The EU should consider Africa as a strategic alternative to Russia to avoid repeating past energy-dependence mistakes amid hybrid warfare and energy-technology risks.

Framatome, a subsidiary of the French state energy company EDF, announced that it would join a joint venture with the Russian state-owned company TVEL to produce nuclear fuel rods and assemblies for power, aiming to build a stronger French nuclear energy presence in the European market. The first presence would be in Lingen, Germany, and the Lower Saxony environment minister currently holds the final decision on approval. This is a perplexing move, given that the European Union (EU) and its allies have been trying to wean off Russian energy sources since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

While the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) recently signed an agreement on nuclear energy with the exact goal of ending reliance on Russian nuclear fuel by 2028, France and Germany could go in the opposite direction. They seem to confirm Georg Hegel’s famous saying: “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” as they could repeat the same mistake of the past with Putin. They would make their citizens, and the larger EU, pay for their lack of understanding of foreign policy and economic interdependence between liberal democracies and imperialistic dictatorships.

Russia’s Use of Energy Dependence as Strategic Leverage

Unlike the wishful thinking of idealist or liberalist theory, states often “weaponize” economic interdependence by leveraging foreign dependencies for strategic advantage. There is plenty of scholarly research, but for those who are not into scientific theories, the pragmatic analysis of reality should be clear. We have already seen this with the EU’s dependence on Russian oil and gas, and increasingly with its dependence on critical raw materials (CRMs) and rare earth elements (REEs). Now, this could be repeated by the ignorance of European decision-makers, leading to a new dependence:........

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