Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

For half a century, the Strait of Hormuz was Iran’s weapon. Today, it is its noose.

The mathematics of energy have flipped, and with them the balance of coercive power in the Persian Gulf.

Iran’s implicit deterrent was geographic, spanning from the tanker wars of the 1980s to the sanctions standoffs of the 2010s. Almost 20% of global seaborne oil, and a similar share of liquefied natural gas, passes through the Strait. The formula was simple: any military confrontation that threatened the Tehran regime risked a closure that would halt trade supplies, spike crude prices, bleed Western consumers, and, above all, inflict pain on the United States, who was the world’s largest oil importer.

The strait served as Tehran’s insurance policy and its most powerful bargaining tool. The threat was predicated on the regime’s belief that it could block everyone except its exports. The Iranian regime revealed its biggest weakness by constantly threatening to damage the global economy through a shutdown of the Strait. In reality, a total shutdown has the most severe impact on Iran.

Almost 90 per cent of Iran’s crude exports, and about 80 per cent of its total exports, depend on the transit through Hormuz. Around 25 per cent of Iranian GDP and 60 per cent of government revenues depend completely on having the Strait open.

Before the war, Iran was exporting roughly 1.7 million barrels per day, receiving around $160 million in daily revenue from exports via the Strait. Thus, Trump’s full closure of the Strait costs Tehran hundreds of millions of dollars a day in losses, not accounting for the additional fiscal and currency consequences in a country already facing an economic disaster with 40–50% inflation. The complete dependence on the Strait of Hormuz also adds to another weakness: 95% of Iranian crude at sea is sold to a single buyer, China. Tehran is not selling into a diversified and open market. Its exports are sold to a monopsony that demands large discounts, between 10 and 11 dollars per barrel.

These weaknesses were visible long before the war. Capital flight reached $15 billion in the first half of 2025 alone; the rial collapsed against the dollar, and the government’s budget, which allocates 51 per cent of oil revenues to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, became even more dependent on a single export route it could not afford to close. When the war began, Iranian crude shipments collapsed by 94%. Then, the United States’ decision to block all Iran export vessels showed that Iran’s chokepoint had become self-choking.

In the past 30 days, 80% of the essential volumes that moved through the Strait have been rerouted or offset by other oil producers, including US record exports.

The world is very different from what the Iran regime thought. In 2025, U.S. crude oil production hit a new annual record of 13.6 million barrels per day, making the United States the world’s largest producer but also the biggest exporter. The United States shipped 5.2 million barrels per day of crude and 7.2 million barrels per day of petroleum products in March 2026, both global records. For the first time, America exported more petroleum than it imported, by a net margin of almost 2.8 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. Total US liquids production now exceeds that of Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. On the natural gas side, U.S. LNG exports reached well over 15 billion cubic feet per day, surpassing Qatar and Australia to make the United States the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporter, while U.S. dry gas production exceeds the combined output of Russia, Iran, and China. Furthermore, the United States is also the world’s largest producer of nuclear electricity, at roughly 30 per cent of global generation, and a global leader in renewable energy.

When President Trump could say in April 2026 that the United States was “clearing the Strait as a favour to countries around the world, including China, Japan, Korea, and Germany,” the framing was an accurate description of who needs Hormuz open and who does not. Only 4% of the traffic through the Strait goes to the United States, according to SP Global.

According to the International Energy Agency, throughput at Hormuz collapsed from its long-run average of about 20 million barrels per day to 3.8 million since the beginning of the war through the second week of April. Daily ship transits fell roughly 95 per cent. The Tehran regime, in a gesture more theatrical than realistic, attempted to levy a $2 million toll on each vessel crossing the strait, without understanding that the move showed desperation instead of leverage.

The US response has been the most important measure deployed against Iran in two decades of standoffs. Operation Economic Fury established a full naval blockade of Iranian ports. Iranian naval losses in the first 38 days of combat exceeded 150 vessels. The ceasefire framework under negotiation requires Iran to reopen Hormuz, but the US maintains control. Thus, negotiations revolve around Iranian dismantlement, not American concessions.

The lesson is not just that Iran miscalculated but that it massively underestimated its obvious weaknesses. The United States is not a hostage of the Gulf; it is the guarantee of its safe sea lanes. Europe is tied to U.S. LNG while keeping a substantial Russian dependence, which complicates its energy security and makes it vulnerable to fluctuations in supply and price from both sources. Asia’s largest economies, particularly China, are suffering the marginal cost of a Hormuz disruption, which has led to increased energy prices and supply chain uncertainties that further exacerbate their economic challenges. Iran’s economic nightmare has only started.

Three important factors must be considered.

• First, the traditional Hormuz risk premium in Brent, which refers to the additional cost added to oil prices due to geopolitical tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, is structurally smaller than in the 2010s because U.S. supply can absorb shocks that previously had no substitute. The Brent price is lower in real and nominal terms than in the 2008, 2018, or 2022 peaks.

• Second, the strength of American energy, including economics, export infrastructure, and LNG capacity, has become a key global geopolitical variable, influencing global energy prices and the strategic decisions of other nations.

