In his newsletter today, Matthew Yglesias digs down into how Russia isn’t achieving anything it wants geopolitically.
Putin hopes to destabilize European governments, but even where it’s happening, he’s not getting what he wants:
Incumbent governments are, in fact, ailing. The Swedish center-left coalition just got knocked out in favor of a new right-wing coalition whose largest constituent member will be the far-right Sweden Democrats.
But while the SDs, like many far-right European parties, were pro-Russian in the very recent past, they flipped during Sweden’s accession to NATO membership. And in order to appease the smaller right-of-center parties, the new coalition will be led by the traditional center-right and strongly Atlanticist Moderate Party. The story in Italy is broadly similar. Mario Draghi’s grand coalition was strongly pro-Ukrainian, and it looks set to be replaced with a right-wing coalition that includes two parties that have historically been pro-Russian. But the new coalition is going to be led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, which despite a lot of frankly alarming fascist associations, has been trying very hard to position itself as clearly anti-Russian.
The Europeans I know are overwhelmingly center-left cosmopolitan types, and they hate the SDs and the Brothers and like to emphasize that these parties are bad and insincere.
I certainly accept that, but the gyrations of opportunists are significant. From Putin’s perspective, the gambit of backing right-populist anti-system parties seemed to be working pretty well. But the war in Ukraine has made him toxic, and while kneecapping the European economy is genuinely helpful to these parties, it is also making him more toxic than ever.
Then, there’s the energy weapon, which can only be used once:
Russian gas is crucially important to the European economy because Europe has the infrastructure to get Russian gas and doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to substitute away from it. But when forced to substitute, you start substituting. Europe is standing up new floating LNG terminals as fast as they can.
Unfortunately, “as fast as they can” is not fast enough to rescue the situation this coming winter. But there will be more in 2023 and even more in 2024. Germany has decided to keep their nuclear plants running and is reopening coal-fired power plants, along with Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands. The fact that losing access to natural gas is causing EU emissions to go up rather than down is something I wish American environmentalists would take more seriously, but the point is that one way or another, Europe is going to be much less reliant on Russian gas 12 months from now than they are today.
This is the big problem with the gas weapon. It’s a good threat, and I think it’s entirely possible that if the European publics had fully understood what they were signing up for last February, the wave of pro-Ukrainian sentiment wouldn’t have happened. But once you actually fire it, you’re out of ammo. With winter looming, the worst is yet to come for the people of Europe. But making Dutch people uncomfortably cold this winter won’t win the war for Russia, and in political terms, Putin hasn’t broken the western alliance. Europe is going to keep building renewables, keep building LNG terminals, and is even contemplating some domestic fracking.