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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  595 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Europe’s Energy Crisis May Get a Lot Worse

Bustamante is a shameless self-promoter. Podcasts are what he does. He's got as much foreign policy and diplomacy experience as I do. More than that, the arrangement of the CIA is that "people without any chance of career advancement" are covert ops, "people with advanced degrees" start as case officers and work their way up. One of the slowest fish in our school at UW ended up going into clandestine ops. On the other hand, I have a buddy who quit being a high school English teacher on September 12 2001 and by April he was writing the Presidential Daily Briefing on Estonia. Not bad for a black man in his early 20s with zero slavic language experience eh?

"Major European powers" may "NEED" the Ukraine invasion to be over by fall but that was never, ever ever going to happen and everyone with any sense knows it. Had Russia managed to take Kyiv in the first 48 hours they would have inherited a partisan hell similar to Syria and Iraq. Europe is the contentious catastrophe it is now because of the Syrian refugee crisis; if Ukraine had fallen it would be 100x worse right now.

As it is, the real problem Europe faces is the amount of trade Germany and France did with Russia and the fact that eliminating that trade is bad for major businesses in Germany and France. Yeah Russia could cut Europe off and Europe would lose like 11-20% of their energy but Russia would lose like 80% of their exports. If you wanna know why Biden fist-bumped Mohammed bin Bonesaw? It's all about January 2023.

Europe is suffering from trade realignment and people are going to die - a lot more in Africa than Europe, but let's not talk about that at the moment. It's going to suck. But somehow pretending that trade realignment was somehow reversible after Spetznaz jumped on Kyiv is fellow-traveler nonsense.





uhsguy  ·  595 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The economic outcomes are primarily tired to sanction that Germany could pull out of. The war isn’t going to end anytime soon but they could ease up sanctions and open up the second gas pipeline whenever they feel like it.

OftenBen  ·  595 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Glad to hear the doom callers are still mostly just that.

kleinbl00  ·  595 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Don't get me wrong, dude, this winter is going to suck. What's wrong is the idea that the bell can be un-rung.