• Third, Iran’s economy has not only suffered damage; it has also been demolished, and its extremely weak fiscal position indicates that it cannot sustain the threat posture in Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important chokepoint. However, a chokepoint hurts whoever depends on it most, and Iran relies on it completely. The United States does not.

The geopolitical advantage that Tehran once held has now become its greatest weakness, likely leading to the disappearance of the regime’s effective bargaining power.

China is set to become the world’s dominant nuclear power producer.

Based on existing and planned projects, its total capacity could reach nearly 186 gigawatts, far surpassing the U.S., which currently leads globally. This shift reflects a broader push to secure reliable, low-carbon energy as electricity demand rises.

This chart, via Visual Capitalist’s Tasmin Lockwood, ranks countries by current and prospective nuclear capacity, using data from Global Energy Monitor.

How Nuclear Energy Is Set to Scale by Country

The U.S. currently leads nuclear energy production with a capacity of 102,475 megawatts, exceeding France by more than 35,000 MW.

China ranks third today at 60,898 MW, but that is set to change as new plants come online.

Dive into the data, which includes sites of any capacity as of September 2025, below:

This shift has major geopolitical implications. Countries that expand nuclear capacity can reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels while strengthening energy security and grid stability.

If all planned projects are completed, China will lead with 185,812 MW, followed by the U.S. at 117,910 MW and France at 75,590 MW.

France remains a historic leader in nuclear energy, with around 69% of its electricity generated from the technology.

The UK was home to the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant, which came online in 1956, but later scaled back its use of nuclear. The government is now aiming for a “golden age of nuclear,” though current commitments totaling 15,394 MW would rank the country just 12th globally.

Of the 17 countries with zero installed capacity today, Uganda is set to scale up the most to 18,000 MW, followed by Poland with 15,612 MW and Türkiye with 14,700 MW.

Betting on Nuclear Fusion and Fission

Today’s nuclear expansion is centered on fission, the technology that powers all existing reactors and accounts for about 10% of global electricity generation. While mature, it is evolving through smaller, modular designs that aim to reduce costs, improve safety, and speed up deployment.

This helps explain why much of the prospective capacity in the chart includes not only large-scale plants, but also a growing wave of smaller reactors backed by governments and private capital.

At the same time, nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, remains a long-term ambition. Despite rising investment and recent technical progress, it has yet to reach commercial scale.

For now, the global nuclear buildout is firmly rooted in fission, as countries prioritize reliable, low-carbon power that can be deployed within the next decade.

To learn more about nuclear, check out this graphic ranking the countries building the most reactors.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• Europe faces an imminent jet fuel crisis as the Iran war and Hormuz disruption cut off key Middle Eastern supplies.

• Long-term refinery closures and rising import dependence have left Europe highly exposed, with limited alternatives and growing competition from Asia.

• Airlines are already cutting capacity and warning of higher fares, with potential flight cancellations looming as fuel shortages intensify.

Accelerated refinery closures in the past decade and increased dependence on kerosene from the Middle East have exposed Europe’s energy supply vulnerability once again.

For years, European consumers have had to contend with last-minute strikes of ground personnel and cabin crew during peak summer travel. This year, strikes may be viewed as a minor nuisance compared to what’s coming within weeks—a jet fuel supply crisis that could ground flights and hike fares.

The war in Iran has cut most of Europe’s imports of jet fuel, while local output has been falling for nearly two decades due to dozens of refineries closing permanently or being converted to biofuel production.

The war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have severely constrained Europe’s jet fuel supply, while jet fuel prices have spiked to over $200 per barrel. The last imports from the Middle East on tankers that had passed Hormuz before the war began have arrived, and there is only one alternative to source jet fuel—from the United States. These supplies are not only insufficient to replace the loss of Middle Eastern jet fuel. Europe faces increasingly fierce competition from Asia for these cargoes as the crisis first hit Asia with crude supply from the Middle East collapsing, Asian refiners cutting refinery runs, and countries imposing fuel export restrictions to preserve domestic supply.

Back in 2009, nearly 100 refineries were operating in Europe. Of these, 28 refineries – more than 25% of the number of refineries and 16% of refining capacity – have been either shut or transformed since 2009, according to data from the European Fuel Manufacturers Association.

As refineries were closing, due to declining fuel demand in Europe and emission-reduction policies, the European dependence on imported supply has grown. The hit to supply from the Middle East caught Europe off guard regarding the security of energy supply for the second time in just four years, after natural gas deliveries from Russia crashed in 2022.

This time, the jet fuel crisis could be imminent, analysts and forecasters warn.

Last year, Europe imported about a third of the jet fuel it consumed, with 75% of imports coming from the Middle East, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

Its executive director, Fatih Birol, this week warned that Europe has “maybe six weeks or so” of remaining jet fuel supply.

“If we are not able to open the Strait of Hormuz … I can tell you soon we will hear the news that some of the flights from city A to city B might be canceled as a result of lack of jet fuel,” Birol told Associated Press in an interview.

