imports? Even if you think global trade is panacea, why throw out working critical infrastructure and replace it with something beyond control?
- tawaypol 5y ago
  It's tempting to think that the governments of these states have been infiltrated by their enemies.
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    Hanlon's razor applies here I think. Don't attribute to "the enemy" what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
    - mnadkvlb 5y ago
      Maybe. but existance of leaders like Gerhard Schröder displays a different story. (he is sitting on russian gas companies’ boards, after heavily going against nuclear). No shit the leaders failed the country for their own gains, seems like.
      - barrenko 5y ago
        The incompetent and the corrupt and more often than not the same person.
        lallysingh 5y ago
        They don't know what the right answer is, but they know the answer that gets them paid.
throaway1721613 5y ago
I think it's quite different. Gas can be understood as being sold by Country A to Country B (instead of business to business or business to consumer). Yes, there might be private firms involved, but Country A can stop the gas on a moment's notice if so desired. Also, there's likely no substitute for this gas in the midterm (months? years to get 3 new nuclear plants?). Finally, in terms of "responsibility", this was decided by the German government, not just by individual consumers / businesses that decided to buy more from Russia. The commercial relationship between the USA and China is much different. First, it consists of thousands of businesses and millions of consumers: it's not so easy to stop the flow (you can ban some of it, but there are workarounds). For many of those goods, there will be substitutes. Finally, this wasn't something explicitly decided by the USA government.
throwaway5752 5y ago
Let's be fair: this was a massive, strategic aim of the Russian state. Germany didn't randomly fall into this situation, there has been decades of influence, bribery, and espionage in Germany to develop that dependency. Kids may need to be reminded that Germany has only been reunified for 32 years and Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall. Russia is is so motivated to expand its borders that they are invading Ukraine. It can be really tempting to look at this as bad for the US, but this is really just catastrophic for Russia. Decades of investment blown up, with one of the only real non-kinetic weapons that they have.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  > Kids may need to be reminded that Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall They should also definitely remember what they did to cause this.
  - nautilius 5y ago
    What did the East Germans do that their fellows in the U.S./British/French occupied zones did not do?
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      Their own 80286 clone?
      - nautilius 5y ago
        I think that was a bit later, but fair point ;-)
      - hello_hn_ 5y ago
- blub 5y ago
  When you put it like that, one almost has to feel sorry for Germany, bravely fighting influence, bribery and espionage every step of the way only to fall prey in the end to the Russian state which maliciously supplied the German industry with gas. But this is not at all bad for the US, it’s great! Russia is isolated and weakened and the EU is strangulated by yet another wave of refugees and weakened economically, becoming even more dependent on the US for security.
scns 5y ago
> Some in this thread have asked how Germany could be so foolish to tie its economic destiny to such a problematic country as Russia. The answer seems to be "one step at a time." And Germany is not unique. Quite quick actually. The ex chancellor of germany [0] became Nord Streams' [1] Chairman of the Shareholders' Committee (since 2006) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream edit: correction and add link
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  And Rosneft and Gazprom. It's completely brazen.
mancerayder 5y ago
How much blame can we lay on the anti nuclear power activists? Or were there other reasons for not diving into that technology with two feet in front, rather than try to sunset it?
quantum_solanum 5y ago
> In exchange the US got cheap goods (and low inflation), and continued supremacy of the dollar in world trade and as a reserve asset. And perhaps most importantly defused the worker radicalism of the 60s/70s by literally moving the means of production out from under them.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  And when it started to rise up again just a little bit with Occupy Wall Street, we got identity politics to ensure workers would never have that opportunity ever again.
Melatonic 5y ago
I think the main key difference here, however, is that it is not the state (the US government) deciding to offshore any of this manufacturing. It is some rich fat cat American CEO who wanted a bigger paycheck. Thankfully for some very key industries we still have onshore manufacturing and that is increasing in modern times.
gamblor956 5y ago
The OP's comment is not grounded in reality. The U.S. used Chinese factories because they were cheap. Emphasis on "were." Companies have been switching away from China en masse (to India, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.) for at least the past decade because China is no longer the cheap option. Frequently, including shipping costs (even before COVID) it was cheaper to just get stuff made in America if you could find a supplier. Hell, my last 3 years at a firm were devoted almost entirely to helping companies restructure their international operations out of China to cheaper countries. The U.S. won't take serious action against China because China took Russia's place as the global counterweight to the U.S. But it has absolutely nothing to do with China's so-called economic leverage, because China doesn't have any over the U.S. anymore.
lorenzfx 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is the right answer. The prevailing political view, was that strong economic ties would make war and violent conflict between Germany and Russia impossible. This is basically what happened intentionally and successfully between Germany and France after World War II first with European Coal and Steel Community and later the European Union.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> In exchange the US got cheap goods (and low inflation)... Inflation is ripping higher Part of the reason inflation is ripping higher (and this was beginning to happen even pre-pandemic) was because the previous administration began tradewars which began to rip up global supply chains. Yes, the bulk of our inflation currently is due to the pandemic, but a good chunk of it was going to start happening anyway even if the pandemic never happened because we began to disrupt global wage arbitrage. Bringing jobs back to America was always going to lead to a period of inflation.
jsnodlin 5y ago
imtringued 5y ago
> the sanctions on Russia have prompted what some observers are calling Bretton Woods III, You know, if you go down that path it will never end. It's like the gold standard. It's going to fail every single time. Bretton Woods is doomed to fail. It was doomed to fail the day it was introduced.

