Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.
The U.S. government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted.
The Joe Biden administration took the extraordinarily aggressive action this month of blocking China from importing most semiconductors, machines to create chips and supercomputer parts.
A former Pentagon official acknowledged that this was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, amounting to a “form of economic containment.”
Jon Bateman, an ex-analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who served in several important policy roles in the Pentagon, wrote that U.S. officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “strong-armed others into compliance.”
Washington’s “mindset all but guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling,” he concluded.
Bateman stated that the “increasing boldness of U.S. unilateral actions, and Washington’s open embrace of a quasi-containment strategy” reflect the U.S. government’s new cold war goal: “China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.”
Today, Bateman is a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a powerful Washington-based think tank that helps Washington craft policy – with plentiful funding from the U.S. government, its allies, large corporations and banks, and billionaire oligarch family foundations.
Bateman is by no means a pro-China advocate. In April, he published a report for Carnegie called “U.S.-China Technological ‘Decoupling’: A Strategy and Policy Framework.”
In the lengthy document, Bateman “offered a concrete picture of what centrist decoupling might look like and how implementation could work at the agency level.”
Bateman wrote the Foreign Policy article as part of a debate with more hard-line hawks in elite Washington policy-making circles. He warned that their “maximalist” strategy could backfire and hurt the U.S. and its allies, and instead promoted a more cautious, incrementalist approach.
“America’s restrictionists—zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling—have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration,” he warned.
“More cautious voices—technocrats and centrists who advocate incremental curbs on select aspects of China’s tech ties—have lost,” Bateman lamented.
He acknowledged that Washington’s new cold war on China has been completely bipartisan, but “Donald Trump’s scattershot regulation and erratic public statements offered little clarity to allies, adversaries, and companies around the world,” whereas “Joe Biden’s actions have been more systematic.”
“The United States has waged low-grade economic warfare against China for at least four years now—firing volley after volley of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa limits, and much more,” he wrote.
Bateman said the Biden administration’s new sanctions, however, “more so than any earlier U.S. action, reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level.”
“Although framed as a national security measure, the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns,” he wrote.
He added, “The U.S. government imposed the new rules after limited consultation with partner countries and companies, proving that its quest to hobble China ranks well above concerns about the diplomatic or economic repercussions.”
Bateman noted that the United States is trying to pressure allies to join its new cold war on China, leading an international campaign to economically isolate Beijing by building a “Chip 4” alliance with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan – which control the vast majority of the global semiconductor industry.
Bateman’s fears that these aggressive new cold war policies could backfire have already come true. Washington’s rapid attempt to decouple the U.S. economy from China is taking a toll on U.S. universities.
At least 1,400 scientists of Chinese descent have left U.S. research institutions and instead gone to China, according to a report published this October by academics at Harvard, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The South China Morning Post reported that the “high number illustrates a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from U.S. government policies deterring research and academic activity by scientists of Chinese descent and suggests American research could suffer.”
The tech press has sounded similar alarm bells about Washington’s bellicose attacks on Beijing.
Electronics industry website EE Times quoted a corporate analyst who said the U.S. “sanctions put a temporary checkmate on China developing their foundry industry at more advanced nodes.”
The website also used cold war rhetoric to refer to the aggressive U.S. policies, writing:
The latest U.S. salvo in the chip war against China will set back its domestic chipmakers by generations, while global suppliers of semiconductors and fab tools will incur billions of dollars in lost sales because of a giant dent in demand out of China, analysts told EE Times.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has strengthened Cold War measures from longer than 40 years ago. In its new rivalry, the U.S. aims to freeze China’s advancement on a new front: chip technology that is critical for economic development and military superiority.
Wired said Washington’s “sweeping new controls are designed to keep [China’s] AI industry stuck in the dark ages while the U.S. and other Western countries advance.”