Northwest Europe is one of the regions most exposed to the jet fuel crisis, as imports have dropped from historical norms this month, and the import decline is set to accelerate in the coming weeks as more U.S. jet fuel cargoes would go to Asia instead of Europe, Ernest Censier, market analyst at Vortexa, said in an analysis on Thursday.

The 15% drop in European jet fuel imports so far in April “reflects structural dependence on Middle Eastern supply: approximately half of NWE’s jet fuel imports typically transit through the Strait of Hormuz,” Censier said.

In addition, relatively short voyage times of about 21 days from Mina Abdulla in Kuwait to Rotterdam mean that supply disruptions are transmitted quickly into regional imports, the analyst added.

The U.S. has emerged as the key source of substitution for lost Middle Eastern supply, but this is unlikely to be sustained as U.S. jet/kerosene exports are increasingly being redirected toward the Pacific Basin, reaching a seven-year high this month, and now accounting for over 30% of total U.S. jet fuel exports.

“This reallocation reflects a broader shift in US product exports toward the Pacific Basin,” Vortexa’s Censier noted.

This leaves Europe highly exposed to the turbulence in the jet fuel markets.

Lufthansa, Europe’s biggest airline, on Thursday said it is accelerating plans to reduce its flight program and retire some aircraft earlier.

“In view of significantly increased kerosene prices, which have more than doubled compared to the period before the Iran war, as well as rising additional burdens from labor disputes.”

“The package for accelerated implementation of fleet and capacity measures is unavoidable in light of the sharply increased kerosene costs and geopolitical instability,” said Till Streichert, Chief Financial Officer of Lufthansa Group.

Authored by Tilak Doshi,

When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy, posted on X last Wednesday with a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat.

The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.

In a guest column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago: “One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.” To anyone who has watched Germany’s Energiewende — that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.

Here is a senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costs now running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.

This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first major public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policy since the anti-nuclear, beatnik ’68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwall chronicled the phenomenon with great precision in Green Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister in 1985, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.

That gospel found a ready audience in the Anglosphere. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered his now-infamous testimony to the US Congress, declaring that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. The moment was theatrical, the science shaky, but the political effect electric. It fused with the inchoate ideas already circulating among Western intellectuals: Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which prophesied mass famine that never came; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which launched the modern environmental movement on the back of exaggerated claims about DDT; and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), the manifesto of ‘Buddhist economics’ that preached reducing human demand rather than raising living standards. As the great Chicago economist Frank Knight observed, economic progress consists not in suppressing desires nor even in satiating them but in their “ever greater refinement and multiplication” — a direct antithesis to Schumacher’s call for ascetic material restraint as spiritual virtue.

This European ideological curse of environmental misanthropy spread among the young urban intelligentsia of the developing countries through the educational curricula and mass media and the vast number of students studying in the progressive universities of the West, from Canada to Australia, Ireland to Italy and New York to California and Florida.

The spread of Europe’s green gospel was enthusiastically supported by Left-wing billionaire foundations which sprouted thousands of “grassroots NGOs” in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These so-called grassroots NGOs were handy to provide a moral cover for grifting renewable-energy lobbies seeking rents from the public purse. Local ‘Bootleggers and Baptists‘ coalitions arose across the developing countries that derived mutual benefits in Europe’s carbon colonialism. To complete the circle, captured agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the IMF imposed anti-fossil-fuel constraints as a condition for aid and public finance to poorer African and Asian governments.

At the root of it all lay Europe’s long love affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”, the fantasy that the simple, low-energy lifestyles of Tahitian natives represented a purer existence than the artifice of industrial civilisation. When Voltaire received a copy of Rousseau’s book The Social Contract, he replied:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than 60 years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.

Perhaps the German intelligentsia never saw the thrust of Voltaire’s rather disdainful response to Rousseau’s love affair with Pacific Islanders.

What began as German domestic posturing metastasized into EU-wide dogma with Angela Merkel’s fateful 2011 decision to shut the country’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima incident in Japan. The results were as predictable as they were catastrophic. Germany, once the engineering envy of the world, now imports electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It has destroyed its nuclear industry — 20 gigawatts of reliable, low-carbon baseload — only to watch coal-fired plants, including the dirty lignite variety, roar back to life.

Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the few credentialled German voices who has consistently refused to drink the Gaia Kool-Aid, pointed out in an interview last week that the country sits atop enough domestic gas reserves for 25 years of secure supply. Yet it refuses to exploit them, crippled by what he calls the “German disease” of nature worship.

The March 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran’s IRGC merely administered the coup de grâce to an already terminal patient. Qatar’s force majeure on LNG shipments removed nearly 20% of global supply overnight. European gas prices spiked and power prices followed as German storage levels plunged.

Suddenly the same political class that had spent years lecturing voters about the moral imperative of Net Zero found itself quietly dusting off moribund lignite coal plants previously earmarked for closure. A ‘renaissance for coal’ is how analysts describe the spectacle. The prior government’s solemn pledge to phase out coal by 2030 now reads like a bad joke told at the expense of German households and manufacturers.

