New York, Berlin, Paris Naive, negligent, hypocritical: Germany’s energy policy is becoming the focus of political debates around the world. Above all, it is America that has devastatingly described Berlin’s dependence on Russia. The fact that the fourth-largest economy in the world could suddenly no longer have enough energy to keep the economy running is met with incomprehension by Democrats and Republicans alike.
On Wednesday, the Americans were surprised at the announcement by Economics Minister Robert Habeck that Germany could ration gas consumption in the future. It should never have come to this,” Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently complained in his column in the New York Times.
Since the 1980s, US Presidents have repeatedly warned Berlin that “Germany should not make itself dependent on a despotic regime, and yet it happened”.
How could the Germans be so naive? That’s the question on Wall Street and Washington alike. “Germany’s stubborn insistence on working with the Kremlin despite Russian aggression was a catastrophic mistake,” criticized the industry service Politico.
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And then he scoffs that this behavior earns former Chancellor Angela Merkel “a place in the pantheon of political naivety, right next to Neville Chamberlain.” Chamberlain was British Prime Minister at the beginning of the Second World War and has a reputation for being too soft on Hitler.
The gas pipeline has become a disaster for Germany.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
“Germany needs to understand that it needs an economic model based on cooperative growth with its allies, in all areas,” argues Daniel Alpert, partner at boutique investment bank Westwood Capital in New York.
It was simply a mistake to “secure cheap energy from the enemy of his allies”. Then he adds: “Nuances are important, and Germany hasn’t been particularly good at recognizing them in the past.”
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The new German finance minister, Christian Lindner, had just had to face critical questions about German energy policy on the American stock exchange channel CNBC. “There is a lot of uncertainty at the moment,” he admitted on Tuesday, referring to the many bottlenecks in commodities. Then he referred to the government’s emergency aid “to reduce the burden on households and small and medium-sized businesses.” There is not much more that can be done at first.
For Lindner it was a difficult appointment in a pose of justification, because one thing has not gone unnoticed by the American public: Germany has repeatedly offended the United States with its energy policy in recent years. The rejection of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was one of the few issues on which Republicans and Democrats always demonstrated unity.
The fact that the US is now benefiting from Germany’s weakness does not change anything about Washington’s fundamental skepticism about Germany’s energy policy to date. Finally, Russian energy supplies are also to be replaced with liquid gas from the USA. Tyson Barker, technology expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), says: “Republicans and Democrats alike share the perception that Germany benefits from American security guarantees as a free rider.”
Schröder is a national scandal. John Herbst, former US Ambassador to Ukraine
Barker believes that both parties accuse the Germans of a certain double standard. “What bothers them is how Berlin hypocritically upholds moral principles at home while obscuring how they advance the German interests that made Putin’s war machine possible in the first place.”
The fact that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder plays a prominent role as a lobbyist in Putin’s Russia is also not well received in the United States. The former US ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, who now heads the Eurasia Center of the Atlantic Council think tank, told the Handelsblatt: “Schröder is a national scandal.” Herbst described him as a “rogue” who only worsened the situation for Germany make worse.
Former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst has called the ex-Chancellor a “rogue”.
(Photo: imago images/ITAR-TASS)
In an interview with the Handelsblatt, the US economist and futurologist Jeremy Rifkin warns that in the search for a new, more reliable policy, Germany must now really speed up the energy transition. “I’m cautiously hopeful, but I’m not naive,” Rifkin clarifies.
In order to become really independent of Russian fossil fuels, a large-scale “mobilization to advance digitization” is needed. At the same time, it is about “installing solar and wind energy everywhere and building the appropriate infrastructure for it”.
Great Britain: Criticism of the German nuclear phase-out
The disaster in German energy policy is also being followed critically on this side of the Atlantic. Great Britain, for example, is bothered by the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany has abandoned nuclear energy without need. That happened far too rashly, far too abruptly, was the tenor in London. The British relied heavily on nuclear power to say goodbye to fossil fuels and to achieve their climate protection goals. In this context, they acknowledge that Berlin made strategic mistakes.
As early as October 2021, British, American and German scientists and lobbyists wrote an open letter to the German public and demanded: “Dear Germany, please leave the nuclear power plants online.”
Critics in London feel vindicated by Germany’s current dependence on Russian energy supplies. “All possible attempts should now be made to procure alternative energy sources in order to reduce dependence on imports from Russia to a minimum,” writes John Law of the Clean Energy Revolution lobby group, which advocates the increased use of nuclear power plants uses.
Nobody in the Johnson government would say that publicly, but the thinking in the London government district of Whitehall is very similar. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will present a new energy strategy in the next few days.
In addition to the increased use of regenerative energy sources, the focus is on the expansion of nuclear energy. By 2050, a quarter of electricity generation is to be ensured by nuclear reactors. Today it is around 16 percent.
But despite all the criticism, the government in London knows that the British are currently facing very similar problems. On Friday, energy costs for British households will skyrocket by 50 percent because the state price cap has to be adjusted to the sharp rise in market prices. In October, the second premium will follow, probably by another 50 percent.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will present a new energy strategy.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
“The sharp increase in wholesale gas prices is having a massive impact on all European countries,” says UK Energy Minister Greg Hands. Great Britain is no exception here. “But our situation is different because we produce about half of our gas ourselves and get another 30 percent from Norway. We usually only get two to three percent from Russia.” Despite these differences, Hands emphasizes that they want to work closely with Germany on the transition to climate-neutral business.
France: Germany has saddled all of Europe with a problem
In France, too, German energy policy is being tackled vigorously. With its strategy, Germany has not only created a national energy problem, it has also “stuck a geopolitical problem on the whole of Europe,” writes Cécile Maisonneuve from the French think tank Institut Montaigne in the news magazine “L’Express”.
The daily newspaper “Le Monde” believes that the long-underestimated energy issue could now “poison all important issues in Olaf Scholz’s cabinet”. Germany’s strategy of relying on “change through trade” and transforming autocracies into democracies through close economic relations has failed. “Russia’s offensive has pulled the world’s fourth largest economy out of a geopolitical naivety that was no longer tenable.”
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