The war exposed the failure but it was there all along. And I'll go a step further, being a bit more familiar with EU politics: this wasn't "failure" as in "random occurrence", it was set up to fail because of explicit financial interests at the top and misguided ideology for the rest. We knew the risks 30 years ago and yet German leaders in particular doubled down on reducing resiliency and increasing dependence on a high-risk partner in exchange for money and "feel good" lies to tell themselves and everyone else. EU has ran out of capable and reasonably honest leaders, now we have people with more strings attached than a piano. I say this as someone who's literally rubbed elbows with some of these people for years.

Let me frame it in the IT landscape. If your storage kicks the bucket but you had no real backup, no procedures to bring back anything, and no spares you couldn't blame it on a random act outside of your control. If it turned out you had repeated warnings but instead chose to phase out backups and to replace the enterprise storage with SD cards from a shady manufacturer then you really wouldn't be able to claim "random act of God". And if when all is said and done you end up on the board of the shady SD manufacturer that kind of seals the deal on whether you are to blame or not.

The situation is fully under their control:

First, because it is a result of their energy policy over the last decade(s).

Second, because the consequences of "the war" are driven by how they decided to react to it.

"The war" is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Everyone could see that the sh*t had to hit the fan one day because of the terrible energy policies in most of Europe... when that happens politicians are always very keen to find reasons "outside of their control"...

Very much like Covid, very much like infrastructure like railroads or highways, very much like the health-care system. Their failure is incompetence fueled by ideology-driven politics for which they tried to undermine the very foundations of the German democracy (e.g., take away state-level authority during Covid).

The US wasn’t the only one who warned the German government about the geopolitical risk they would be exposed to.

Angela Merkel shut down nuclear power in Germany and then tied our industry to Putin.