The tech magazine quoted Gregory Allen, director of the AI governance project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an influential neoconservative think tank in Washington that is bankrolled by the weapons industry, U.S. government, and Washington’s allies.
Allen summed it up: “The United States is saying to China, ‘AI technology is the future; we and our allies are going there—and you can’t come.’”
Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.
Afghan women line up at a World Food Program distribution point / credit: United Nations photo licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a series Toward Freedom has launched to examine the real impact and reasons for U.S. “humanitarian interventions.”
From the U.S. military intervention launched under the banner of democracy and human rights to restored warlords and the resuscitated Taliban regime, Afghan women have never stopped fighting for their rights.
When Taliban forces entered Kabul on August 15, appearing to have taken control of Afghanistan two weeks before the United States was set to complete its troop withdrawal, shock and fear for women’s fate under the Islamist group’s repressive rule quickly multiplied inside the country and globally.
After nearly 20 years of a U.S.-led coalition’s presence, a costly two-decade war, the very force the United States had tried to push out of power, in the name of its “War on Terror,” took over again. This time it occurred with stunning rapidity, in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s hasty, chaotic military withdrawal.
With the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals were abandoned at the mercy of the Taliban, amid concern the fundamentalist movement would re-impose its hard-line interpretation of Islamic law on women and girls.
But securing women’s rights was used from the beginning to justify the U.S. military intervention. The Biden administration’s irresponsible pull-out in tandem with the swift, untroubled Taliban return speaks volumes about Washington’s lack of interest to secure respect for human rights and improve women’s lives. Humanitarian interventions have been used to deploy U.S. troops and drones in Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries. As a consequence, 1 million people have been killed and an estimated 38 million have been forced to become refugees.
Condemning Humanitarian Interventions
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the oldest feminist organization in Afghanistan, stated in its response to the Taliban takeover: “It is a joke to say values like ‘women’s rights,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘nation-building,’ etc., were part of the U.S./NATO aims in Afghanistan!”
On International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2003, Afghan women of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) marched to the UN headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan. The sign states in Persian: “Down with the Northern Alliance, power to the Afghan people!” / credit: RAWA
The women’s association mentioned the United States’ geostrategic motives for its invasion, namely causing regional instability to encircle its rival powers, China and Russia in particular, and to undermine their economies via regional wars.
“Right from the start, RAWA members have been saying that freedom can’t be brought through bombs, war and violence,” Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission (AWM), a U.S.-based organization that funds RAWA’s work, told Toward Freedom. “How can they liberate women while they’re killing their husbands, brothers and fathers?”
Afghan women have long known that the U.S.-staged war on terrorism—and any foreign meddling—was not going to make their country safer. Women took the brunt of the backlash of war, military invasion and, again, today’s uncertain aftermath.
“[Afghan women] have always rejected outside interference, and maintained that Afghans need to fight for their freedom from inside,” Kolhatkar said.
For decades, active women have been at the forefront of opposing fundamentalism, warlordism and imperialism in Afghanistan.
Leading political activist and human-rights advocate Malalai Joya publicly denounced the presence of warlords and war criminals in the Afghan parliament in 2003 while serving as a member of parliament (MP), which resulted in her dismissal. An outspoken critic of the United States and NATO, she has continued to denounce the 20-year U.S./Western occupation. She has condemned U.S.-led drone attacks and bombings, clandestine raids carried out by U.S. and Afghan special forces into civilian homes, all of which have killed thousands of Afghans.
Between 2001 and 2020, more than 46,000 civilians were killed and 5.9 million Afghans displaced as a result of the war’s ongoing violence.
U.S. Brings Taliban Back to Power
Activists at the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), an NGO launched in the mid-1990s, have criticized the United States for allegedly bribing and empowering warlords, then resuscitating the Taliban’s power in the 2020 U.S.-led negotiations in Doha, which translated into replacing one fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan with another.
