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This article says, "Germany did a bunch of reasonable looking things." But after Russia invaded Georgia (2008) then Ukraine (2014), Germany worked to increase

• nonethewiser 4y ago
  > Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify? So they could benefit financially by being the natural gas hub for Europe. As you said, the reasons not to work with Russia were plainly obvious.
• piva00 4y ago
  What's even more egregious is that Germany has ran multiple years with a massive budget surplus (2018 + 2019 alone amass to 100bi€). Imagine if that could be used to be invested in ways to have a diversified grid...
• RandomLensman 4y ago
  Because in the past that also would have likely forced a rethinking/reexamination of Germany's defense setup and that would have been impossible to sell domestically.
• edgyquant 4y ago
  I can’t make the argument a previous head of state should be mandated from working where the free market takes them. I also can’t argue that the decisions of Germany’s leadership make a ton of sense. Or rather I can, the economic argument and Germany not likely to deal with a Russia near home it isn’t able to easily deal with (outside of MAD.) That calculus makes sense to me I get and even still agree with the principle. But you also have to look out for your national security and it really seems like Germany wasn’t looking out for anyone but it’s self here. Germany faces no serious conventional threat from Russia nor does it currently have competing spheres of influence. However as part of NATO and the EU does. So it looks to be pretty clear that the Germans do not consider that they and, say, Lithuania share the same goals.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    germans and russians have been fighting for 1000 years. Take the calendar and mark the times when they were not fighting. Constructive engagement is sane; endless war from all sides is not sane
    • nradov 4y ago
      How would you propose to prevent endless war between Germans and Russians in the future? I mean without carving up Eastern Europe between themselves, that is. So far engagement with Russia hasn't been constructive. Believing that this will change seems like hope triumphing over experience. In the long run, a steady policy of containment with occasional minor outbreaks of violence might be the best we can realistically achieve.
      • mistrial9 4y ago
        I have heard that the French are excellent cooks - perhaps they know about this "carving up" you speak of?
  • enaaem 4y ago
    Russia's expansion is definitely a national security thread to Germany. The thing is that Germany didn't believed that Russia would expand. It was a gross miscalculation on Germany's side. Believing promises and neglecting capabilities. If Russia takes Ukraine their population grows to 180 Million. With the Baltics and Belarus they will be near near 200 million. Expecting Poland (at 40 Mln) to hold the Russians of is ridiculous.
    • edgyquant 4y ago
      I think this may be a mischaracterization. Germany believed that, knows really, that it is richer economically and has a tech gap thanks to NATO over them. Germanys stance was that Russia will piss and moan as it’s elite slowly lose their autocratic regime to a Republican one (similar to South Korea and Taiwan.) I’m not convinced this has changed and it is my opinion that German policy is a pretty obvious open secret that Ukraine and Russia is there problem. You can see this in their reaction to the invasion where they stalled with hold off rhetoric because they couldn’t believe we’re taking this seriously. So it wasn’t ignorance that Russia would bully the two smaller “Russians” it was a calculated risk and an accepted cost of doing business.
• cheriot 4y ago
  We can add Chechnya (1999) to that list. https://www.historyonthenet.com/putins-first-invasion-the-1999-invasion-of-chechnya https://www.historyonthenet.com/putins-first-invasion-the-19...
  • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    It's different.
    • cheriot 4y ago
      How is that? https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/chechnya-war https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/chechnya-war
      • btilly 4y ago
        Chechnya was inside of Russia's national boundaries. And therefore was not a violation of international law.
        • cheriot 4y ago
          The question is whether it was ever reasonable to see Putin as a reliable partner. The first thing he did in office was launch a brutal invasion, stifle the press, and ignore war crimes committed by the Russian army. Is that someone a peaceful democracy can trust?
          • btilly 4y ago
            I am in complete agreement with you on Putin's character. I am also in complete agreement on what he did to the press, and the war crimes he committed. However what he did in Chechnya was fight a civil war in a particularly brutal way. This is different than invading another country. Admittedly the distinction doesn't matter to the people who were living there. But it DOES matter to other countries. The US position, in particular, was that we wanted Russia to remain territorially stable. Our top priority was to see Russian nukes secured. Our nightmare was a breakup of Russia resulting in loose nukes going to bad actors. Which gave us a big incentive to not complain about the horrible ways in which Russia was maintaining said stability. When Putin moved from suppressing civil war to international conquest, the situation changed. But the USA was also in the embarrassing position of having no moral high ground to stand on. For example estimates of excess mortality in Syria are in the same range as estimates of excess mortality in Iraq. And across much the world, our invasion of Iraq is seen as less legitimate than Russia's invasion of Georgia, and support of the existing government of Syria...
• jcranmer 4y ago
  > Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify? As I understand it, the general thrust of Germany's Russia policy (until several months ago) was a kind of energy-politik [1]: bind Russia into the world economy via the need to maintain stable energy links, and it will be less likely to be a capricious bully to its neighbors. Which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child? [1] Sorry, I don't know the German word for "energy" to write the proper German compound word.
  • xxpor 4y ago
    Die Energie, pronounced basically like "en-er-gee", where the g is like gulp, not like jump (or... energy), and ee is long e ([i])
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    > I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child? You are trying to post-rationalize this with some 4d chess realpolitik. Just follow the money. [0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-ex-chancellor-schroeder-meets-putin-moscow-politico-2022-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-ex-chancellor-sc...
