Squaring the Circle? The EU’s Energy Dilemma

The sudden and brutal aggression of the Russian Federation on Ukraine in February 2022 exposed an almost fatal weakness in Europe’s energy security, one rooted in a failure to understand that when push comes to shove geopolitics trumps economics. This false sense of security was evidenced by the fact that the Russian assault threw Europe’s nascent joint energy policy and the national energy policies of a considerable number of its member states into turmoil, developments that were striking for two primary reasons; prior to the war, the European Union (EU) harboured a sense of confidence that it had a reliable partner in Russia and forgot the lessons learned from the oil shocks of the 1970s. The former proved misguided due to flawed assumptions while the latter constituted a strategic failure to integrate past insights. Together, these miscalculations converged to constitute a near perfect storm, one that would alter the course of European energy policy and perhaps even the European project for decades to come.