“I do not understand the United States for undoing and now redoing the Taliban in Afghanistan, whose ruling will affect women’s lives the most, which will be ruined yet again,” prominent human-rights activist Mahbooba Seraj, member of AWN, said in a interview with TRT World.
Talking to Toward Freedom, Alia Rasoully, an Afghan based in the United States who founded WISE Afghanistan, an organization that aims to provide women access to health and education, underlined how the Doha talks were conducted solely in the United States’ interest. She said many Afghans are not aware of the agreement’s details.
“Afghan women feel betrayed,” Rasoully said. “Although some women were included in the negotiations, none of their demands for basic human and Islamic rights are being met today.”
On April 28, 2003—known as the Black Day to commemorate the day the Taliban seized Kabul in 1992—other Afghan organizations joined RAWA in a demonstration / credit: RAWA
Spozhmay Maseed, a U.S.-based Afghan rights activist, deplored the seemingly unconcerned U.S. pull-out. “It was shocking to everyone,” she told Toward Freedom. “U.S. forces were combating terrorists for 20 years, today they’re dealing with them. Who were they fighting then? What was that fight for?”
RAWA member Salma, whose real name must be concealed to protect her security, relayed similar concerns to Toward Freedom.
“The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was a military operation orchestrated by the CIA that brought in Northern Alliance puppet leaders, who are as extremist and misogynist as the Taliban, and painted them as ‘democratic’ and ‘liberal,’” she said.
“What’s the result of these 20 years?” Salma asked. “[The United States] spent more than $2 trillion on the war to bring back the same Taliban, and it turned the country into a corrupt, drug-mafia and unsafe place, especially for women.”
The façade of democracy the United States had poured trillions of dollars into maintaining was lifted when former President Ashraf Ghani abandoned the presidential palace on August 15 by reportedly dashing onto a helicopter with close to $200 million in tow.
“How breakable that ‘democracy’ was, and how rotten the U.S.-backed puppet government was!” Salma asserted.
The Work of RAWA
On its website, RAWA has documented through its reports, photos and videos the horrific conditions facing Afghan women at the hands of the mujahideen and the Taliban, as well as the destruction and bloodshed during the U.S. occupation, which was rarely reported in the media.
“This indigenous women’s movement had long been trying to draw international attention to the atrocities against their people, in particular the ultra-woman-hating acts they were witnessing,” AWM’s Kolhatkar stressed. “It was only after September 11, when the world discovered there were terrible things happening to women in Afghanistan.”
Unlike many other Afghans, RAWA members have stayed, striving to give voice to the deprived women of Afghanistan in the struggle for women’s rights.
RAWA, which was established in 1977 as an independent political organization of Afghan women struggling for women’s rights, is driven by the belief that only a democratic, secular government can ensure security, independence and equality among Afghan people. It became involved in the struggle for resistance following the Soviet intervention called for by the then-socialist government of Afghanistan in 1979. Over the last four decades, RAWA spoke out against the anti-Soviet resistance (known as mujahideen) in the 1980s, fought against the Taliban regime in the mid-1990s, denounced the role of the Pakistani state in creating the Taliban and has rejected the U.S. occupation of the last 20 years.
The women’s organization has been involved in various social and political activities to include literacy classes, schools for girls and boys in villages and remote areas, health and income-generation projects for women to help them financially, and political agitation. It has also worked with refugee Afghan women and children in Pakistan, running nursing, literacy and vocational training courses. In 1981, it launched a bilingual magazine in Persian and Pashto, Payam-e-Zan (Woman’s Message), spreading social and political awareness among Afghan women.
Due to its pro-democracy, pro-secularist and anti-fundamentalist stance, RAWA has always operated as a clandestine organization, including in the last two decades under the U.S. occupation and the so-called “democratic government,” which it never recognized.
Using pseudonyms, concealing their identities, turning their homes into office spaces, often changing locations to avoid attention, its members have been active in different areas across Afghanistan. They would run underground schools for girls and women where they would use their burqa as a way to hide their books, and disseminate copies of Woman’s Message, secretly aiming to raise awareness among women of their rights and change their minds.
