Good for #France. Merkel's energy politics have been a disaster, don't export them now to other countries!
@useless_idiot I've never lived in Germany so I only judge by what I see from the outside, but it looks like Merkel's politics got Germany in the wrong in every possible way, but "her legacy" is still not considered something bad.
Then again, who am I to judge, we've got Putin who started the war in Europe and it got to the point when we can't even fix this shit ourselves anymore 😩
Yeah, there is something strange going on in Germany in this regard. Maybe she was so popular that she's still considered above criticism?
I really don't know how to fix it, there is some disease in the minds I don't entirely understand. 😢
But to stay a little on the subject: One symptom is the delusion that trading with Russia (or China for that matter) will turn those countries into happy-huggy democracies.
@useless_idiot Yeah, that definitely was a mistake, instead of making 🇨🇳 and 🇷🇺 more democratic, it "tainted" 🇩🇪 and whole 🇪🇺 with it.
I couldn't even imagine the scale of corruption, I was expecting at least what we have now sanction-wise in 2014-15, but no — it go back to business as usual pretty fast.
I bet with 🇨🇳 it's even worse as it's less obvious, they are really good at not being "in your face".
I wouldn’t be as radical here - Wandel durch Handel has a strong basis in game theory, while the limitation of assuming that both parties play the same game. With Russia it was clearly not the case - they were playing revanchism and the German game was irrelevant there. I may be wrong of course in long term but I think in case of China the volume of trade with EU and US was a significant facto preventing it from active support of Russia in the war. The Chinese game seems to be simply more compatible to the EU than the Russian one, which is nothing surprising as different societies have different sets of values.
@kravietz
Interesting theory! I think explaination for that might be more simple than that, focused on short term interests, but might also be way more complex, focused on something long term that we are yet to see. Might even be both — that is the worst part.
But I agree, we can only speculate about what China's game is here.
@kravietz
Like I said many times before, in Russia government is brutal, but at least it's also incompetent — I'm not so sure about China.
@kravietz
Hard to admit that revanchism is some trait of Russians, but that is exactly what everyone observes now. I don't know how to put it to not make it look like blame shifting, I think that non-free regime always brings out the worst in people, people are not limited to it, but it's always the worst that gets exploited. By analogy that is why I'm rather sceptical about China in this regard — they are just as far from liberal democracy than Russia is, maybe even more so.
@useless_idiot