In a Facebook post, the TechTimes said:

In a move that highlights the severe economic strain of the Middle East conflict, the German Government is reportedly considering a ‘renaissance for coal’ to prevent a total energy meltdown. … While Germany has spent years pushing for a 2030 coal phase-out, the current energy crisis has forced a pivot toward energy security over climate targets. Reports indicate that several lignite units, previously held in safety reserve, may be returned to full market operation.

Conservative leader Alice Weidel, riding a surge of popularity for the conservative-populist AfD party that is now second only to the ruling CDU/CSU coalition, has forthrightly stated that under an AfD-led government, the Net Zero movement would be rejected:

We must also declare the climate crisis over. The whole thing is, as the American President so nicely puts it, a hoax – it is a complete scam. … We must immediately end the failed Energiewende. We must also immediately cut back and eliminate the waste of resources and the subsidies for so-called renewable energies.

German Energy Minister Reiche is not alone in her seeming Damascene conversion. Chancellor Merz has repeatedly called the 2023 nuclear shutdown a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany vulnerable to import shocks and deindustrialisation. Even EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, that high priestess of the Green Deal, stood before a nuclear summit in Paris on March 10th and confessed that “reducing Europe’s nuclear sector was a strategic mistake”. Reliable, affordable, low-emission power had been sacrificed on the altar of ideology, she effectively admitted — 15 years too late for the German utilities that had already been forced into insolvency or foreign ownership.

Yet these deathbed ‘repentances’ cannot disguise the deeper truth: the entire red-green project was always a triumph of wishful thinking over engineering reality, favouring Rousseau’s imaginations of noble savages in the South Pacific over Voltaire’s rather commonsensical rejection of being told that walking on all fours was heavenly.

The West’s punitive climate policies — layered atop self-inflicted energy sanctions on Russia — have boomeranged with spectacular precision. Entire sectors of German manufacturing have decamped to jurisdictions unburdened by the climate industrial complex. Energy-intensive industries that once powered the Mittelstand now eye the exits, while households stare at electricity prices that remain among the highest in the developed world.

Following the recent elections in Baden-Württemberg, the exasperated pseudonymous commentator Eugyppius remarked that: “Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods.” For the German Greens and their socialist allies, of course, the stupid people are the working- and middle-class majority who are ‘climate deniers’. Never mind that they are cost-of-living realists who notice when their heating bills triple, when German industry bleeds jobs and when the same politicians who preached energy poverty as virtue now scramble to fire up the dirtiest coal plants to prevent blackouts.

The polling numbers tell the story with merciless clarity. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now routinely polling at 25–27% nationally, ahead of or level with the CDU/CSU in several surveys. In western states long considered immune to its message, AfD has doubled its vote share in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Its platform could not be clearer: man-made climate change is a ‘scam’, the entire Net Zero apparatus a vehicle for crushing industry and sovereignty.

Enter the ‘Far Right’

This is not fringe muttering; it is the explicit rejection of the Energiewende that Reiche herself is now edging towards. The pattern repeats across Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leads Presidential polling by framing the Green transition as “ultra-ecological fanaticism” that punishes farmers and motorists while enriching the Davos set. Britain’s Reform UK under Nigel Farage mocks Net Zero as “Net stupid Zero” and surges on promises to drill domestic resources. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, though more circumspect in office, has little patience for Brussels’s eco-mandates and has quietly prioritised energy security over emission targets. Even a section of British Conservatives, once captured by the same delusions, have begun to row back on timelines that threatened to bankrupt households.

What unites these movements is not they are led by ‘far-Right’ extremists, as the legacy press hysterically insists, but a straightforward recognition that ideology has collided with physics and economics. German households — those not among the young urban Greens steeped in deep-ecology dogma — are fed up. They have watched their country destroy its nuclear fleet, subsidise intermittent renewables to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros and then beg Qatar and the United States for LNG while quietly reopening coal mines. The same elites who imposed these costs now express shock that voters are turning to parties promising relief.

The Hormuz shock has merely accelerated a reckoning that was already baked in. Ireland’s riots and protests over energy-driven cost-of-living pain offer a grim preview of what happens when governments refuse to admit their role in manufacturing the crisis. Dublin is quietly backing down without ever conceding the policy errors that made energy poverty inevitable. Berlin, Paris and Brussels are engaged in the same contortions: walking back punitive green measures while pretending the original strategy was sound.

History’s reckoning

Yet there is a larger historical arc at work. The German Greens’ capture of energy policy was never really about climate; it was about power — cultural, political and economic. It represented the final victory of a post-1968 worldview that equated industrial civilisation with original sin. BRICS nations and the Global South have no intention of sacrificing development on the altar of Western guilt. China builds coal plants and nuclear reactors with equal enthusiasm; India refuses to apologise for using its own coal.

Only in Europe did policymakers convince themselves that virtue-signalling could substitute for watts. Reiche’s epiphany, however partial, is therefore welcome. So too are Merz’s and von der Leyen’s belated acknowledgments. But rhetorical corrections will not suffice. Germany must confront the full cost of its ideological detour: the lost nuclear capacity, the stranded assets, the industrial hollowing-out and the political polarisation that has handed AfD its strongest hand since its founding.