baybal2 5y ago

lobochrome 5y ago

Now consider that Germany has a huge dependency not only on the supply side to China but also on the demand side for machinery equipment and vehicles. In addition, we have a huge dependency on the US for national security. So we are dependent on Russia for Energy, on China for Manufacturing and industrial demand of our most important industrial sectors and are protected by the US from a National Security point of view. The army is a national laughing stock, the car industry is begging to be disrupted, and chinese equipment and machinery companies have completed their IP theft programs and are now almost at par from an innovation level. All while international media hailed Merkel and her useful idiots for their international leadership.

mort96 5y ago
Wait what's the contradiction here? Merkel's and Germany's international leadership can be good at the same time as Germany's dependency on Russia and China is problematic from a national security perspective. Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
- lobochrome 5y ago
  Maybe. I guess you can celebrate her for her "international leadership" (what are we exactly celebrating by the way?) and at the same time acknowledge that she completely missed the interests of her constituency.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    Yeah I don't see how she made any strategic decisions that set up the long term success for Germany and EU. She's remembered bigly internationally for letting all the migrants in.
    - timeon 5y ago
      Bordering countries like Italy and Greece were becoming overwhelmed by migration wave. They were crying for help for quite some time til anyone even noticed the problem. So to ease the pressure there was plan to redistribute them in to EU. This was refused by several countries so 'Merkel' took some of them to Germany. It was not ideal but better then nothing. That crisis was caused by instability in Middle East. Which was caused by several other factors like climate (farms without water in Syria) and international politics of Russia and USA. But like now everyone was blaming Germany.
      - petre 5y ago
        She should have thrown money and equipment at the problem like the US does. That works most of the time. When it doesn't, let French diplomacy handle it. Or even better, just do both at the same time. Italy and Greece, just take this money and patrol ships and do coastal patrol. Hungary, just take this money and build a barbed wire fence, if you think it works. Border states were guarding the Schengen Area dreamland. Instead they paid Turkey tribute to allow it to blackmail and took the migrants in, assingned quotas which made everyone unhappy about it.

jonhohle 5y ago

During the previous six years, it struck me as completely bizarre that there was any pushback for bringing manufacturing or energy production back locally. It doesn’t have to be nationalist, it’s just adding redundancy in case your trading partner realizes they have over powered leverage. No business wants to concede to a vendor that they are irreplaceable. Edit: Likewise, watching Germany dismantle its nuclear infrastructure over the last several decades for… what reason exactly? Replacing a clean, cheap, on-demand energy source for dependence on foreign energy imports? Even if you think global trade is panacea, why throw out working critical infrastructure and replace it with something beyond control?

tawaypol 5y ago
It's tempting to think that the governments of these states have been infiltrated by their enemies.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  Hanlon's razor applies here I think. Don't attribute to "the enemy" what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
  - mnadkvlb 5y ago
    Maybe. but existance of leaders like Gerhard Schröder displays a different story. (he is sitting on russian gas companies’ boards, after heavily going against nuclear). No shit the leaders failed the country for their own gains, seems like.
    - barrenko 5y ago
      The incompetent and the corrupt and more often than not the same person.
      - lallysingh 5y ago
        They don't know what the right answer is, but they know the answer that gets them paid.

