European Decline '22: Gradually, Then Suddenly

Two stories dominate the headlines this week in Britain and Western Europe: Will Boris Johnson survive in Downing Street and power? And will the Russians invade Ukraine? They’re very different stories, but both are interwoven with the longer and ultimately larger story of the growing energy crisis in Europe and the world. It’s a larger story because economic growth, living standards, and even civilization itself depend on the availability of reliable cheap energy. It’s a longer story because the current crisis is the delayed outcome of feckless and irresponsible energy policies (camouflaged by dreams of Green utopianism) that European governments have been increasingly pursuing since the end of the Cold War.

A few days ago, Bloomberg’s energy correspondent, Javier Blas, tweeted out that day’s snapshot of the European energy situation:

Shocked? Alarmed? But wait. Maybe the Irish who pride themselves on their Green and European virtues tell a better tale? Alas, Blas continued:

Ireland is quite shocking: coal is accounting for 20 percent of power production this cold, windless morning; natural gas is doing another 45 percent, and fuel-oil (yes, you read that right) an extra 16 percent. In total fossil fuels are accounting for almost 90 percent of the country’s electricity now.

There were unhappy responses from the Green twitterati to these home truths along the lines of: Why not tell us about the days on which the sun shone and the winds blew and “renewables” generated lots of cheap energy? But they were missing the point. Renewables, natural gas, oil, coal, hydro, all generate cheap energy (nuclear does not). Except for renewables, however, the energy they provide is also reliable. That’s why they have to be on-stream when wind and sun fail and the energy that renewables then don’t generate has to come from other sources. That’s been happening in Europe a lot in the last few months.

Failure is, in fact, an option.

Why? Europe’s central problem is that its collective policy of switching from cheap fossil fuels to unreliable renewables can work only if the latter get large subsidies. These can be financed either honestly from the taxpayer in higher taxes or sneakily from the consumer in higher electricity bills. Either way they add to the cost of living. In addition, as economists used to know, planning such complex interventions to manipulate market signaling invariably goes wrong at some point and produces either a glut or scarcity. At present it’s scarcity. and therefore energy prices are soaring across the continent afflicting both the wise and the foolish virgins.

Almost all European countries are complicit in these failures. As often happens, though, the biggest countries are the most complicit because they are the most influential. They cause the problems from which everyone suffers.

Take Germany. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel retired from politics in November last year amid glowing tributes as, in the words of the Economist magazine, “the indispensable European.” In reality she is the European most responsible for the wretched state of Europe’s energy market. She was responsible for five massive policy errors in her years in power, including refugee policy and opposition to reforming the Euro, but her two errors that  concerned energy now look the most damaging and the most consequential.

First, her decision to close down Germany’s nuclear power program—which she took “almost alone”—and replace it with energy from renewables has meant that coal-rich Germany uses more “dirty” coal to handle the problem that renewables don’t provide energy on schedule. It has also ensured that German energy prices are now the highest in Europe. According to one German source, household energy costs will rise by 37 percent by the end of 2022.

Auf Wiedersehen and good riddance.

Second, her determined support of the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea over the objections of both Washington and Brussels, increased Germany’s and Europe’s over-reliance on Russian energy. And as we see in the current crisis, that enables Putin to use energy pricing and supplies as weapons against Poland and Ukraine—and to create a European political crisis by setting German economic interests (and now even needs) in opposition to NATO’s strategic unity and dividing the alliance.

It’s difficult to decide which of the two decisions has had the worse consequences.

By comparison French President Emmanuel Macron has a much easier problem to solve because his country “went nuclear” under previous presidents. As a result France has a far more reliable domestic source of energy in nuclear-power stations and is far less vulnerable to shortages of supply and price shocks in the international energy market.

But when prices are rising so sharply in those markets, as they are, France is not entirely invulnerable either. Its finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, warned that without official intervention of some kind, energy prices to the French consumer would rise by 37 percent this year which, inconveniently for the French president, is an election year. Macron has therefore imposed an energy price cap of four per cent.

It’s “naked unashamed populism” according to the Telegraph’s Ben Marlow who goes on to point out that Macron doesn’t want rising fuel prices to invite riots from the gilets jaunes in an election year—the election is due in April.

More to the point, it's a bad economic decision since it will encourage excessive use of energy, build up popular support for the price cap, and make it difficult to abolish it, even after the election, because that would mean accepting responsibility for a large rise in electricity prices. As long as it lasts, however, its huge costs will be borne by the state-supported nuclear supplier, EDF, its investors, the taxpayers, and ultimately by France’s nuclear industry which needs more capital investment to update the very ageing power stations that give France its energy advantage over other European countries. But Macron can afford it, and since he might win an election by doing it, he didn’t hesitate.

Suicide, she wrote.

