PARIS (Dispatches) -- The
Russia-Ukraine conflict and the resulting energy crisis could lead to American economic domination, warned French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire.
Speaking to the French National Assembly, Le Maire said he feared the United States could benefit from the situation to the detriment of European interests.
“We cannot accept that our American partner sells its LNG at four times the price at which it sells it to its own companies,” he said.
Le Maire said “the conflict in Ukraine must not end in American economic domination and a weakening of the EU.”
He insisted on the need to build “economic relations that are more balanced on the energy issue between our American allies and the European continent.”
Le Maire’s remarks came just days after French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his dissatisfaction over LNG imported from the U.S. and Norway.
Macron told the informal European Union Summit in Prague: “We are going to say with great friendship toward our American friends, our Norwegian friends, that ‘you are great, you provide us with gas.’ But there is one thing that can’t work for a very long time, that is we can’t pay for gas that is four times more expensive.”
The statements signal dissatisfaction and sense of crisis, indicating that after the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has lasted for more than half a year, Europeans have gradually found that the strategic direction of the situation is becoming seriously unfavorable to Europe, and the U.S. has become the biggest beneficiary of the war, and Washington is trying to expand the unilateral benefits of its own.
According to a BFMTV report, the U.S. provides 500 million euros
in aid to industrialists and farmers to encourage them to increase production.
The American arms industry could also benefit from the international context, BFMTV said. In March, Germany announced it had ordered 35 fighter jets from the manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said in a speech on Monday that Europe’s prosperity is built on cheap energy from Russia and access to the big China market, in addition to security protection from the U.S. In his view, “this is a world that is no longer there.”
Europe is not self-sufficient in energy, and is weak militarily. Europe as a whole lives in the shadow of American hegemony.
The Nord Stream gas pipeline, which has been strongly opposed by the U.S., has now been sabotaged, heralding the end of Europe’s use of cheap Russian energy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has repeatedly promoted China as a geopolitical opponent of the entire West.
According to Bloomberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will visit China in early November. If it proves to be true, his Tuesday remarks that “decoupling with China would be the wrong path” and that “globalization has been a success story that enabled prosperity” explicitly delivered what is the mainstream attitude of Germany.
Decoupling from China to form a relatively closed political-economic bloc dominated by the U.S. is the new geopolitical pattern Washington has been trying to promote.
The U.S. has strengthened its technological blockade against China, and has always wanted to pull the whole of Europe into its tech-economic chariot against China.