> what’s to lose now?
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
Yes, we need to move away from fossil fuels but the reality is that we are still dependent on them so we may as well look at strategic independence and economic gains and produce what we can ourselves.
So, your long game should be to forge amicable relations with your next-door neighbour, rather betting everything in your relationship with your manipulative friend on the other side of the pond. In the meantime, you should also become self-dependent.
Russia would love to regain the European land the Soviet Union lost.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.
That means the moderate right (think laissez-faire pro-immigration pro-business, the only remaining other voting bloc) and extreme right (hate based parties) control, easily, 50% of the vote. They are not currently allied but the problem is that a shattered left is not something the right (or anyone) can work with. If the left fully shatters, the right will be forced to join the extreme right.
So right now, it takes essentially EVERY small insignificant party cooperating not to hand EU countries to the extreme right (yes, in Germany there's more margin, in the Netherlands less, France is on the brink, ...)
That makes your "dumb" not dumb but a serious catch-22. Any compromise that makes ANY party that has 5% of the vote walk out is a total non-starter, because one vote of non-confidence and "hitler gets elected again" so to speak.
Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population. It is the only thing keeping pension systems afloat for the moment. It is faltering, the working age population will still collapse (and immigration is not saving anything but the huge cities. In the south of Europe entire regions are essentially depopulated and those regions are growing despite mass immigration)
Yet another problem where there is no choice. Or there is a choice between "collapse now" and "collapse in 10 years".
We're seeing a repeating theme here.
And no worries: the EU governments are going to use spending cutbacks to get themselves out of this situation. Which again is the stupidest thing imaginable, because I can't even imageine a way to make that work ... but here we are.
And why is nobody asking "WHY has the left failed" and explain it? Winning over voters to your side isn't that hard. You just have to talk to them, see what they want, and give it to them, or at least negociate a compromise. That's it.
So, have politicians on the left bothered engaging in conversation with the voters to discuss their grievances and work with them on their issues to win their votes back? Or have they ignored their citizens' issues from their ivory towers and resorted to calling everyone who disagreed with their unpopular polices "Nazis", "fascists" and "alt-right supremacists"?
Because I only saw a lot of the latter and none of the former. Isn't it wild how if you diss your electorate, they won't vote for you and cause you to loose elections? It's almost as if that's a known self regulating feedback mechanism of democracy, that the left refuses to acknowledge and seeks to blames someone else for their self inflicted failures.
The problem with the left is that they've been ideologically captured and refuse to acknowledge or even discuss the pressing issues the population wants to discuss because of the optics of those issues (like illegal migration and asylum abuse) go against the ideological purity tests of the left whose policies often are the root cause of those issues. Isn't it obvious that if run a country on optics instead of Realpolitik and common sense, shit will hit the fan eventually when the bill is due and people will vote you out with both hands?