Europe Doesn’t Need the U.S. Anymore | Putin Is Losing the Energy War | Israel’s Slide Toward Illiberalism, and more

Is Germany Letting Ukraine Down? It’s Not That Simple  (Hal rands, Bloomberg).

·  “Scholz has averred that Germany will send tanks only as part of a larger coalition involving the U.S.… The annoyance is palpable in Kyiv, Warsaw and other Eastern European capitals that worry less about provoking Putin than about defeating him. Add in the fact that Scholz beat a path to Beijing as soon as Chinese President Xi Jinping began accepting post-Covid visitors in November, and questions abound about whether Germany—the world’s fourth-largest economy—is serious about meeting the threats to a global order that has served it so well.”

·  “Still, it’s a mistake to make Germany the villain in a geopolitical morality play. For all its shortcomings, Germany’s Ukraine policy has been remarkable: Who, a year ago, would have predicted that Germany would respond to the invasion by decisively slashing its dependence on Russian energy? That it would send, however ambivalently, howitzers, air defenses and armored vehicles to Kyiv?”

·  “Taking the longer view, one can criticize Germany for being naive about Putin’s Russia and becoming economically handcuffed to a nasty autocracy. Then again, the U.S.—and many of Europe’s largest democracies—are guilty of similar mistakes.”

·  “Above all, it’s worth remembering that the characteristics that critics of German foreign policy find so frustrating are the same characteristics that helped transform a once-bellicose country into the peaceful, liberal state we know today.”

·  “The good news is that Berlin’s foreign policy is headed, albeit fitfully and belatedly, in the right direction. The bad news is that Ukraine may not have the luxury of waiting for a zeitenwende to play out at a leisurely pace.”

Vladimir Putin Is Losing the Energy War  (David Sheppard, Financial Times)

·  “Vladimir Putin’s energy war is suddenly going about as well as his ‘special military operation.’ That is, to say, not very.”

·  “In the past month, natural gas prices have plummeted. After trading near €150 per megawatt hour ($48 per million British thermal units) at the beginning of December they have fallen below €60/MWh ($19 per mmbtu) this week. … Prices are about twice the level we once would have considered on the high side in a normal winter, but are no longer 10 times that, as they were last summer when Russia’s fully cut off of its main gas pipeline to Europe.”

·  “It would be foolish to rule out further price volatility. But Russia’s weaponized energy strategy is really on borrowed time. … By 2024/25, more LNG will start arriving on to the global market, easing the supply situation and making extreme price spikes much less likely.”

·  “Governments such as Germany’s have shown they can move quickly in a crisis, establishing floating LNG terminals in a matter of months to open up alternatives to Russian gas. The same urgency now needs to be applied to longer-term solutions, be that offshore wind, hydrogen or nuclear, while speeding up the long-term process of reducing the use of gas in heating. That will be the only way to decisively declare victory in the energy war.”

Is Israel’s Democracy America’s Problem?  (James Traub, Foreign Policy)
The Biden administration has a big decision to make about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slide toward illiberalism.