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The Third Family · Stay in the Room Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Third Family.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Two nuclear powers are weakening the rules, and Europe is being invited to do the same.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Breaking them would cost it the only thing holding it together.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: In October, at Lubmin on Germany's Baltic coast, the far-right AFD held a conference.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was beside the idle terminal that used to take Russian gas from Nord Stream.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of its members of the Bundestag called for the plant to be restarted, and he hoped his P.O.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Lisch guest had no objection.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Shedgors Braun, leader of the Confederation of the Piolish Crown,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: said his party wanted to become shareholders in the Reconstruction.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then he borrowed a line from Apocalypse Now.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love the smell of Russian gas in the morning.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Wall Street Journal reported Washington's proposal.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Russian gas would flow back into Europe through the old pipelines across Ukraine.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: It would be sold through an American intermediary to get round European sanctions.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The proceeds would be held in escrow,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: and there would be a lucrative opening for American investors.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The administration, the journal reported,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: is wagering that European resistance will prove less rigid than meets the eye.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: This project supports Ukraine's right to defend itself and Europe's security.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Think of it as two crime families.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Kremlin has treated international law as optional since it seized Crimea in 2014.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump White House does it by deal.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: They threaten each other, trade with each other,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: and share a contempt for any rule that binds the strong.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the second family's methods are reported.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Others are only alleged.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Washington has kept up a naval blockade of Iranian ports since July.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: U.S. forces carried out limited strikes near the Strait of Hormuz on 2 November,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: described as defensive.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Plans for a renewed campaign have been drawn up.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Trump says he has no immediate plan to launch one. Meanwhile, J.D.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Vance writes to Tehran, offering talks.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: In Poland, local reporting alleges that Trump privately urged the defence minister,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamis, to leave the governing coalition and side with the right.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Kosiniak-Kamis has confirmed the meeting, but not the proposal.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In Romania, Anne Applebaum reports in The Atlantic,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: the US ambassador to Greece pressed the case for American liquefied gas.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Prime Minister declined a contract because the price was not competitive.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Within months, a coalition party,
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: whose leader the ambassador had been filmed dining with,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: joined the far right in a no-confidence vote that brought him down.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Its leader denies any American influence.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has shown cause.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the sequence makes Europeans nervous.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then there is the bill.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: According to the EU, as the Wall Street Journal reports it,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: the Iran war has cost Europe an extra 100 billion euros in energy.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Reuters has reported protests over fuel prices and living costs this autumn
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the parties seeking to capitalise on that anger want Russian energy back.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Roberto Vanacci's new party in Italy, Braun's in Poland.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in Germany, the AFD, which leads the latest INSEE poll on 29%.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Put that together and a business model comes into view.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The war has pushed up Europe's bill,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: and Washington proposes Russian gas as the relief through an American middleman.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: My own reading, not anything reported,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: is that American suppliers also do well while the shock lasts.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: What the figures show is the scale of Europe's dependence.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The energy analysts IEFA expect the US to supply two-thirds
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: of continental Europe's liquefied gas imports this year.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: None of this needs a conspiracy.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And families is a loose word.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Neither the White House nor the Kremlin is a single will,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: and Europe's nationalist right is less coherent still.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Moscow even cheers Piolish parties that loathe Russia,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: but their separate actions push the same way.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: They weaken the EU's legal order,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: and that order stands between each of them and separate countries,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: easier to bargain with one at a time.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now the trap...
