Frank Walker7 said:I'm not quite following your train of thought, though I think I caught your point at the end where you're really asking about the specific price tag involved.
What exactly is so hard to grasp here?
To actually extract resources, they need technology—technology they’d have to purchase because they simply don't possess it, and I highly doubt anyone is just going to hand it over as a gift.
Even if they have existing wells, keeping them operational requires maintenance, which again, demands foreign tech.
If they want to mine ore at prices that actually make economic sense, they're back to square one: needing technology they don't own.
Then there's agriculture. To plant anything meaningful, you need high-yield seeds (which they buy from Americans) and the machinery, like tractors, to scale production. They pull all of that from Germany or the USA. They don't have their own. The only alternative is using low-quality seeds and outdated methods.
And even when something finally grows, albeit in much smaller quantities, they still have to harvest it. Again, more machinery, more tech, and so on.
All those oil reserves, gas, minerals, and miles of empty land don't mean a thing if they can't actually utilize them. It’s that old saying: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. In this case, it feels like they killed the bird in their hand with a cruise missile just to try and catch the ones in the bush, only to watch the whole thing fly away.
And yes, the European Union will eventually have to pay whatever the market demands, likely at a premium. But, the EU also has its own resources that it'll now be forced to develop and utilize—something it really should have been doing a long time ago instead of relying solely on cheap handouts from neighbors. We're seeing now that "cheap" often turns out to be significantly more expensive than it looks at first glance.
It’s like what wealthy people say: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things." Well, I suppose the European Union has just learned that lesson the hard way.