As an unregistered organization carrying out political work and home-schooling, if authorities found about its existence and illicit activity they could react punitively with any member caught up.
Since the assassination of its founder, Meena Kamal, the feminist association has been working more underground as anyone openly identified as member would risk being arrested or even killed. Despite it becoming increasingly dangerous to organize, the movement continues to stand.
“This is the time our women need us the most in Afghanistan,” Salma said. “We have to continue to be the voice of the voiceless who are here.”
Women’s Rights at What Cost?
Afghan women saw improvement in their lives over the past 20 years in terms of access to education, healthcare and employment, as well as economic, social and political empowerment. But the gap between urban centers and rural areas never really narrowed. In rural areas, where it is estimated 76 percent of Afghanistan’s women reside, women still rely on men in their families for permission to attend school and work. Girls are typically allowed to have primary or secondary education, then their families proceed with arranged marriages. In 2020, as little as 29.8 percent of women could read and write.
An Afghan family in a village near Chagcharan Ghor province in 2007 / credit: Vida Urbonaite, Lithuania
“Progress was slower in rural areas,” Rasoully remarked. “We worked hard in advocating to convince parents that their girls could safely go to school in a very culturally appropriate environment that they were comfortable with.”
She called for greater efforts to address the urban-rural divide, noting the international community made the mistake of taking an inequitable approach to offering educational opportunities to Afghan girls, as it directed its programs at young women in cities.
In her view, the insecurity brought on by the war into rural communities was a major impediment that kept girls out of school and prevented women from working.
Many villages experienced for years the devastation of heavy fighting between the Taliban, foreign militaries, government forces and local militias. The loss of husbands, brothers and fathers to the war further compromised women’s ability to go about everyday life.
A woman with her brother are busy drawing water from a river in Afghanistan in 2009 / credit: David Elmore, United States
Salma made clear progress in women’s status in the past two decades has been the result of a “natural process.” During that time, Afghan women acquired basic freedoms that had been withheld from them under the Taliban regime. But the foreign military presence could not be credited for that.
Kolhatkar specified that while the United States had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and it supported women’s rights on paper, the United States allowed the opposite in practice by “working with fundamentalists every step of the way.”
She explicitly said the issue of women’s rights was never a concern for Washington. Rather, it was a pretext to make its long, protracted occupation “palatable.”
“RAWA had been warning the Americans since the early phase of the invasion not to embrace the Taliban, nor the warlords,” Kolhatkar, AWM’s joint director, reminded. “It shouldn’t at all surprise us that the U.S. administration finally left Afghanistan, with misogynist hardliners in charge once again.”
With the Taliban back in control on August 15, a wave of civil resistance mainly was initiated by Afghan women. The protests have built momentum, hitting different parts of the war-ravaged country in the last month.
Further, a new generation has grown up in a country that is connected to the rest of the world through the Internet. That has increased political and social awareness among the general public, especially among young people.
Today, groups of women—small and large—are disobeying Taliban restrictions, protesting in Herat, Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif and other Afghan cities to demand their fundamental rights. They are bravely defying the extremist group, refusing the idea of returning to the grim days that women lived through.
Under the Taliban’s previous rule (1996-2001), the Islamist militants enforced strict rules on women and girls, forcing them to cover their bodies from head to toe, prohibiting them from leaving home without a male family member, and banning them from going to school or work. If they did not abide by the rules, they could face severe punishment, such as imprisonment, torture or execution.
Rasoully expressed concern that the progress made by 35 million Afghans throughout the last two decades, especially young women and girls, may go to waste. She personally mentored girls in medical school, in areas like Kandahar, over the last five years.
“But today, we are being told girls cannot go to school beyond sixth grade,” she said. “This will take us back to the stone ages.”
