Long-term German energy reliance on Russia arose from the acute foreign energy dependency predicaments Germany has faced for more than a century. 1/11

Like other European powers minus Austria in the early 20th century, Germany lacked domestic oil. 2/11

It came out of WWI with no empire in the Middle East and was forced to hand Deutsche Bank’s share of the Turkish Petroleum Company (with a monopoly concession in Mesopotamia) to France, leaving it with none of the world’s large oil companies and no stake in one. 3/11

After WW2, the Truman administration opposed it importing either from the western hemisphere or the Soviet Union. Consequently, it had to rely on British imperial power to protect oil imports from the Middle East. 4/11

It turned back to the Soviet Union – a position taken by the last Weimar governments and the Nazis before Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union – after the Suez Crisis because Eisenhower would not in 1956 let Britain play that role. 5/11

As gas became important from the 1960s, little of the North Sea’s oil and gas was found in German waters, and there was no equivalent of the French companies’ position in Algeria (until 1971 nationalisation). 6/11

Soviet gas and Germany pipes to bring the gas became the material basis of Ostpolitik. Later, it was this energy relationship with Russia that created the energy space for Gerhard Schröder to oppose the Iraq war. 7/11

It was the 2010s when Germany had serious alternatives through the rise of the liquid natural gas trade and from 2015 shale export. 8/11

But by this time the German energy companies had established production rights in western Siberia (not having any elsewhere including post-war Iraq) + heavily-energy dependent German industry faced high electricity costs that were part compensated for by cheap Russian gas. 9/11

The German sin was to pretend that its energy relationship with the SU/Russia didn’t have geopolitical consequences for others starting not with Ukraine but, in Europe, with Poland when martial law was introduced in 1981. 10/11

The German misjudgement was to ignore that the dissolution of the Soviet Union created the medium- to long-term risk of an outright Russian war in Europe. 11/11