President Trump has warned at a NATO summit that German dependence on Russian gas poses a major security threat to the West. It’s about time somebody said it!

This problem has been brewing for decades. In fact it goes right back to the communist era of the Soviet Union, when the Russians saw the burgeoning green movement as the perfect way to undermine their enemies in the free West.

Originally, the Soviets funded the “Peace Movement” in Western Europe mainly as a way of promoting the campaign for nuclear disarmament (in the West, that is, not behind the Iron Curtain). They were especially successful in Germany.

As Rupert Darwall writes in his book Green Tyranny – as discussed on Curt Schilling’s show – one of the leading figures in the German Green movement Petra Kelly was actually dating a Soviet agent. Ostensibly, her lover Gert Bastian was an ex-NATO general who had quit to head the Peace Movement’s Generals for Peace and Disarmament. In reality, he was a Stasi spy – and when the details were about to emerge in the early 90s after German reunification, Bastian shot first Kelly then himself.

As well as undermining the West’s missile defences, the German Greens did a very successful job of tarnishing the name of nuclear power – Atomkraft? Nein Danke! – in Germany generally. The result was that large numbers of planned nuclear power projects which might have given Germany energy independence similar to that enjoyed by France were nixed.

Despite their ugly past – they attracted both ex-Nazis and cultural Marxists under the influence of the Frankfurt School – the Greens went from strength to strength. They were largely responsible for driving the disastrous policy, known as Energiewende, which has hamstrung German industry, driven hundreds of thousands of Germans into energy poverty, and also led to this new German dependency on Russian gas.

Energiewende is about weaning the German economy off fossil fuels and encouraging renewables instead.

But because wind and solar are intermittent and unreliable, base load capacity has to be provided by fossil fuels.

Green campaigning has made it increasingly hard for fossil fuel producers in Germany to make any kind of profit.

So guess who is now providing the energy shortfall?

The very people who, all those years ago, sowed the seeds of Germany’s green energy suicide: the Russians.