By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, May 20, 2021
I respectfully dissent from National Review’s editorial on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, for this
reason: Conservatives have it wrong on Nord Stream 2 in particular because
conservatives have it wrong on U.S.-EU relations in general. The U.S.-EU
relationship will be the most important bulwark for liberal-democratic values
against the Chinese challenge in the coming decades — if Washington and
Brussels don’t screw it up.
But first take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of
the United States’ trying to use sanctions to bully Europeans out of importing
Russian gas while the United States spent every day of 2020 importing, on
average, 538,000 barrels of Russian oil, which is more than we
import from Saudi Arabia. All that talk about American “energy independence”
was, and always has been, baloney — baloney by the barrel, millions of them.
There is no such thing as energy independence for the
United States or for our allies or for any advanced country — world energy
markets are thoroughly integrated, and the United States will for the
foreseeable future continue to rely in some part on imports to fill specific
market needs even while it enjoys its position as a net exporter of petroleum.
The United States imports more Russian oil than does Japan or India, and our
consumption of Russian oil has increased in spite of our hawkish posture toward
Moscow, in part because the collapse of Venezuela has left a big hole on the
supply side of the ledger. Domestic ampleness and highly developed trade
relationships give the United States energy choices, not
energy independence.
That it is good to have choices is as keenly appreciated
in Berlin and Brussels as it is in Washington. Like the United States, the
nations of the European Union prefer to be in a situation in which they have
ready access to as many different sources of energy as is practical. You’d
think that the case for an extra fuel pipeline would not be very difficult to
make in Washington, which recently experienced gasoline shortages after hackers
disabled the main pipeline that feeds the East Coast gasoline.
Like the United States, the European Union trades energy.
Unlike the United States, it does not have an abundant ready supply within its
own borders. Europe could produce a great deal more oil and gas than it does,
if it permitted fuller development of its natural resources. As it is, the
biggest oil producer in the European Union is Denmark, the world’s
44th-most-prodigious pumper, putting out less than half as much crude as
Equatorial Guinea. The gas situation is better, but the entire European Union produces
only about one-sixth as much gas as does the United States. There are a couple
of big non-EU energy producers nearby, with the United Kingdom and Norway
leading the pack. There is no plausible scenario in which the European Union is
not a major importer of oil and gas for the foreseeable future — big green talk
notwithstanding.
The map showing where oil and gas are distributed does
not look very much like the map showing where democracy and human rights are
distributed. Some of the hydrocarbons are in Canada and Norway, and a lot of
them are in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and — note this well — China, currently the
No. 6 oil producer. Among the other top-ten oil producers, only Canada can be
said to genuinely share U.S. values. The others are spread over a spectrum of
illiberalism and awfulness: Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran at the deep
end of the authoritarianism pool, with Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait,
and Brazil leaning a little or a lot more our way.
The Europeans do business with the Russians for the same
reason we do.
But what should most concern Washington is not the
relationship between Berlin and Moscow or Brussels and Moscow — it is the
relationship between Brussels and Washington and the relationship between
Brussels and Beijing. The next several decades will see the emergence of a new
international order that will be in the largest part shaped either by the
interests and values of the People’s Republic of China or by the interests and
values of the liberal democracies. Neither the United States alone, nor the
United States plus its English-speaking allies, nor the European Union has the
power to secure a liberal-democratic future on its own. This will be a joint
effort, or it will be a failed effort.
The United States does not have the power to force the
other nations of the world to adhere to its interests and values on its own. It
never has — including at the height of its power and prestige in the immediate
postwar years. But rather than recognize the facts on the ground and organize
its diplomatic business accordingly, the United States has in recent years
lurched from absurdity to absurdity and from crisis to crisis, now aping the
crude nationalism of Beijing, now striking a grandiose Wilsonian pose — while
at almost all times and on almost all occasions making foreign policy an
instrument of short-term domestic politics, subordinate to short-term political
calculation.
This has led — inevitably — to the undermining of our
national interests rather than their fortification.
Both the Donald Trump administration and the Joe Biden
administration hectored and threatened Angela Merkel’s government as though
Germany were some Pakistan-style failing state answerable to American whim and
dependent upon American goodwill rather than a critical — indeed, at this point
irreplaceable — ally.
Try using diplomatic imagination. From the European point
of view, the United States is an increasingly impulsive, grasping, and at times
predatory self-seeker, prone to fits of nationalist rage and spasms of punitive
populism. Threats such as those related to Nord Stream 2, the invasive and at times
abusive situation with U.S. export controls, trade protectionism, and other
expressions of daft “economic nationalism” — these create incentives for the
European Union to use China and Russia as counterweights to an unpredictable
and untrustworthy United States. This while Washington should be pressing in
precisely the opposite direction, giving our EU allies the incentives and the
means — and the confidence — to work more closely with the United States to
contain China. “America First” rhetoric and the haphazard policy agenda that
went with it never actually put American interests first — they only made it
more difficult to pursue our long-term interests in a competent and intelligent
fashion.
If it were a question of pipelines, then the United
States would have much better reason to build more of them at home (which the
Biden administration of course opposes) rather than try to block them abroad.
If the issue really were, as we sometimes claim, that we are concerned about
the economic and political position of Ukraine, then we should be working to
support Ukraine-EU integration, particularly on the matter of rule-of-law
reform and beating back oligarchism — something the Biden administration is
perhaps not perfectly situated to pursue with great credibility. None of these
projects is served by the masterful mode that has been Washington’s bipartisan
preference when it comes to Nord Stream 2 and similar matters.
The threat of sanctions never was going to stop Nord
Stream 2, which is nearly complete. That threat wasn’t strategy or diplomacy —
it was a tantrum. It was a tantrum of the kind that wouldn’t work with Beijing
— of the kind that didn’t work with Beijing during the Trump
years. And it will not work with the European Union, which has a slightly
larger economy than China’s and many good reasons to be reasonably confident of
its own position, at least for the nearer term.
If the United States expects to lead, it cannot afford to
conduct its foreign affairs while drunk on nationalism and high on rage. It is
going to have to sober up.
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