Tim Bailey 🏳️‍🌈🇬🇧🇮🇱🇭🇰

EUROPE HAS BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY WEAKENED, AND NOW BRUSSELS IS FINALLY WAKING UP. After 20 years of declining oil-refining capacity, the European Commission suddenly sounds the alarm. EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen declares: “This crisis is a wake-up call.” A wake-up call? Europe has spent two decades making itself increasingly vulnerable, and only now are its leaders beginning to recognize the consequences. For years, ideological environmental activism, misguided energy policies, and political short-sightedness have helped undermine Europe’s energy security and industrial competitiveness. And who benefited from a Europe that became increasingly dependent on imported energy? Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Russia has exploited political divisions on both sides of the European political spectrum. On the far right: Financial links and political relationships involving Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. Russian influence operations targeting figures associated with Germany’s AfD. Close political relationships with Austria’s FPÖ and Italy’s Lega. Support for nationalist movements hostile to European integration. Propaganda designed to weaken NATO, undermine EU unity, and reduce support for Ukraine. Disinformation campaigns exploiting immigration, nationalism, and distrust of democratic institutions. On the environmental and political left, Russia pursued a different opportunity: Amplifying opposition to European shale gas and fracking. Encouraging narratives that made domestic fossil-fuel production politically unacceptable. Exploiting anti-nuclear sentiment that contributed to the closure of reliable electricity generation. Benefiting from campaigns against domestic energy infrastructure. Taking advantage of political resistance to long-term investments in European energy independence. Exploiting the contradiction between Europe’s ambitious environmental promises and its growing reliance on imported energy. Not every environmental campaign was Russian-funded or Russian-directed. But Moscow certainly had every reason to encourage policies that made Europe more dependent on Russian gas. The result was a strategic disaster. Europe weakened parts of its own energy infrastructure while purchasing enormous quantities of energy from an authoritarian regime. We closed nuclear plants, lost refining capacity, restricted domestic production, and allowed ideological purity to take priority over energy security. Meanwhile, Russia collected energy revenues, strengthened its geopolitical leverage, and continued undermining the democratic institutions Europe was supposed to defend. Protecting the environment is important. But environmental protection without economic realism, industrial security, or geopolitical awareness becomes a dangerous weakness. The greatest irony is that movements claiming to protect Europe’s future helped create vulnerabilities that Russia could exploit. Europe’s fundamental values include democracy, freedom, sovereignty, scientific progress, and the ability to determine our own future. Those values mean very little if we become economically and strategically dependent on authoritarian regimes. Putin did not need to defeat Europe militarily to weaken it. He could exploit our political divisions, our ideological extremes, and our own disastrous policy decisions. And now, after two decades, Brussels calls it a wake-up call. The real question is why it took so long.