Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
In the end, Donald Trump’s threat to prohibit diesel exports apparently proved credible after all.
Faced with rapidly rising prices at the pump and an emerging acute shortage of middle distillates, from diesel and heating oil to aviation kerosene, the G7 heads of government decided on Friday, under pressure from the US president, to release their own oil reserves.
For the EU, the perfect storm is brewing: a rising dollar price, the visible control of the Strait of Hormuz by the US military, as well as rising interest rates in the bond markets amid the threat of a sovereign debt crisis, have made the pressure particularly tangible for the EU states: further rising energy prices will hit the fragile eurozone industrial economy considerably harder than the essentially energy-autonomous United States.
The problems of the EU Europeans are homegrown and not the result of American special interests: completely overstretched welfare states, a self-inflicted migration crisis that can no longer simply be wished away, an economy in an atmosphere of departure – though not at home, but fleeing EU regulation, excessive energy costs and the political raid of the Green Deal. They have laid a fuse to the fragile structure of the EU, lit it and are no longer willing to recognize that this powder keg could explode at any moment.
One miscalculation is piling on top of another. In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, they had counted on the Americans shouldering the lion’s share of forcing a regime change in Moscow – cheap access to the country’s energy and resources, possibly bargaining and pricing power, have by now become indispensable to keep