Maseed, the U.S.-based Afghan activist, insisted today’s Afghan women are better educated and more politically aware than in the 1990s, and will keep pushing for their rights.
“If women go backward, they think it’s better to come out on the streets and be killed than to follow these regressive rules and die inside every day,” the activist affirmed.
Resisting oppression with exceptional resilience—even under the new Taliban rule—they intend to keep up their struggle. They also are appealing to the international community not to grant recognition to the Taliban as a legitimate political actor.
In the past weeks, Afghan associations and supporters in the diaspora have joined Afghan women’s calls to refuse to recognize the Taliban. But they also have criticized the U.S. role in creating a disaster, at both political and humanitarian levels. And it is clear from U.S. machinations that ordinary Afghans will suffer starvation with recent efforts at keeping the Taliban from accessing funds stored in foreign banks.
“Perhaps things were better for many Afghan women under a U.S.-supported government, but it is also the United States’ violent intervention, which has led to the situation in Afghanistan today,” Nida Kirmani, a feminist sociologist and professor at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences, wrote in a tweet. “One cannot disconnect the two.”
Using women’s rights again as a means of framing US imperialism. Perhaps things were better for many Afghan women under a US-supported government, but it is also the US’s violent intervention, which has led to the situation in Afghanistan today. One cannot disconnect the two. https://t.co/RYNX9COIvL
Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. She was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017, and since 2018 has been based in Tunis.
On September 10, sections of the second Nord Stream 2 pipeline laid from the German shore and Danish waters were connected in a so-called “above water tie-in.” The opposing pipe strings were lifted from the seabed by the lay barge, Fortuna. Then the pipe ends were cut and fitted together. The welding to connect the two lines took place on a platform located above the water on the side of the vessel. Then the connected pipeline was lowered to the seabed as one continuous string / credit: Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis and was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.
The current crisis of spiraling gas prices in Europe, coupled with a cold snap in the region, highlights the fact that the transition to green energy in any part of the world is not going to be easy. The high gas prices in Europe also bring to the forefront the complexity involved in transitioning to clean energy sources: that energy is not simply about choosing the right technology, and that transitioning to green energy has economic and geopolitical dimensions that need to be taken into consideration as well.
Gas wars in Europe are very much a part of the larger geostrategic battle being waged by the United States using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine. The problem the United States and the EU have is that shifting the EU’s energy dependence on Russia will have huge costs for the EU, which is being missed in the current standoff between Russia and NATO. A break with Russia at this point over Ukraine will have huge consequences for the EU’s attempt to transition to cleaner energy sources.
The European Union has made its problem of a green transition worse by choosing a completely market-based approach toward gas pricing. The blackouts witnessed by people in Texas in February 2021 as a result of freezing temperatures made it apparent that such market-driven policies fail during vagaries of weather, pushing gas prices to levels where the poor may have to simply turn off their heating. In winter, gas prices tend to skyrocket in the European Union, as they did in 2020 and again in 2021.
For India and its electricity grid, one lesson from this European experience is clear. Markets do not solve the problem of energy pricing, as they require planning, long-term investments and stability in pricing. The electricity sector will face disastrous consequences if it is handed over to private electricity companies, as is being proposed in India. This is what the move to separate wires from the electricity they carry aims to achieve through Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s proposed amendment to the existing Electricity Act of 2003.
In order to understand the issues related to transitioning toward green energy, it is important to take a closer look at the current gas supply-related issues being faced by the European Union. The EU has chosen gas as its choice of fuel for electricity production, as it goes off coal and nuclear while also investing heavily in wind and solar. The argument advanced in favor of this choice is that gas would provide the EU with a transitional fuel for its low carbon emission path, as gas tends to produce less emissions than coal. It is another matter that gas is at best a short-term solution, as it still emits half as much greenhouse gas as coal.
