policy making principle putting business first, not military power well, suddenly it looked like weakness. chancellor olaf scholz promised dramatic change. my guest is state secretary for economic cooperation niels annen. so, has germany got a new strategic vision? niels annen, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. pleasure. well, it s great to be here. let s start with the war in ukraine. i think there s no doubt that putin s invasion of ukraine shocked germany. would it be fair to say it has also destabilised germany? no, i don t think so. but it certainly shocked germany because a lot of our economic model was based on the assumption that we would continue using cheap russian natural gas. and it was also based in a kind of historic, should i say, historic experience that although russia was a competitor and an enemy in the cold war, it was always also, in economic terms, a quite reliable partner. and i think that was somehow, you know, seen as a constant policy. and we did n
of three years has been cheating on me with some little skank. audience: ooh! and, do you want to know the best part about it all, though? yes, i would like to. his own mother was the one who walked in on them. jeremy paxman interviewed jerry springer back on newnight back in 2014. here s a bit of it. jerry springer, the godfather of the confessional chat show, is here. are you ashamed of it? uh, the show s stupid, i ve always thought the show s stupid. ashamed? no. shouldn t you be? no, not any more than a journalist should be doing the news. because, for example, you would make a living. let s say you re a journalist, let s say you do the news every night. every night, you tell stories about very bad things and it s very profitable for the station. you re not necessarily helping the people you talk about. newspapers are in that business all the time. you could decide only to put well scrubbed, wealthy people who speak the queens english on television and just do that. but t
my guest is state secretary for economic cooperation niels annen. so, has germany got a new strategic vision? niels annen, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. pleasure. well, it s great to be here. let s start with the war in ukraine. i think there s no doubt that putin s invasion of ukraine shocked germany. would it be fair to say it has also destabilised germany? no, i don t think so. but it certainly shocked germany because a lot of our economic model was based on the assumption that we would continue using cheap russian natural gas. and it was also based in a kind of historic, should i say, historic experience that although russia was a competitor and an enemy in the cold war, it was always also, in economic terms, a quite reliable partner. and i think that was somehow, you know, seen as a constant policy. and we did not really realise that it s not the soviet union any more. it s a brutal dictator and an unpredictable dictator. but what you ve just described is a very big de
For decades, Germany built its economic power on Russian energy and trade with China - that has left Germany looking vulnerable, so what is the new strategy?.