Boris Johnson can only envy him. He is facing the political crisis of a lifetime amidst an economic crisis of rising energy prices and shrinking energy supplies. That  is the cumulative result of successive governments which pursued the dream of total decarbonization while failing to invest in an energy security guaranteed by many sources of supply, in particular domestic sources of reply as in France. Theresa May inherited the policy of Net-Zero decarbonization but she then made it worse—more expensive and requiring greater sacrifices from the voters.

Boris himself is similarly culpable because, having originally supported the fracking of natural gas—which is plentiful in Britain and the surrounding seas, the greenest fossil fuel, and possesses numerous other advantages—he junked the commitment to license its development in 2019 to win Green votes. He needs his government to reverse that decision if the lights are to stay on and the gas heaters to warm Britons through the winter. If not, he'll be out in the cold himself, perhaps as soon as next week when the Gray Report is slated to be released.

The larger lesson was delivered by Lord Frost, the cabinet minister who negotiated a mainly favorable Brexit deal for Boris, via an interview with the London Times this week: Boris needs to immediately clear out “all the neo-socialists, green fanatics and pro-woke crowd” in Downing Street if he wants to save his premiership. Lesson? Personnel is policy.

And if Boris doesn't keep in Number Ten, the same lesson will need to be read to his successor. Europe's energy policies are a recipe for destroying governments. So far the governments don't seem to have realized that.

Unlike Trump, Biden Puts Moscow First

Over at Newsweek Josh Hammer has a good piece on the Biden Administration's capitulation on Putin's Nord Stream 2 pipeline which, among other things, highlights the American Left's Russian schizophrenia.

We all remember the Obama years which brought us the Hillary Clinton "Russia Reset'" button; then- President Obama's famous debate smack down of Mitt Romney for his pugnacious attitude towards Moscow, "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back;" and Barack's assuring Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” in dealing with his country once the election was over. Things were all candy and flowers.

Then came the 2016 election, which saw Trump, like every U.S. president going back to Reagan, indicating a preference for improving relations between the two powers. The Left lost its collective mind in response, to the point that watching Rachel Maddow's nightly show got to be like hanging out with Joe McCarthy while he was on a bender, only a lot less fun.

Hammer does a good job of illustrating how little their accusations actually matched the facts on the ground:

The irony is that Trump, on the actual substantive merits, toed a very hawkish line on the Russian Federation. He shored up missile defense in Central and Eastern Europe, which the Obama administration had undermined.... He repeatedly stood strongly with America's ex-Iron Curtain allies, delivering a powerful, Reagan-esque 2017 foreign policy speech in Warsaw that was aimed squarely at Moscow. He unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from certain bilateral and multilateral accords... that buttressed Russia due to the simple fact that it did not comply and America did. Trump also adamantly opposed and issued strong sanctions to try to prevent the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline."

That was because Nord Stream 2 would, as I wrote in May, increase Germany's addiction to Russian energy (since their own electricity rates have skyrocketed due to their foolish Energiewende program), replenish the Kremlin's coffers that had been hurt by several years of low energy prices as well as Covid, and alienate our Eastern European allies who are understandably anxious about Russian domination.

Hammer calls Biden's decision to greenlight the project "a stunning about-face." After all, the president never shied away from the Dems' constant assertion that when Trump said "America First" he really meant "Moscow First." Biden frequently calls Putin a "KGB thug," and claims to have once looked him in the face and said "I don't think you have a soul." And on Nord Stream 2 specifically, the Biden administration frequently reiterated that their position is essentially that of the last administration, right up until the day before it changed completely.

So who does this benefit? Putin, obviously, as well as the Merkel government, whose energy failures can be papered over with Russian oil and gas. And who loses out? Aside from America's allies in the region, the biggest losers are America's natural gas exporters, who are effectively locked out of a key European market.

So tell me again, which president actually puts Moscow first?

Turkey's Dangerous Human Pipeline to the West

Not all pipelines carry oil and gas. For the past five years, a human pipeline has sprung up, connecting "refugees" from their hellish homelands in Afghanistan and Syria with the desirable precincts of Greece and Italy. That the vast majority of them are not entitled to asylum under laws dating back to the end of the Second World War and designed to prevent a second Holocaust, matters little -- not when they can be used as a weapon against the West.

So Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s provocation in opening Turkey’s borders to the West so that thousands of “migrants” might once again invade the territories of his fellow NATO allies really ought to be the last straw for the lands of Christendom. At war with the Seljuk Turks since they first invaded the Eastern Roman Empire in the 11th century and defeated the Byzantine emperor at the crucial Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the West suffered an existential threat from the Islamicized central Asians until well into the 17th century. At the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Turks (successors to the Seljuks) were finally halted in their quest to invade Europe and conquer Rome.

