Donald Trump has spent much of his second term picking fights with Europe – the continent that has contained, ever since the conclusion of the Second World War, most of the USA’s closest trading partners and friends.
On Monday, though, the President did something he hadn’t done before all that often – he landed a legitimate criticism on the behaviour of some of the bloc’s nations.
“The European Union paid Russia 250 Billion Dollars for Energy, and the Fake News Media doesn’t want to get near that story,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “I made the right choice for the American People – ALWAYS, AMERICA FIRST!”
Trump was drawing attention to the fact European countries have continued to buy oil and gas from Vladimir Putin’s Russia even after its invasion of Ukraine, and after sweeping sanctions were imposed on it for doing so. Several nations obtained exemptions from those sanctions to continue buying from Russia, because their energy systems were dependent upon it.
Several landlocked European nations rely upon Russian pipelines for their electricity and heating in winter, and got exceptions from the sanctions to continue buying them. But even countries as far west as France still routinely buy Russian hydrocarbons.
Trump isn’t even wrong about the scale of the purchases. Russia itself estimates that it’s sold around €320bn ($209bn) of oil and gas products to Europe since 2022, a sum rivalling the $226bn which Europe has contributed to Ukraine’s defence. Trump didn’t quite make this point, but it is true that Europe is effectively funding both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war.
If Trump’s point was just that Europe should break its reliance on Russian oil and gas – and should have started doing so long before 2022 – he would be entirely right. But naturally, that isn’t the point that the US President is making. Instead, he’s using the figure to justify his own secret deal to buy diesel from Russia, ahead of the midterm elections next month.
Even as Trump signed a deal passed by Congress – in honour of his close friend and ally Senator Lindsey Graham, who died over the summer – to increase sanctions on Russia, Trump made a secret deal to buy up to 1.8 million tonnes of diesel from Russia which he only announced last week, when the first tanker was reaching US shores.
While 1.8 million tonnes of diesel sounds like a lot, in reality it is only around three days’ supply for the US market, and would be dramatically less than Europe buys from Russia. But in classic Trump style, the President has missed the point of his analogy.
Trump has cut this deal in the hope it might temporarily reduce diesel prices in the weeks before the midterm elections, which Republicans are set to lose, and heavily. As Trump likes to boast, the US produces most of its own oil and gas, and is insulated from the worst of the impacts of both the Russia-Ukraine war, and those of his own war against Iran. European nations are largely buying Russian hydrocarbons through sheer necessity. Trump is doing it by choice.
Every barrel of oil or shipment of gas European countries buy from Russia helps fund its war of aggression against Ukraine. Trump is correct when he calls Europe out for doing that. But to do that while voluntarily choosing to hand Russia even more money – and a PR win, to boot – shows just how clueless he really remains.