Quote (ofthevoid @ 13 Jun 2024 18:08)
No, it actually was not inevitable. Russia is inherently a more European country. In the way they look, dress, culturally, most Russians live in western Russia not that far from European countries, most really want to access Europe for shopping, to buy cars, for tourism, and so on. 15 years ago, it was a match made in heaven, Europe gets a massive amount of it's energy from Russia, while Russia gets western goods and consumerism and increased standards of living. Europe as a whole was a much more valuable trading partner, simply due to proximity and where most Russians actually live and where their country is most developed. But then we (the US) decided we should encroach and gobble up these peripheral ex-soviet states, for no real good reason other than to inch closer militarily to them.
The real economic blocks of today should have been US, China and Europe. Instead our actions made it that it's mainly US and China (maybe India eventually). In all of this EU (with largely German economic leadership and Russian raw resources) could have been an actual center of power. Instead Europe today is a stagnating economic bloc, not able to compete with China and the US, so it's relegated as basically being the junior western partner with US being the big bro.
The Eastern European countries weren't encroached and gobbled up by the US/the West, they came voluntarily. It was them who wanted to join NATO, wanted to join the EU. In many cases, we let them wait longer than they themselves would have wanted, e.g. Romania and Bulgaria joining the common market. Ukraine is the tragic fringe case because it, unlike its more western neighbors, was roughly evenly split between pro-West and pro-Russia forces.
Of course it would have made more sense economically for Russia to become a part of a European power block, but their actual industry is far too dilapidated to keep up with the EU. In such a partnership, they would have been relegated to being the provider of commodities, to being the proverbial gas station. And on the political level, Russia would always have wanted to retain a sphere of influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia. And of course the inner repression and authoritarianism. So the tension between Russia being a useful provider of resources and diametrically opposed to our political values would have existed in all scenarios.
In a de facto dictatorship, where the ruling class (Putin and the oligarchs) is insulated from the fallout of the economic misery of the populace, the political priorities (opposed to Europe's) were always gonna trump the economic priorities (aligned with Europe).
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The green agenda has deliberately and strategically been boosted by the Chinese for well over a decade with the explicit goal of increasing their market share on the global car markets. They realized that their producers would take decades to catch up to the technological know-how and the infrastructure (factories etc.) of the West when it came to vehicles with combustion engines. Therefore, they pushed this new ideology which goaded the West into voluntarily throwing away and invalidating its technological edge and creating a new market on which the Western manufacturers don't have a century of headstart on their Chinese counterparts. Moreover, EVs and electric engines are technologically and mechanically simpler than combustion engines. The performance and price of EVs is heavily determined by their batteries, which are a comparatively low-tech product and essentially just chemistry. Dito for solar panels. Europe/the West was never gonna compete with China on these types of products, whose price is almost single-handedly determined by labor and material costs.
For this reason, the Biden admin already imposed tariffs on Chinese EV manufacturers which are similar to those considered by the EU. Without tariffs, the US market for EVs would get swamped by cheap Chinese imports too.
https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/rippling-out-bidens-tariffs-chinese-electric-vehicles-and-their-impact-europeThis post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 13 2024 01:37pm