In September last year, images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi smiling, arms linked — told Brussels and London more than any communiqué about where two decades of energy self-harm had led. On the sidelines, Gazprom and CNPC signed a “memorandum” on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline through Mongolia. This was a political signal, not a priced gas contract. I set out at the time, in How the West Snookered Itself in Energy Geopolitics, how the obsession with Net Zero had handed Moscow and Beijing a strategic gift while leaving Germany, once Europe's industrial powerhouse, prostrate.
A year on, the diagnosis has not changed. What has changed is the prescription. Having wrecked their own economies through the fantasy of decarbonisation, the EU and UK's governing liberal-left establishment — stagnant, unpopular, and facing the electoral rise of AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National in France — has settled on a time-honoured remedy for domestic failure: warnings of the threat of war.
The Wages of Self-Sabotage
I have written at length about the irrationality of EU and UK energy policy (here and here among others). America pursued a radically different trajectory during President Trump’s second term. Washington's November 2025 National Security Strategy openly abandoned the pretence that Europe remains a serious partner. It described a continent that has traded its classical liberal inheritance — free speech, open inquiry, democratic accountability — for the utopian triad of Net Zero, mass immigration (consisting largely of young unskilled men from the Middle East, North Africa and West and South Asia) and an ever-expanding regulatory, growth-killing state.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member