Tim’s view
This weekend will test how willing the EU is to risk closer energy ties with the US. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will head to the Munich Security Conference, an annual opportunity to check the pulse of the trans-Atlantic alliance, which, according to the conference organizers, is nearly on life support because of US President Donald Trump’s “wrecking ball politics.” Energy will be high on Rubio’s agenda — specifically, pushing Europe to speed up its phaseout of Russian oil and gas and accelerate its plans to buy more US LNG.
It’s a delicate subject for European policymakers. They are under increasing pressure from industrial executives, who warned in a group letter this week that high energy prices pose a “dire” threat to the region’s economy. And Trump has repeatedly made clear that buying more US energy is a prerequisite for favorable trade terms. Yet building more gas import infrastructure could conflict with the EU’s climate goals. And more to the point for a security conference, one of the biggest lessons from the war in Ukraine has been the financial costs and security risks of relying too much on fossil fuel imports from anywhere.
European leaders will likely use Munich as a platform to publicly call for stronger US-EU cooperation. But Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO and lead Ukraine negotiator during Trump’s first term, told me that in private, many will “state that they can’t be too dependent on the US for gas either, now that the US has also shown [through its aggressive posture toward Greenland] it is a predator.”
That response, Volker said, is “definitely emotional and overblown.” The fact is, the US is in the middle of a massive, very expensive buildout of LNG export infrastructure, while Europe remains in the midst of an aggressive push toward decarbonization. A Kremlin-esque weaponized gas cutoff would hurt the US more than the EU. So both sides have a lot to gain from smoothly functioning energy trade. While Trump rails against Europe’s lackluster security spending and threatens to blow up NATO, gas may actually be the last thing holding the alliance together.
Notable
The EU’s energy chief said last month that the bloc is actively looking at taking more LNG from Canada, Qatar and North African countries as the EU seeks to reduce its energy dependence on an increasingly unreliable Washington.