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
      Many of the decisions were made my Merkel who, despite lots of flaws, is with absolute certainty immune from the allure of money. She's never shown any interest in it, had any income other than her government salary, and spend 16 years while in power living in a modest apartment within walking distance from the office.
• yks 4y ago
  Ukraine has been a pain in Germany's neck, Nord Streams are the most visible result of that but then there are also anecdotes of Merkel ignoring Yushchenko, German delegations not attending Ukrainian independence parades and so on. Even now Merkel is openly saying "no regrets" in the face of the bona fide genocide, that's how little empathy German leadership has for Ukraine. I think the calculus was that Ukraine is never going to be in NATO and so its future is at best irrelevant for Germany, and at worst they'd prefer it absorbed by Russia who Germans enjoy dealing with. But in the meantime Eastern European countries gained power, and they are really not okay with Russian imperial project (Hungary aside). So now Germany, being an ally with Eastern Europe on paper, has to do something, so they are reluctantly doing the bare minimum.
• jltsiren 4y ago
  For the same reason the world didn't take climate change seriously already in the 90s. It didn't align with short-term economic interests. As mentioned in the article, the prevailing political climate had made energy imports less political and more a matter of economics. Increasing energy imports from Russia made sense in that climate. The Russian invasion of Georgia wasn't a big deal in West Europe. It was like the US invasion of Iraq. An empire invaded a faraway country because its leaders had some personal issues. That's what empires do. Political leaders condemned it, but there were limited practical consequences, because everything happened far away. And because the EU was not trying to be an empire shaping the world in its image. East European countries took things more seriously, because they are closer to Russia and more vulnerable to its whims. Even the 2014 invasion of Ukraine wasn't a major issue. Until then, Ukraine was seen as one of the corrupt post-Soviet states that didn't know whether they wanted to align with Russia or Europe. As long as Putin's ambitions were limited, they were not a West European concern. Leaders again condemned Putin's actions and some sanctions were issued, but that's it. Putin's Russia was still seen as a fact of life West Europe had to learn to coexist with. Things changed after 2014. Ukraine aligned with the West. When Putin invaded the next time, it was a full-scale invasion of an unambigously European country. That did concern West Europe, because it was dangerously close. The whole situation looks like a mutual misunderstanding of the motives on the other side. Putin seems to have counted for a limited European reaction, because he didn't understand that non-empires tend to make pragmatic rather than ideologically motivated decisions. He assumed that West European complacency was an ideological rather than a pragmatic position. Similarly, West European leaders didn't see that the threat of the invasion was real, because they assumed empires would also make pragmatic rather than ideological decisions.
• AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
  > Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify? Diversify towards what? The biggest consumers of gas is heating homes and the chemical industry. Most houses have gas or oil heating. Do you convert from gas back to oil? Or to coal? Because most urban housing in Germany cannot be easily transferred to heat pumps, you know. The cost for conversion is prohibitive. In most cases you would have to cancel rental contracts to free the flat for conversion. How do you convince house owners and tenants to go with such a mad stunt that will mutliply their heating costs? All for a hunch of "someone might do something crazy in the east". How do you convert a chemical industry that cannot subsitute gas for any other product? Push them abroad? Please have reasonable and informed answers to these questions before asking question like > And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?
  • seydor 4y ago
    Germany has lignite to use for electricity and oil for heating, as you said. That should be enough to reduce demand and thus prices. Long-term there are gas reserves in Netherlands , in the mediterranean etc. The EU has options. I have to also ask why? Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe
    • glogla 4y ago
      > Germany obviously has choices but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe I think the problem here is that the Germans would rather have war in Eastern Europe (people of which they probably don't consider important) than more expensive heating.
      • fkall 4y ago
        Germany has taken 900,000 refugees. Why not send them to a similarly sized U.S. state and watch the reactions? U.S. citizens already complain about gas prices (which are still much lower than in Europe). How about raising them the European prices and see if they still virtue signal? As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.
• pmayrgundter 4y ago
  Cui bono? Kissinger noted in Diplomacy (1994) that Germany's key role in European history has been main defender of Central Europe against Russia. And ofc, Russia was a major foe in the last wars. To me, there's no way Germany missed the point of Russian moves the past decade. So assume for a moment that they knew this day was coming. If they have energy independence, they might also be called to task to play their traditional role and their natural role now as the powerhouse of the EU and NATO, to lead the fight against Russia. But if they're hobbled by energy dependence, they can shrug and say "sorry, it's simply not a feasible option for us. We're sitting this one out." Which seems to be what they have done. Add they get cover from their domestic green problems as well. Alles ist gut.
  • makomk 4y ago
    That's an interesting explaination, but I'm not sure why they'd need such a complicated scheme when they could just point at the state of the German armed forces as justification. (Which was basically their response to the invasion of Ukraine)
    • pmayrgundter 4y ago
      The power of AND
  • chickenimprint 4y ago
    This is nonsense, Germany is militarily very weak and only makes up 20% of the EU economy. You make it seem like they own Europe and are some scheming superpower in disguise. There's not much they could do in terms of military aid the US couldn't do 20 times over in half the time. France is like twice the size as an arms producer, what are they doing? What about Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Belgium? None of these countries needed an excuse to do nothing. Germans might not have enough gas to heat their homes which would cause the government to fall and you see this as some sort of genius chess move.
    • pmayrgundter 4y ago