As Russia turns off the gas and Germany activates emergency plans, Europeans must become ants to avoid ending up grasshoppers.
The next step in the conflict between the West and Russian President Vladimir Putin was supposed to be a European boycott on Russian coal, oil and natural gas. It may instead be a gas embargo by Putin on Europe. It comes to much the same.
The countries of the European Union must accept what some of them — notably Germany and Austria — spent years denying. It’s that in the eyes of an amoral despot such as Putin, everything is a weapon of war. That includes nuclear and chemical arms, but also wheat, disinformation and, not least, energy.
For decades, Putin has done his best to make European countries as dependent as possible on Siberian hydrocarbons to create vulnerabilities in the West. Now he’s exploiting those weaknesses.
The so-called “Smartest people in the room” told us that free trade with tyrannies such as Russia and China would mitigate their totalitarian nastiness. It was all bullshit motivated by greed. Now the same slime insist mass immigration is the way to lift everyone’s boat. They’re lying again.
