what fortuitous news did rainmaker get in the pipeline?”
Inside the European pipeline fantasy that became a real-life gas war with Russia. By Daniel Freifeld Foreign Policy When Joschka Fischer’s lucrative new job as the “political communications advisor” to a consortium of European energy companies was leaked to a German business publication this summer, there was one comment that stood out. “Welcome to the club,” said Gerhard Schröder, an even more highly paid advocate for the other side in Europe’s increasingly politicized energy war.Schröder’s remark was short, snide — and very much to the point. For eight years, the two men had led Germany together, with Schröder ruling as its center-left chancellor and Fischer as his foreign minister. Their long-running partnership had survived a particularly complicated era in post-Cold War Europe, and publicly Fischer had always been supportive, even telling Der Spiegel that Schröder “will go down in the history books as a great chancellor. “But since their coalition government collapsed in 2005, Sc
They now have a heavyweight rainmaker in Fischer, who is going toe to toe with his old boss Schröder in the struggle for influence in the path of the pipelines. The recent EU agreement with Azerbaijan and the fanfare-laden treaty signing in Turkey are contributing to the sense that Europe is leveling the playing field with Russia. “We have started to confound the skeptics, the unbelievers,” European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said in July. “Now that we have an agreement, I believe that this pipeline is inevitable rather than just probable.”And yet, if recent experience teaches anything, it is not to count Russia out, especially when so much is at stake. When I raised this issue with Russian Energy Minster Sergei Shmatko at a meeting in Bulgaria in April, he shot me a threatening glare and cautioned against planning for an energy future without Russia, unless the Europeans were fully prepared to deliver it. “We have an expression in Russia,” Shmatko told me.
