Catalyze June 22

CATALYZE MAGAZINE | 20
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO
SOLVING THE SDG'S
CONTINUED...
Patrick Theros:
A single important quality is the ability to understand the other nation from its own
point of view. What are its interests? What is its historical background? What are its
particular problems? Let me give you a current example. The EU is pushing for a
complete embargo on Russian oil and later on Russian gas, which is fine in principle,
but it affects different countries in different ways. So before you can impose such an
embargo you have to get everybody to buy-in. And sometimes the country that suffers
the least that thought up this idea because they're suffering the least has to make
some real sacrifices to help the country that's suffering the most.
A good example is that something like 80 or 90% of Czech gas comes from Russia.
The Czech pipeline system isn't connected to any other pipeline except pipelines
going to Russia. This is a very sort of specific and narrow approach, but other countries
all have their own interests at play, and doing a "one size fits all" approach is very
difficult unless the countries that suffer least make the sacrifices to help the countries
that suffer more.