The question is whether the Establishment possesses the courage to follow where basic economics and common-sense leads — towards a pragmatic energy mix that includes nuclear revival where feasible, domestic fossil resources where necessary and an end to the ruinous subsidies that have enriched renewables rent-seekers while impoverishing citizens.

Fifteen years after Merkel’s nuclear panic and decades after the Greens first infiltrated the corridors of power, reality is reasserting itself with the cold logic of physics and markets.

The fevered dream of a weather-dependent utopia is dissolving under the pressure of rolling blackouts, price spikes and voter revolt.

What comes next will hopefully be a return to something more honest: an energy policy grounded in engineering, not eschatology. For a country that once prided itself on Sachlichkeit — sobriety and realism — the awakening cannot come soon enough. The alternative is not climate salvation but national decline. Germany, and Europe with it, stands at the threshold. The only question remaining is whether its leaders will step through it before the lights go out for good.

Germany sits at the center of Europe’s trade network, but it is not the only global force shaping the continent’s economy.

This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Gabriel Cohen, highlights the top trading partner of each European country based on International Monetary Fund data for Q1-Q3 2025.

Europe’s nearly $30 trillion economy is diverse and spans sectors such as energy, manufacturing, and agriculture, yet nearly half of all European countries rely on the same major trading partner for their imports and exports.

Germany: The Center of Europe

Germany is the top trade partner for 19 European countries, more than six times as many as the next closest countries, which each count just three.

This dominance reflects Germany’s central role in European manufacturing, supply chains, and intra-EU trade.

The table below shows how many European countries rely on each nation as their top trade partner, highlighting Germany’s outsized role in the region.

The Dutch, French, and Italian economies, among others, are closely linked to Germany, which is a major industrial player and consumer of primary goods ranging from crude oil to agricultural products. German cars and other high-value exports, meanwhile, have found success across European markets, especially within the 27-member European Union.

The following table shows each European country’s largest trade partner.

While Germany is Europe’s trade giant, its own largest trade partner is the Netherlands. The two countries have an annual trading relationship worth more than $200 billion, marked by extensive economic integration and joint supply chains.

The Netherlands, home to Europe’s largest seaport at Rotterdam, is also the main trade partner of neighboring Belgium, with which it forms part of the Benelux union.

Europe’s Other Top Trading Partners

Many European countries trade most with their largest neighboring country. For example, Malta’s main trade partner is Italy. Portugal’s top trade partner is Spain, while Spain’s is France.

The Baltics take this a step further: Latvia’s largest trade partner is Lithuania, while Lithuania’s is Poland. Estonia’s main trade partner is Finland, while Finland’s is Sweden. Poland and Sweden, in turn, maintain their largest trade relationships with Germany.

Some clear exceptions emerge. As the world’s largest economy, the U.S. is the primary trade partner of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

The Rise of China to the East

While Germany dominates within Europe, China is expanding its influence along the continent’s eastern edge.

It is now the top trade partner for Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, displacing traditional European partners such as Germany in some cases.

Chinese exports to Russia and Ukraine play a major role in the country’s relationship with both Eastern European nations. Beijing also imports significant amounts of primary goods from the two warring countries, including food and mineral products from Ukraine as well as hydrocarbons from Russia.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The $19 Trillion European Union Economy on Voronoi.

Via Remix News,

Since Ukraine’s population has shrunk dramatically, the army’s number one problem is no longer the lack of weapons, such as ballistic missiles and air defense systems, but the lack of soldiers to operate them, writes Világgazdaság.

The authorities in Kyiv, however, must bring the army size required by Commander-in-Chief Zelensky (800,000 active soldiers), and since the number of men eligible for military service (between the ages of 18 and 60) is slowly running out, the Ukrainian leadership is now trying to fill the gaps by conscripting women. 

As of early 2024, approximately 5 million men are considered to be of conscription age in Ukraine, reduced from about 8.7 million before the February 2022 invasion due to death and emigration.

And yet, many of these 5 million are exempt, unfit for service, or already serving.

Ukraine has long been shown to use forced conscription methods, with increasing violence, leading men to attempt to leave the country, often at the risk of their lives. 

Last year, Hungarian channel M1-Hirado recently ran a special compiling some of the latest footage of Ukrainians being beaten and shoved into vans in forced mobilization operations.

Citizens across the country have fought back since the war began, especially in areas populated by ethnic Hungarians, who feel they have been targeted.

As of now, there is no full mobilization of women.

According to lawyer Rostislav Kravec, the fact that women can also be included in the list of those who refuse military service or deserters could be a kind of “test” by the authorities.

This way, they can gauge how public opinion would react to the general, mandatory mobilization of women.

Meanwhile, although both sides have contended claims of territorial gains or losses, Russian armed forces are slowly pushing Ukrainians out of the fortified towns in Donbas. 

Read more here…

Authored by William Andersen via The Mises Institute,

Christianity Today recently published an article by Kristy Etheridge that was very critical of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, something that would not be surprising, given the magazine’s evangelical Christian outlook on issues.

The article—again, not surprisingly—dealt mostly with how many Christian groups, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, have spoken out against Canada’s program and similar programs in Europe and in the US.

