New Cold War
with Russia Over Oil and Gas
By Paolo Pontoniere
A new Cold War is under way, but unlike the conflict
of the Reagan era it is not a fight for military
supremacy but rather for gaining control, directly
or through commercial proxy, of energy resources.
At the heart of this new conflict are Western
attempts to defuse Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s drive to transform his country into
a new oil and gas superpower with vast bargaining
power with the European Community. Russia is already
the world’s eighth largest producer of crude
oil and the first of natural gas.
Most recently, UK authorities blamed Russian intelligence
for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko,
a former KGB spy, who had accused Vladimir Putin
of leading an autocratic, murderous and corrupt
government. Litvinenko was a figure in the struggle
between the Putin government and Russian oligarchs
(whom Western powers favor) for the country’s
most prized possessions -- the oil and gas fields
controlled by the Russian oil companies, the state-controlled
Gazprom and the privately held Yukos.
Litvinenko’s assassination nearly coincided
with the signing of a commercial agreement between
Gazprom and ENI-Italy’s largest energy conglomerate
-- for the distribution of natural gas to Western
Europe. The first of its kind, the agreement would
allow Gazprom to operate independently under the
supervision of the Italian partner, which would
be tantamount to the Russian giant selling its
product directly to consumers in Western Europe,
bypassing EU’s regulatory constraints.
Western powers have come to despise what they
see as Russia’s heavy-handed form of capitalism,
as in the case of mining rights to the Arctic
sea floor, which is believed to hold vast oil
reserves. According to Moscow, under the newly
operating United Nations Convention on the Law
of the Sea, more than 50 percent of those submerged
resources belong to Russia. This assertion has
compelled other powers -- such as Denmark, Norway,
Canada and Iceland -- to stake their own claims
to some of the same underwater territories. The
controversy is leading to an increased militarization
of the Arctic, with Russian battleships often
confronting the vessels of oil developers and
Western navies.
“Putin has decided to make a huge energy
superpower out of Russia and there’s almost
nothing that can stop him,” says Robert
Hueber, an analyst at the Center for Security
and International Studies. “Unless something
slows him down, there’s no way for the West
to prevent him from putting his hands on some
of the most prized resources of the planet.”
Although China’s higher profile in Africa
is providing cause for concern to the United States
and its allies, it is Russia that generates their
strongest reactions. They believe Russia is using
its energy clout for geopolitical gains, especially
in the regions that were once under the Soviet
control but are now independent countries.
Western powers have been vehemently denouncing
Russia for last year’s rows with Ukraine
and Belarus over the price of gas. Russia temporarily
shut down its gas and oil shipments to these countries
as a result of the quarrel. The action in turn
caused great worry and anger in Western Europe,
which imports respectively 30 percent of its oil
and 40 percent of its gas from Russia.
In some countries like Poland, Finland and Slovakia,
imports account for more than 70 percent of consumption,
and in Hungary the percentage soars above 89 percent.
Reacting to the shutdown, Germany’s Chancellor
Angela Merkel said Russia had lost its credibility
as an energy partner.
Western analysts have also accused Moscow of conspiring
to turn the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
-- an intergovernmental body composed of China,
Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,
with India, Pakistan and Iran as invited observers,
meant to foster good neighborly relations and
deal with issues of Central Asian security --
into a sort of “OPEC with nuclear weapons,”
as described by Simon Sweeney, director of the
International Studies Programme of York St. John
University College in the United Kingdom.
Not all analysts, however, are convinced that
Russia wants to wage a New Cold War with the West
and in particular with the United States.
“Someone is still fighting the Cold War,
but it isn’t Russia,” Mark Almond,
a professor of modern history at Oriel College,
Oxford, wrote in The Guardian. “The chill
is still coming from the West.”
Thomas Friedman, a devout pro-West observer, agrees.
Should Moscow, he writes, really decide to leverage
its energy resources to subjugate the international
community, it would have other, sharper arrows
in its quiver.
Russia could, as many of its hardliners have suggested,
ban products from Moldova and Georgia or block
the transit of their unemployed jobseekers to
Russia, thus causing these countries’ economic
collapse. Moscow could also destabilize Georgia,
Ukraine, Moldova and Kazakhstan and then agree
to annex -- as these populations have requested
-- their pro-Russian minorities living near the
borders of the old Motherland.
In the case of Georgia and Kazakhstan, destabilization
could be extremely hard on the United States and
its Western allies, as it would totally compromise
direct access to the immense oil resources of
the Caspian region -- on which the West is greatly
reliant -- and their transfer to Western ports.
Thus, for now, and short of an all-out confrontation
with the Old Bear, the Western powers can only
lash out at the feared expansionism of the New
Oil Czar by accusing Moscow of renewed charges
of murderous plots and dark conspiracies. –
New California Media
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