As I have written earlier, the problem with green energy is that it requires a much larger capacity addition to handle seasonal and daily fluctuations that planners have not accounted for while advocating for switching over to clean energy sources. During winter, days are shorter in higher latitudes, and the world therefore gets fewer hours of sunlight. This seasonal problem with solar energy has been compounded in Europe with low winds in 2021 reducing the electricity output of windmills.
The European Union has banked heavily on gas to meet its short- and medium-term goals of cutting down greenhouse emissions. Gas can be stored to meet short-term and seasonal needs, and gas production can even be increased easily from gas fields with requisite pumping capacity. All this, however, requires advance planning and investment in surplus capacity building to meet the requirements of daily or seasonal fluctuations.
Unfortunately, the EU is a strong believer that markets magically solve all problems. It has moved away from long-term price contracts for gas and toward spot and short-term contracts—unlike China, India and Japan, which all have long-term contracts indexed to their oil prices.
Why does the gas price affect the price of electricity in the EU? After all, natural gas accounts only for about 20 percent of the EU’s electricity generation. Unfortunately for the people in the EU region, not only the gas market but also the electricity market has been “liberalized” under the market reforms in the EU. The energy mix in the grid is determined by energy market auctions, in which private electricity producers bid their prices and the quantity they will supply to the electricity grid. These bids are accepted, in order from lowest to highest, until the next day’s predicted demand is fully met. The last bidder’s price then becomes the price for all producers. In the language of Milton Friedman’s followers—who were known as the Chicago Boys—this price offered by the last bidder is its “marginal price” discovered through the market auction of electricity and, therefore, is the “natural” price of electricity. For readers who might have followed the recently concluded elections in Chile, Augusto Pinochet—who was a military dictator in Chile from 1973 to 1990—introduced the Constitution of 1980 in Chile and had incorporated the above principle in a constitutional guarantee to the neoliberal reforms in the electricity sector in the country. Hopefully, the victory of the left in the presidential elections in Chile and the earlier referendum on rewriting the Chilean constitution will also address this issue. Interestingly, it was not the former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—as is commonly thought—who started the electricity “reforms” but Pinochet’s bloody regime in Chile.
At present in the EU, natural gas is the marginal producer, and that is why the price of gas also determines the price of electricity in Europe. This explains the almost 200 percent rise in electricity price in Europe in 2020. In 2021, according to an October 2021 report by the European Commission, “Gas prices are increasing globally, but more significantly in net importer regional markets like Asia and the EU. So far in 2021, prices tripled in [the] EU and more than doubled in Asia while only doubling in the U.S.” [emphasis added].
The coupling of the gas and the electricity markets by using the marginal price as the price of all producers means that if gas spot prices triple as has been seen recently, so will the electricity prices. No prizes for guessing who gets hit the hardest with such increases. Though there has been criticism from various quarters regarding the use of marginal price as the price of electricity for all suppliers irrespective of their respective costs, the neoliberal belief in the gods of the market has ruled supreme in Europe.
Russia has long-term contracts as well as short-term contracts to supply gas to EU countries. Putin has mocked the EU’s fascination with spot prices and gas prices and said that Russia is willing to supply more gas via long-term contracts to the region. Meanwhile, in October 2021, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Russia was not doing its part in helping Europe tide over the gas crisis, according to an article in the Economist. The article stated, however, that according to analysts, Russia’s “big continental customers have recently confirmed that it is meeting its contractual obligations,” adding that “[t]here is little hard evidence that Russia is a big factor in Europe’s current gas crisis.”
The question here is that the EU either believes in the efficiency of the markets or it doesn’t. The EU cannot argue markets are best when spot prices are low in summer, and lose that belief in winter, asking Russia to supply more in order to “control” the market price. And if markets indeed are best, why not help the market by expediting the regulatory clearances for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will ship Russian gas to Germany?