Wrote Etheridge:

Many Christians spoke out against assisted suicide in the 1990s when Dr. Jack Kevorkian became a household name for participating in dozens of suicides in Michigan. Since then, evangelical passion against assisted suicide seems to have waned. While evangelicals have left a void in many public spaces regarding end-of-life issues, the Catholic church has often stood in the gap. As more states and countries consider legalizing the practice, believers must raise their voices together in defense of life.

Christians who oppose assisted suicide affirm that life is sacred. God created human beings in his image (Gen. 1:27), and we do not have the right to destroy ourselves or each other.

Brad East, writing in Christianity Today, noted:

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

Promoters of assisted suicide always couch their arguments in the language of compassion for those suffering from terminal illness, and 11 US states also permit assisted suicide, all of them except for Montana being dominated by the Democratic Party. This practice always has been couched in the language of “death with dignity,” and it generally has strong support from the political left, although the hard-left socialist publication, Jacobin, recently had an article by Jeremy Appel critical the circumstances under which some Canadians choose suicide, declaring:

But the legalization of MAiD has brought to the fore some disturbing moral calculations, particularly with its expansion in 2019 to include individuals whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable.” This change opened the floodgates for people with disabilities to apply to die rather than survive on meager benefits.

I’ve come to realize that euthanasia in Canada represents the cynical endgame of social provisioning within the brutal logic of late-stage capitalism — we’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself?

The problem with my previous perspective was that it held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, which are often out of their control.

It is not surprising to see Jacobin blaming capitalism for something done within the confines of a socialist system, but socialists go by the mindset that says if something is bad, it is the fault of capitalism, since socialism produces only happy results. But Appel is not wrong in pointing out that what began as a way ostensibly to end the suffering of terminally ill people has morphed into a program responsible for one in 20 Canadian deaths, with more than 100,000 people killed since the program began a decade ago, as Canada’s government did away with the requirements that only those with terminal illnesses could request doctor-assisted suicide.

Indeed, the government is happy to recommend MAID to people for a variety of reasons. An 84-year-old woman who visited a Vancouver emergency room with back pain was offered MAID by an attending physician, a suggestion the woman turned down. The government is even expanding its program to cover people with mental illness, including veterans who experienced PTSD as a result of trauma suffered in combat in places like Afghanistan, with MAID eligibility for these people coming in 2027. Appel writes:

In another instance, retired corporal Christine Gauthier, who is paraplegic and competed for Canada at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics and the Invictus Games, was offered assisted suicide, with Veterans Affairs offering to provide her with the necessary equipment.

Gauthier had been fighting for five years to have Veterans Affairs provide her with a wheelchair ramp. They wouldn’t provide the ramp, but they would give her the means to end her life.

Most Critics Fail to Recognize the Real Reason Maid Exists

There are plenty of religious and moral reasons to criticize this kind of a program. Although many libertarians have openly supported assisted suicide (with some exceptions), it is important to separate the “right to die” movement from programs like MAID in Canada and in Europe, such as the Netherlands, which has had an assisted suicide law on the books for more than 20 years. Whether or not one supports such policies, as bad as many believe they are, it becomes much worse when government healthcare agencies are the entities recommending that people have doctors put them to death, as there is no way a program like this does not become coercive.

In a country like the US, the government cannot refuse medical care to someone who does not seek another doctor to end one’s life. In Canada and most European countries, that is exactly what the government can do. While entities as far apart religiously as many religious groups and Jacobin might decry the same things—for different reasons—they are united in their support for the welfare state and state control over medical care.

The Christianity Today writers and others in the evangelical camp such as World Magazine tend to frame MAID as a purely ethical issue, and while ethics obviously play an important role in all of this, none of these writers seem to understand that Canada’s government-controlled system has made good medical care even more scarce than it should be. It should be obvious even to someone like Appel that Canada’s system reduces the amount of available care, which should surprise no one who is familiar with socialism.

As noted before, many of complaints against assisted suicide are rooted in a belief that people choose to have medical providers kill them is because they lack resources. Appel writes:

An excellent piece from Global News reporters Brennan Leffler and Marianne Dimain, headlined “How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death,” notes the “excruciating cycle of poverty” that leads disabled people to choose assisted death, rather than live a life filled with barriers to their existence.

Appel then declares more government spending as the solution:

We’ve let the MAiD genie out of its bottle. There’s no going back. We must ensure that our health care systems have sufficient resources to guarantee everyone, regardless of ability or mental health, a dignified existence.

Appel, however, has it wrong. Poverty supposedly does not matter in the Canadian system because no one pays for medical care. This isn’t a case of Joe dying of liver disease because he can’t afford a liver transplant; this is about Canada’s system having shortages of doctors, equipment, medicine, and all of the other components of healthcare, and shortages are a feature of socialism.

In other words, the way to keep people from using the medical establishment from taking their own lives is to expand medical care, and since outfits like Jacobin see government as the only legitimate provider of health care, that means pouring even more tax revenues into the medical system. Yet, it should be clear that government control of the medical system—especially in Canada—has very predictable results: shortages and denial of care. 

