Donald Trump's attack on Germany has poked a hornet’s nest lurking beneath the EU's facade of unity
Donald Trump was right to criticise Germany for its billion dollar energy deals with Russia at the Nato summit in Brussels on Wednesday 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 750 mile Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will funnel 2 trillion cubic feet of Kremlin-controlled gas into Germany from late 2019.
The lead Russian company is the state-owned Gazprom, which has former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on its staff roster and a controlling 51 per cent share in the project, which will cost at least $15 billion.
“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 on Wednesday morning before pointing out, yet again, that Berlin had failed to meet its Natodefence spending target of 2 percent of GDP.
Nord Stream 2 has caused bitter recriminations in the European Union, with critics accusing Berlin of undermining the EU’s united front against Russia and weakening the bloc’s ties with a wounded Ukraine.
Video:
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 40 percent of Europe’s gas supply.
Mr Trump may have exaggerated when he described Germany as a“captive of Russia” but even the most slavish admirers of the EU were forced to admit the volatile US president had a point.
No comments:
Post a Comment