throaway1721613 5y ago

I think it's quite different. Gas can be understood as being sold by Country A to Country B (instead of business to business or business to consumer). Yes, there might be private firms involved, but Country A can stop the gas on a moment's notice if so desired. Also, there's likely no substitute for this gas in the midterm (months? years to get 3 new nuclear plants?). Finally, in terms of "responsibility", this was decided by the German government, not just by individual consumers / businesses that decided to buy more from Russia. The commercial relationship between the USA and China is much different. First, it consists of thousands of businesses and millions of consumers: it's not so easy to stop the flow (you can ban some of it, but there are workarounds). For many of those goods, there will be substitutes. Finally, this wasn't something explicitly decided by the USA government.

throwaway5752 5y ago

Let's be fair: this was a massive, strategic aim of the Russian state. Germany didn't randomly fall into this situation, there has been decades of influence, bribery, and espionage in Germany to develop that dependency. Kids may need to be reminded that Germany has only been reunified for 32 years and Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall. Russia is is so motivated to expand its borders that they are invading Ukraine. It can be really tempting to look at this as bad for the US, but this is really just catastrophic for Russia. Decades of investment blown up, with one of the only real non-kinetic weapons that they have.

thriftwy 5y ago
> Kids may need to be reminded that Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall They should also definitely remember what they did to cause this.
- nautilius 5y ago
  What did the East Germans do that their fellows in the U.S./British/French occupied zones did not do?
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Their own 80286 clone?
    - nautilius 5y ago
      I think that was a bit later, but fair point ;-)
    - hello_hn_ 5y ago
blub 5y ago
When you put it like that, one almost has to feel sorry for Germany, bravely fighting influence, bribery and espionage every step of the way only to fall prey in the end to the Russian state which maliciously supplied the German industry with gas. But this is not at all bad for the US, it’s great! Russia is isolated and weakened and the EU is strangulated by yet another wave of refugees and weakened economically, becoming even more dependent on the US for security.

scns 5y ago

> Some in this thread have asked how Germany could be so foolish to tie its economic destiny to such a problematic country as Russia. The answer seems to be "one step at a time." And Germany is not unique. Quite quick actually. The ex chancellor of germany [0] became Nord Streams' [1] Chairman of the Shareholders' Committee (since 2006) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream edit: correction and add link

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
And Rosneft and Gazprom. It's completely brazen.

mancerayder 5y ago

How much blame can we lay on the anti nuclear power activists? Or were there other reasons for not diving into that technology with two feet in front, rather than try to sunset it?

quantum_solanum 5y ago

> In exchange the US got cheap goods (and low inflation), and continued supremacy of the dollar in world trade and as a reserve asset. And perhaps most importantly defused the worker radicalism of the 60s/70s by literally moving the means of production out from under them.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
And when it started to rise up again just a little bit with Occupy Wall Street, we got identity politics to ensure workers would never have that opportunity ever again.

Melatonic 5y ago

I think the main key difference here, however, is that it is not the state (the US government) deciding to offshore any of this manufacturing. It is some rich fat cat American CEO who wanted a bigger paycheck. Thankfully for some very key industries we still have onshore manufacturing and that is increasing in modern times.

gamblor956 5y ago

The OP's comment is not grounded in reality. The U.S. used Chinese factories because they were cheap. Emphasis on "were." Companies have been switching away from China en masse (to India, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.) for at least the past decade because China is no longer the cheap option. Frequently, including shipping costs (even before COVID) it was cheaper to just get stuff made in America if you could find a supplier. Hell, my last 3 years at a firm were devoted almost entirely to helping companies restructure their international operations out of China to cheaper countries. The U.S. won't take serious action against China because China took Russia's place as the global counterweight to the U.S. But it has absolutely nothing to do with China's so-called economic leverage, because China doesn't have any over the U.S. anymore.

lorenzfx 5y ago

I'm not sure if this is the right answer. The prevailing political view, was that strong economic ties would make war and violent conflict between Germany and Russia impossible. This is basically what happened intentionally and successfully between Germany and France after World War II first with European Coal and Steel Community and later the European Union.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

> In exchange the US got cheap goods (and low inflation)... Inflation is ripping higher Part of the reason inflation is ripping higher (and this was beginning to happen even pre-pandemic) was because the previous administration began tradewars which began to rip up global supply chains. Yes, the bulk of our inflation currently is due to the pandemic, but a good chunk of it was going to start happening anyway even if the pandemic never happened because we began to disrupt global wage arbitrage. Bringing jobs back to America was always going to lead to a period of inflation.

jsnodlin 5y ago

imtringued 5y ago

> the sanctions on Russia have prompted what some observers are calling Bretton Woods III, You know, if you go down that path it will never end. It's like the gold standard. It's going to fail every single time. Bretton Woods is doomed to fail. It was doomed to fail the day it was introduced.