>Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.
Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.
The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.
They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first.
Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak.
During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium.
Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal.
Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.
Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.
In other words, not