Trump right to rebuke German hypocrisy over gas pipeline
DONALD Trump was right to criticise Germany for its billion-dollar energy deals with Russia at the Nato summit in Brussels yesterday morning. He hit the nail on the head – and Angela Merkel where it hurts – when he took aim at the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
A consortium of Russian, German, Dutch and French companies plan to build the 1,200km pipeline, which will funnel 2trn cubic feet of Kremlincontrolled gas into Germany from late 2019. The lead Russian company is state-owned Gazprom, which has former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder on its staff roster and a controlling 51pc share in the project, which will cost at least $15bn (€12.8bn).
“Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where we’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia,” Mr Trump told Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, before pointing out, yet again, that Berlin had failed to meet its Nato defence spending target of 2pc of GDP.
Nord Stream 2 has caused bitter recriminations in the EU, with critics accusing Berlin of undermining its united front against Russia and weakening the bloc’s ties with a wounded Ukraine.
As well as flying in the face of Brussels’ foreign policy, the pipeline bypasses Ukraine and Eastern European EU countries, depriving them of valuable transit fees and exacerbating the bloc’s crippling addiction to Russian gas imports, while strengthening Russian influence. Gazprom supplies almost 40pc of Europe’s gas.
Mr Trump may have exaggerated when he described Germany as a “captive of Russia” but even the most slavish EU admirers were forced to admit he had a point.
Ms Merkel invoked her youth in Soviet-controlled East Germany in response, saying Germany had been free since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
She said she was “very happy that today we are united in freedom, the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions”.
However, the barb will have cut the Chancellor, held aloft as a symbol of EU unity and solidarity. Germany approved the pipeline, which still needs broader EU rubber-stamping, on the very same day it expelled Russian diplomats after the Skripal scandal.
Mr Trump exposed the hypocrisy of Germany’s pursuit of the pipeline, which it needs to buttress its supplies after ditching nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster.
The 2014 Ukraine crisis brutally exposed the EU’s dependence on Russian gas. It imports 51pc of its energy and when Putin turned off the taps to Ukraine in 2006 it caused shortages in Europe. The European Commission drafted the Energy Union strategy to wean the EU off Russian gas. It looks to improve interconnections between EU members and diversify suppliers to prevent similar shortages.
Such was the commission’s horror at the German plan it looked to block it. Now, that decision has been kicked to EU governments. Approval is being doggedly blocked by countries like Poland. Despite that, construction of the pipeline has begun on Russian territory.
Meanwhile, Poland plans to pay the US up to $2bn to station an American armoured division on its territory in a sign of Warsaw’s lack of faith in its European allies.
German double-dealing over Nord Stream was attacked by Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, who demanded the EU did more to stop the pipeline. “It is not a profitable or economic project,” he said, “It is clearly a geopolitical project aimed to weaken Ukraine.”
The EU and Ukraine have bolstered ties, exchanging financial support and a potential path to EU membership for reforms after the country turned away from Russia following its revolution. Ukraine’s embrace of the EU, welcomed by Brussels, was a factor in Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
Mr Trump has intentionally poked a hornet’s nest lurking under the EU façade of unity. “Trump is anything but stupid,” said an aide to a senior EU official. “He is serious and methodical in sowing divisions.” It was a clever rebuke to Ms Merkel and the EU, which has voiced fears over the volatile US president’s meeting with Vladimir Putin at the end of this week. On Tuesday, European Council President Donald Tusk warned Mr Trump to remember who his real allies were before meeting the Russian strongman leader.
Mr Trump may be looking to find a new market for US liquefied natural gas. But, with higher prices in Asia, it seems more likely he was issuing his own warning to the EU, with whom he is also locked in a burgeoning trade war.
His message was clear; people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and it is time to pay up on defence.
‘Trump is anything but stupid. He is serious and methodical in sowing divisions’