More than 20 years before Canada instituted its MAID program, Jane Orient—a practicing physician—predicted that the Canadian system would find that the premature death of patients would provide financial savings to the program.

Writing about government-provided care, she likened it to providing only freeways to move automobile traffic:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all the medical care you needed or wanted, without ever worrying about the bill?

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to drive to work every day without ever paying a toll or stopping at a red light?

The second question usually provokes much more critical thought than the first. Before people vote the money to build a freeway through their downtown, a lot of inconvenient objections are raised.

The first is this: Do we want to tear up the main business district of town?

The idea of “comprehensive health care reform” to “assure universal access” should stimulate the same thought process. To build such a system, you start by destroying the insurance and medical system that we already have.

She continued:

When we build a freeway, we don’t necessarily destroy all the other roads. In Britain and Germany, private medicine is allowed to coexist with nationalized medicine. But in Canada, it isn’t. If you’re a Canadian and want something the government isn’t willing to pay for, or you want it now instead of three years from now, you have to go to the United States.

A lot of proponents of “universal access” want to close the private escape hatch. They want no other roads, just the freeway. Of course, there may be some back alleys or secret tunnels or special facilities for Congressmen, but those won’t provide American-class medical care to ordinary folk.

Some think we don’t need other roads if we have a freeway. But remember what a freeway is: a controlled access road.

Orient continued her freeway analogy, noting that the Canadian system is not built on ensuring better care, but rather promoting equal care, even if that care might be substandard or even non-existent:

In Canada, you don’t have to pay to get medical care. In fact, you are not allowed to pay. Once the global budget is reached in Canada, that’s it. The on-ramps are closed. It doesn’t matter if you have money. Hospital beds are empty for lack of money to pay nurses, and CT scanners sit idle all night for lack of money to pay a technician. But if some people are allowed to pay, Canadians fear that some people might get better care than others.

In other words, Canadian care is more about people equally sharing scarcity than being able to get medical help for their ailments. She noted that the government systems like what we see in Canada routinely deny care for serious illnesses and medical problems, while promoting euthanasia as a solution:

The roadblocks are at the exits that lead to the hospital. The global budgeters “contain costs”—ration health care—by denying those things that you do need insurance to pay for: heart surgery, radiation treatments for cancer, hip replacements, things like that. Out of “compassion,” reformers may open another exit: the one that leads to the cemetery. Do you think it’s accidental that euthanasia and “universal access” are on the agenda at the same time? When government gets involved in providing health care, health care must be rationed.

Given that medical care is a scarce good, there always will be tradeoffs and some form of rationing. However, government systems discourage entrepreneurship and are more likely to be restrictive, increasing the scarcity problems and making it even more difficult for people to receive care that can make the difference between life and death.

Advocates of state-sponsored medical care claim that rationing by price is immoral, but rationing by bureaucratic decree is a moral imperative.

Thus, if Joe were to die because he could not afford a heart transplant, that would be immoral, but if he were to die because the government agency making those decisions denied that care, that would satisfy all moral criteria.

Conclusion

Assisted suicide is on the increase in places like Canada because it permits the government to deny medical care in the name of compassion and “dying with dignity.” It should not be surprising to see increased rates of doctor-sponsored killing running parallel with more government involvement with health care.

As we see more state involvement with medical care, the relative scarcity problems with health care will increase, and as medical scarcity increases, physician-assisted suicide rates also will rise. Death is already built into socialism, so we should not be surprised to see practitioners and advocates of socialized medicine welcoming the Grim Reaper as one of their own.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the mainstream Christian groups (such as the Presbyterian Church USA and the Episcopal Church) that openly support the Canadian system and demand it be implemented in the U.S. are silent about the proliferation of medical suicide incidents, either ignoring the problem altogether or quietly supporting it.

Because they are blind to the negative effects of the massive state-sponsored intervention they support, their response to MAID and other assisted suicide movements is to call for more of the same.

Just as Europe’s neoliberal establishment was celebrating the downfall of Hungary’s Orban and his replacement with… another hard-line ant- immigrationist, it got some bad news on Sunday, as Bulgaria’s pro-Russian former President Rumen Radev was set for a runaway victory in the election and may even secure a parliamentary majority in the poorest EU state, ‌exit polls showed, potentially ending years of weak coalition governments and altering the European Union member’s foreign policy.

An updated exit poll conducted by Sofia-based Alpha Research showed Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria with 44%, far ahead of the long-dominant GERB party, led by former Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, at 12.5%.

If confirmed, the performance, which outstripped opinion polls, would mark one of the strongest results by ​a single party in a generation, sideline a party that has ruled on and off for decades, and may see an end to the ​instability that has resulted in eight elections in five years.

“Progressive Bulgaria won decisively. This is a victory of hope over ⁠distrust, a victory of freedom over fear, and finally, if you will, a victory of morality,” Radev said of the exit poll results during a press conference.

Radev, ​a eurosceptic and former fighter pilot who opposes military support for Ukraine’s war effort against Moscow, stepped down from the presidency in January to run in the parliamentary election, ​which comes after mass protests forced out the previous government in December.

