The issue, to which we don't have the answers, what will Germany do? So, the real wild card in Europe is that as the United States builds its cordon sanitaire, not in Ukraine, but to the west, and the Russians try to figure out how to leverage the Ukrainians out; we don't know the German position. Germany is in a very peculiar position. Its former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is on the board of Gazprom. They have a very complex relationship to the Russians. The Germans themselves don't know what to do. They must export, the Russians can't take up the export. On the other hand, if they lose the free trade zone, they need to build something different.
For the United States the primordial fear is Russian capital, Russian technology ... I mean, German technology and German capital, Russian natural resources, Russian manpower, as the only combination that has for centuries scared the hell out of the United States. So how does this play out? Well, the US has already put its cards on the table. It is the line from the Baltics to the Black Sea.
For the Russians, their cards have always been on table. They must have at least a neutral Ukraine, not a pro-Western Ukraine. Belarus is another question. Now, whoever can tell me what the Germans are gonna do, is gonna tell me about the next 20 years of history, but unfortunately the Germans haven't made up their mind, and this is the problem of Germany always. Enormously economically powerful, geopolitically very fragile, and never quite knowing how to reconcile the two. Ever since 1871 this has been the German question, the question of Europe. Think about the German question, because now it's coming up again. That's the next question that we have to address and we don't know how to address it, we don't know what they are going to do.
