An LNG tanker anchored in Greece. The United States has been shipping LNG to Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine to help the continent diversify its energy requirements away from Russia. (Shutterstock/Aerial-motion)

No Easy Solutions to Europe’s Geopolitical Trilemma

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In seeking defense, economic, and energy autonomy, Europe must diversify its partnerships and hedge against Russia, China, and an increasingly unpredictable United States.

For the past 75 years, the primary concern for European security has been the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its Russian successor state. As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, said back in the 1950s, NATO’s purpose was to “Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” But times have changed. President Donald Trump’s efforts to take Greenland from Denmark may have culminated in a dramatic climbdown at Davos, but the episode underscored the incredible pressures Europe faces—not just from Russia, but from the United States and China as well. Europe’s geostrategic position is now under threat in ways the European Union (EU) has never faced since coming into being in late 1993, and these concerns were at the center of discussions at the Munich Security Conference this past weekend.  

Breaking Free from Russia But Becoming Dependent on America

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which still threatens to metastasize and spill over into the rest of Europe, drove Europe to reduce its vulnerability to energy coercion by switching from Russian piped gas to liquified natural gas (LNG), much of it imported from the United States. Europe reduced its dependence on Russian energy significantly over the past three years and, barring an unexpected change of government in Moscow and a sudden end to Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, it is difficult to imagine Europe returning to its prior state of dependence on Russian energy. The EU currently intends to phase out all Russian gas imports by the end of 2027.

Surging liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States to Europe to avoid energy shortfalls and widespread societal disruption was a close-run thing, aided in part by back-to-back mild winters, but the curtailment of Russian energy........

© The National Interest