According to Reuters, Radev rode a wave of frustration with political instability in the Balkan country of 6.5 million people, where voters are sick of corruption and veteran parties that have dominated politics for decades. Alpha Research put turnout at 47% with one hour of voting to go, up from the 39% total in ​the last election in October 2024.

“There is now an opportunity for the things people have been hoping to see change to actually become visible,” Evelina Koleva, a ​manager at digital marketing company in Sofia, told Reuters.

Final election results are expected on Monday.

In his campaign, Radev drew comparisons with Hungary’s pro-Kremlin former Prime Minister ‌Viktor Orban ⁠when he talked about improving relations with Moscow and resuming the free flow of Russian oil and gas into Europe. He also criticized the EU for relying too heavily on renewable energy.

It is not clear how much his views will impact the foreign policy of Bulgaria, a NATO member on the EU’s southeastern flank which joined the euro zone in January – a move Radev has criticised.

He said he would be willing to work on judicial reform with the pro-European reformist We Continue ​the Change-Democratic Bulgaria (PP-DB) coalition, which came third ​in the Alpha Research exit polls ⁠with 11.3%. A minority government was also an option in the 240-seat parliament, Radev said.

“Bulgaria will make efforts to continue its European path,” he said. “But a strong Bulgaria and strong Europe… needs pragmatism because Europe has fallen victim to its own ​ambition to be a moral leader in a world without rules.”

GERB’s Borissov appeared to concede in a post on ​Facebook, but added a ⁠note of caution: “To win the elections is one thing; to govern is quite another. Elections decide who comes first, but negotiations will decide who governs.”

Bulgaria has developed rapidly since the fall of communism in 1989 and joined the European Union in 2007. Life expectancy has risen sharply, unemployment is the lowest in the EU, and the economy has ⁠greater safeguards ​since joining the euro zone in January. But it lags behind other EU countries in many metrics, ​and graft remains endemic, including in elections, where vote-buying is rife.

The cost of living has become a particular issue since Bulgaria adopted the euro. The previous government fell amid protests against a new ​budget proposing tax increases and higher social security contributions.

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

Both benefit from this since the US wants to avoid India sliding into turmoil amidst the global energy crisis and possibly offsetting its envisaged role as a counterweight of sorts to China while more energy revenue from India preemptively averts Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China.

The Treasury Department renewed the US’ Russian oil sanctions waiver on Friday two days after Secretary Scott Bessent said that this wouldn’t happen.

It remains unclear what exactly accounts for this flip-flop, but it’s possible that Trump 2.0 concluded that a deal with Iran might not be reached as soon as some optimists expected, so it’s better to keep Russian oil on the global market for another month to maintain global economic stability. Russia and the US’ shared Indian partner gains the most from this.

The IMF recently assessed that India will remain the world’s fastest-growing major economy for this year and the next at 6.5% growth in both, and maintaining this is imperative for both Russia’s and the US’ interests. That’s because India balances between both, having been perceived as tilting a bit closer towards the US in February after the interim Indo-US trade deal was agreed to but then recalibrating back to Russia last month due to the global systemic consequences of the Third Gulf War.

As was explained here in March when the US issued its Russian oil sanctions waiver for India before making it global, “The new world order that it envisages has India playing a prominent geo-economic and geopolitical role, especially vis-à-vis China, ergo why it temporarily waived the sanctions on Russian oil purchases in order to avoid India sliding into turmoil and possibly offsetting this scenario if it didn’t.” As for Russia, it supplies India not just to make a profit, but also to advance its own strategic goals.

These relate to relying on India as an alternative pressure valve from Western sanctions pressure for preemptively averting potentially disproportionate dependence on China and bolstering India’s new tri-multipolarity balancing act for accelerating the global systemic transition to complex multipolarity. Far from feeling like India “betrayed” it as Pepe Escobar falsely claimed last month, Russia recently offered to supply India with as much energy as it wants, which it obviously wouldn’t do if it felt “betrayed”.

On that topic, India had scaled back its import of Russian oil in January to 1.06 million barrels per day amidst speculation about its compliance with US sanctions as its trade talks with the US were nearing their end, but then nearly doubled this last month. According to the Times of India citing Kpler, “India’s purchases of Russian crude reached 1.98 million barrels per day in March”. April’s were 1.57 million barrels per day but are expected to rise next month after maintenance at a major refinery is completed.

India is therefore expected to remain the primary beneficiary of the US’ renewed sanctions waiver, which advances the US’ and Russia’s goals that were earlier described, but the US is also expected to end this policy and resume its secondary sanctions threats against Russia’s oil clients in the event of peace with Iran. Lavrov warned the world last month about Trump 2.0’s plans for global dominance, especially in the energy industry, which could take the form of pushing through the “DROP Act” in pursuit of this goal.

It’s premature to predict whether India would comply with future US pressure to once again scale back its import of Russian oil since it’s required to fuel its economic rise much more than the interim Indo-US trade deal is. At the same time, if Pakistan helps mediate a US-Iranian peace deal, India might want to remain in the US’ good graces to prevent the US from pivoting to Pakistan at its expense.

The interplay between these four and China, the US’ strategic rival, will determine the future of regional geopolitics.