Yeah the EU leadership has been really shortsighted on these past decades (especially since the 10s), especially in their strategic energy and industrial sectors.

Be it the Ukranian conflict, the ME crisis, the NA wars and instabilities, etc. The EU is the one that geopolitically speaking lost the most.

Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests, I simply do not understand how they could leave foreign actors to dictate policies that affect thier own territory and enterprises without any sort of critical thought.

But even then, they could not have possibly been all mere puppets. And yet.

It was cheaper, I don't think it's much more complex than that. And with fossil fuels, countries without significant local production are always dependent on someone else, with most potential suppliers being problematic in some way.

Of course we should have gone for renewable energy more forcefully, but that wouldn't have resolved the issue. That change will take time, and you can't arbitrarily accelerate it.

I guess you only need maybe 20% of them to be puppets to mess around. It’s a lot easier to damage than to build.

Aren't those really easy to explain?

EU opposes the Houthis because they are a horrifying slave state that distributes children as sex slaves to their troops.

EU opposes Russia because it is a horrifying fascist dictatorship that has repeatedly invaded it's neighbors, and constantly talks about it's historical claims to EU territory.

In the NA conflicts it's harder to draw such a clear line, because the conflicts typically have about 15 sides each, but the basic algorithm you can use is generally that EU tries very hard to pick sides based on morality, not geopolitical interests.

> Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests,

The European parliament has been bought 10 times over by the lobbies.

See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...

"By some estimates, they influence 75% of legislation"

> But even then, they could not have possibly been all mere puppets. And yet.

Even if the lobbying was not reason for all the bad decisions of the EU, the EU parliament has no way to actually propose any laws on its own. All the laws emanate from the commission which is also bought and paid for by you guessed it, the lobbies.

The issue was 1990s-2000s Germany argued it was in Europe's best interest to integrate Russia into the European fabric, but 1990s-2000s France+UK+Italy argued it was in Europe's best interest to integrate the Mediterranean into the European fabric.

When the UK left the EU and France+Italy were in the midst of their economic doldrums due to the Eurozone crisis, this left the hard power states within the EU comparatively weakened.

But the collapse of Minsk II and the ongoing war in the Middle East led to a cascading crisis for a unified Europe.

> Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests

It's an open secret that Russian money is deep, deep in European politics.