This brings us to the knotty question of the EU and Russia. The current Ukraine crisis that is roiling the relationship between the EU and Russia is closely linked to gas as well. Pipelines from Russia through Ukraine and Poland, along with the undersea Nord Stream 1, currently supply the bulk of Russian gas to the EU. Russia also has additional capacity via the newly commissioned Nord Stream 2 to supply more gas to Europe if it receives the financial regulatory clearance.
There is little doubt that Nord Stream 2 is caught not simply in regulatory issues but also in the geopolitics of gas in Europe. The United States pressured Germany not to allow Nord Stream 2 to be commissioned, and also threatened to impose sanctions on companies involved with the pipeline project. Before stepping down as the chancellor of Germany in September 2021, Angela Merkel, however, resisted pressure from Washington to halt the work on the pipeline and forced the United States to concede to a “compromise deal.” The Ukraine crisis has created further pressure on Germany to postpone Nord Stream 2 even if it means worsening its twin crises of gas and electricity prices.
The net gainer in all of this is the United States, which will get the EU as a buyer for its more expensive fracking gas. Russia currently supplies about 40 percent of the EU’s gas. If this stalls, the United States, which supplies about 5 percent of the EU’s gas demand (according to 2020 figures), could be a big gainer. The United States’ interest in sanctioning Russian gas supply and not allowing the commissioning of Nord Stream 2 has as much to do with its support to Ukraine as seeing that Russia does not become too important to the EU.
Nord Stream 2 could help form a common pan-European market and a larger Eurasian consolidation. Just as it did in East and Southeast Asia, the United States has a vested interest in stopping trade following geography instead of politics. Interestingly, gas pipelines from the Soviet Union to Western Europe were built during the Cold War as geography and trade got priority over Cold War politics.
The United States wants to focus on NATO and the Indo-Pacific region, as its focus is on the oceans. In geographical terms, the oceans are not separate but a continuous body covering more than 70 percent of the world’s surface with three major islands: Eurasia, Africa and the Americas. (Although in the formulation of British geographer Halford Mackinder, the originator of the world island idea, Africa was seen as a part of Eurasia.) Eurasia alone is by far the bigger island, with 70 percent of the world’s population. That is why the United States does not want such a consolidation.
The world is passing through perhaps the greatest transition that human civilization has known in meeting the current challenges posed by climate change. To address these challenges, an energy transition is required that cannot be achieved through markets that prioritize immediate profits over long-term societal gains. If gas is indeed the transitional fuel, at least for Europe, it needs long-term policies of integrating its gas grid with gas fields, which have adequate storage. And Europe needs to stop playing games with its energy and the world’s climate future for the benefit of the United States.
For India, the lessons are clear. Markets do not work for infrastructure. Long-term planning with state leadership is what India needs to ensure supply of electricity to all Indians and ensure the country’s green transition—instead of dependence on electricity markets created artificially by a few regulators framing rules to favor the private monopoly of electricity companies.
Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees staff with refugees from Sudan in Chad / credit: UNHCR/Colin Delfosse
Over 700,000 people have been internally displaced in Sudan since April 15, when an armed conflict began between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The IOM spokesperson, Paul Dillon, said at a press briefing in Geneva on May 9 that the number has doubled in the prior week after IOM had previously estimated on May 3 that 334,053 had been displaced, 72 percent of them in West Darfur and South Darfur States.
In the states of South Darfur, North Darfur, and Central Darfur, clashes between the SAF and RAF began soon after they started fighting in Khartoum, killing many civilians, as Mohammed Alamaldin, a civil society activist from West Darfur’s capital Genena, told Peoples Dispatch.
However, in his own state, community members—including youth, women, and elders—had managed to secure a local agreement between SAF and RSF “to wait until the winner is determined in Khartoum.”
The locally negotiated truce lasted for a little over a week before forces clashed on April 24. Amid the ensuing insecurity, the armed conflict between West Darfur’s ethnic militias escalated, killing over 250 and wounding 300 civilians between April 27 and May 3, according to Alamaldin. On May 12 and May 13 alone, 280 were killed and over 160 were injured.