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the argument at full strength.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: A rule follower facing two rule breakers is bled out slowly.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It obeys the law while its energy is priced against it and its streets fill.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Push that far enough and Europe has to choose.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the rules and lose, or break them and survive.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Become the Third Family.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here is what would prove this piece wrong.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: If member states start buying Russian gas outside EU law this winter,
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: or Brussels suspends its own rules to cope,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: then on the question that matters most this winter, the choice is real.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: The hardest case is Poland.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: On the night of the 30th of October,
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: a group of judges elected by the current Parliament suspended the head
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: of the Constitutional Tribunal.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: He is a former minister in the Nationalist Law and Justice Government.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The judges took control of the court.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: President Karol Narocki, who has refused to swear in five of the new judges,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: turned his plane round and pushed his way into the building.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Tusk is right on the appointments.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: In October, the Council of Europe's Venice Commission said
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: the President's refusal should not stop the new judges taking their seats.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: An older ruling on a different appointment sets the principle.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights found that a tribunal bench,
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: including an improperly elected judge, was not a lawful court.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: That does not settle the legality of what those judges did next, and his own side doubts it.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights calls the legal basis for the suspension questionable.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Marcin Matchak, a law professor and fierce critic of law and justice, calls it non-existent.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Tusk's answer, there is no other way.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it started in 2015.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Both the outgoing centrist government
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: and the incoming nationalist one made legally questionable moves to stack the court.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So Poland is the trap made real.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: A government defending the rule of law has stepped to its edge,
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: and its opponents have the word they wanted.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Dmitry Medvedev called it a constitutional coup.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: My judgment is that Tusk took a necessary risk.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: In Hungary, Peter Magyar won a two-thirds majority in April.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: In July, he used it to amend the constitution and remove the Orban-era president,
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: who could have referred his reforms to the constitutional court, hard-edged.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But constitutional because he had the votes.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Tusk does not.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Overriding a presidential veto in Poland takes three-fifths of the Segem,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: and his coalition lacks it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Waiting for next year's election could mean losing the court for good.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the price is real, and it will be paid on the street.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who wants to tell Poles they have been betrayed has just been handed a story.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So why is the choice false?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Poland shows what bending the rules costs.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not that Europe must break them.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The EU is not a state.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: It has no army, no single sovereign,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: and no general power to suspend its treaties and restore them later.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Its emergency provisions work inside the treaties, not above them.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is 27 countries held together by treaties and courts.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Its coherence is the rule of law.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: The day Brussels deliberately sets its treaty obligations aside, Robert Fico,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: or a nationalist government in Warsaw or Paris,
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: can say the treaties no longer bind them either.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Breaking the law to save the Union would hand them the argument,
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: and the law has more room in it than the trap admits,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: though it matters who is acting.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Ukraine, as the state attacked, may defend itself and take countermeasures against Russia.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Other states may help it, at its request and within limits,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: under the UN Charter's right of collective self-defense.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whether countries not directly injured may take countermeasures
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: of their own is contested, so EU sanctions rest on the Union's own treaty powers.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Europe is also a lawmaker.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: The ban on Russian gas, approved in January,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: phases out liquefied imports from the start of 2027,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: and pipeline gas from the autumn.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: That is law Europe chose to make.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The frozen Russian assets show the same habit.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: The EU has kept them immobilized rather than seize them,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: and separately it agreed a €90 billion loan for Ukraine,
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: funded through EU borrowing, and repaid only when Russia pays reparations.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Both were decided in the open, by vote.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: What Europe cannot do is play the family's game.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Blockading Russia's Baltic ports would be cheered by some.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the UN's own definition lists a blockade of a state's ports or coasts
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: by another state's armed forces as an act of aggression.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Trying instead to choke Russian trade at the Straits would bring Europe
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: into conflict with long-established passage regimes for the Danish Straits
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: and on the Black Sea route for the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Europe's own shipping depends on them too.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Iran makes the point.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: If Washington believed trade brings peace, it would offer Tehran what it offers Moscow.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, the strong get deals and the weak get a blockade.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Europe's advantage is that its rules bind the strong as well.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: American voters have delivered a rebuke to Trump.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Democrats took control of both the Senate and the House.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: The AP reports high living costs and the Iran war among voters' frustrations.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a rescue.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Trump remains President until January 2029.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the gas plan, the blockade and Poland, are not waiting for Congress.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The danger for Europe is not that America forces it to submit.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is that Europe's own voters, cold and squeezed, vote for submission and call it common sense.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Britain has both ends of this.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: On the right, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss condemned Tusk's move.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: On the left, George Galloway, a former RT presenter,
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: told Russia's state news agency TASS last month that Moscow has already won
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: in Ukraine.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Europe's answer to two families cannot be to become a third.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Its rules are all it has.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether it can use them faster than the families can break them.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: This piece draws on reporting by Gazetta Y.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Borkshire, The Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters, The Guardian, Regex Bospolita,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: TASS, and Anne Appelbaum in The Atlantic,
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: and on figures from IFA and the INSEE poll.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Full sources are in the written version on Substack.