The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was fully right to protest against Ottawa’s decision (“We must increase the pressure, not reduce it…”), and the Ukrainian diaspora to be alarmed. Sending back to Germany, at Berlin’s insistence, turbines necessary for the operation of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline and, therefore, useful for the financing of the military aggression of Ukraine by Russia, is in flagrant violation of Canadian sanctions and international. This is a bad decision — one that Ottawa, in doing so, has a hard time justifying.
Again, here is a story that shows how dependent our countries — sorry, our democracies — are on fossil fuels and, by extension, on tyrants who have their hands on the tap and who we always end up getting used to, following a short-sighted logic of variable geometry defense of freedoms.
With regard to these unreasonable accommodations, there is an obvious parallel to be drawn between Ottawa’s targeted decision and the shocking about-face that Joe Biden has just made by renewing, during his trip to Saudi Arabia, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the one whom he had promised to make a “pariah” for having ordered the sinister murder, committed in October 2018, of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In the case of the turbines that are in a Siemens warehouse in Montreal for maintenance, one has to wonder why Chancellor Olaf Scholz was so insistent that they be returned to Russian giant Gazprom. True that Germany is dependent in a proportion of the order of 35% on the Nord Stream gas pipeline of Gazprom for its gas supplies. However, it is argued, the country currently has reserves that protect it from serious shortages until the end of the year. And that, in any case, inflationary pressures are expected to continue to exert themselves on gas prices, Nord Stream or not, with inevitable negative impacts on the national economy and the pocketbooks of Germans.
Where then was the urgency to render service to Gazprom? On the side, at least in part, of the psychosis that has gripped the Germans and their media, seized with collective panic at the risk of shortages, argues columnist Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail. And this is how, for reasons of domestic politics, the German coalition government would have liked to show itself to be active, proactive, even if it meant placing the Canadian ally in an uncomfortable position and, above all, giving Vladimir Putin the means to continue its crusade, as the sinews of war essentially passes through fossil fuels.
To reduce Germany’s dependence on Russia, the Scholz government concluded a long-term gas supply agreement with Qatar in March. Before Joe Biden, the quasi-ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also went to Saudi Arabia last winter, preceded by Emmanuel Macron, who also received in Paris, at the end of the week, the authoritarian president of the United Arab Emirates. . In the context of an energy transition that is dragging its feet, the tyrants still have a bright future ahead of them. We ostracize them, we rehabilitate them. Our governments do not fight against them, they sort them out in the name of realpolitik — read according to the fluctuating liking of their immediate interests.
True that the ostracization of the ultra-authoritarian MBS, who left at 36 to reign for a long time, was difficult to sustain. Especially since with the approach of the November mid-term elections in the United States, the Democratic salute to Congress requires a reduction in the price of gasoline and that nothing is possible without an increase in production by Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of crude oil. Should Biden be so aplaventrist? Far from giving the impression of coming to the rescue of President Biden, MBS has only very vaguely advanced on the subject of an increase in production.
No less painstakingly, Biden’s trip to the Middle East was meant for the United States to try to rebuild its alliances with the Sunni world in the larger goal of stemming the growing influence of China and Russia. Vast mission.
It is in this perspective that Mr. Biden brought together nine Arab autocrats in Jeddah last Saturday, thus articulating, with distressing clarity, a dangerous and rickety approach which will consist – in the name of democracy! — to recruit tyrants to resist other tyrants… With the key, in symbiosis with Israeli politics, the burial of theefforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. An approach, rooted in an old logic of the cold war, which will nowhere help freedoms to progress.