Fast forward to 2015, when the so-called “migrant crisis” – a Muslim invasion by another name, this one conducted by fighting-age men in trainers, carrying cell phones and pleading “refugee” status in order to take advantage of western charity and guilt – roared through eastern and southern Europe, heading for the rich countries of the European Union, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom. In a blunder of historic proportions, outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel foolishly welcomed a million or more mostly young men from Muslim lands into the heart of central Europe – their historical goal.

This invasion force first had to traverse the bulwark countries of Greece, Serbia and, especially, Hungary, leading to a sharp division in the contemporary EU: the areas that had suffered most under Islamic rule, such as Hungary and Balkans, turned their faces against the “migrants,” while hitherto unscathed western nations like Italy, French, Germany, Britain and the Scandinavian countries continued to embrace them, at their cultural peril.

What has happened since has been eminently predictable. In the wake of widespread  disruption Hungary has erected a fence along its eastern and southern borders. Poland – whose elite Winged Hussar cavalry was instrumental to victory at the gates of Vienna – has adopted a policy of zero immigration from Muslim lands. France, meanwhile, has suffered from rioting and an outbreak of church burning, Germany and Sweden from rape, molestation, arson and murder sprees, and Britain has been subject to the “grooming” of its girls and young women by Pakistani (“Asian,” in Fleet Street parlance) rape gangs.

Re-enter the Turks under the Islamist Erdogan, who views himself as the successor to the caliphs whose rule ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. Like Vladimir Putin in Russia, who wishes to recreate the Czarist and Soviet territorial empires under Russian hegemony, Erdogan hopes to restore the ummah under Turkish rules. To that end, he has abrogated the reforms made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who established a secular Republic of Turkey in 1923, abolished the caliphate the following year – bringing for the first time to Islam the idea of separation of church and state –  and brought Turkey into the family of civilized nations and, ultimately, in 1952, into NATO.

Turkey in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, however, only made sense in the context of the Cold War, providing the Americans with a forward operating presence close to the Soviet Union, including the big air base at Incirlik, from which it operated the U-2 spy planes. Even today the base remains useful, serving as a staging area for American operations in the Middle East.

By greenlighting the invasion of Europe by Muslim Syrians and Afghans, Erdogan has abrogated Turkey’s NATO bargain.  Which means that the West – which admitted Turkey to NATO with the understanding that it stay secular – needs to rescind its deal with Turkey.  Turkey was always a marginal member of NATO (it stayed neutral throughout almost all of World War II and fought on the wrong side during World War One), and now that it has abandoned secularism in favor of recrudescent Islamism, which historically has been incompatible with the West, its presence no longer serves any useful purpose. The country’s meddling in the Syrian crisis, its war against the U.S.-allied Kurds, and its increasingly cozy relationship with Russia make Turkey more of a security risk than an asset.

Alas, NATO is akin to the Hotel California, with this twist: you can check out, but you can never be 86ed. There is no way to expel a member – and Turkey knows it.

With many displaced persons in his territory, the Turkish dictator has been holding them as hostages, to be used as blackmail against the West as he goes his increasingly anti-Western way.  That his way is not our way matter little, neither to Erdogan or the western media, which has long preferred the sob story of “refugees” to the historical realities of Realpolitik. The “refugees” are often sentimentalized in the Western press as “just wanting a better life.” But so what? So does everybody. Economic migrants are rightly not regarded as legitimate refugees.

Still, economic migrants (which is what most of the “refugees” are) are not entitled to legitimate refugee status, a legal concept codified after World War Two during the displacement of millions of people. So-called DP camps dotted Europe as the victorious Allies confronted the thorny legal difference between “refugees” (those who could not return to their homelands) and “displaced persons” (those uprooted by the war who could return as conditions allowed).

It’s an important distinction. No one is truly a “refugee” if he or she can return to their homeland, even after a time spent in a DP camp. When the Americans finally leave Afghanistan, no Afghan will be a refugee.  When the Syrian civil war is finally sorted, no Syrian is a refugee. No one fleeing his own homeland’s cultural, economic, or civil dysfunction is, by definition, a “refugee.” The way for Syrians to improve Syria -- a Roman province as far back as 64 BC and a center of early Christianity -- is by staying home.

That the flashpoint is once again Greece should come as no surprise. Recall that Byron, one of Britain’s greatest poets, died at Missolonghi fighting for Greek independence from the people who turned the Parthenon into a mosque and an ammunition dump. As recently as 1974 Greece and Turkey came to blows over the island of Cyprus, which remains divided today. In the current crisis, the Greeks have deployed troops to their land borders, and their navy to the littorals.  The memories of Thermopylae, although distant, echo still.

Will we heed them? This is no time for political correctness. With the imminent end of America’s forever war in Afghanistan, it’s time for a complete re-assessment of our presence in the Middle East. It’s also past time for Turkey to be gone from NATO, and to be understood as the enemy it is, rather than the ally that it was.