Source: Nord Stream 2 AG
President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing governments worldwide to digest the geopolitical consequences of war pursued by an energy superpower.
The 27-nation European Union has responded by speeding up its disconnection from Russian gas, while the U.S. has barred Russian oil imports and is scouring the world for alternative supplies. Saudi Arabia is reveling in a renewed strategic importance as crude prices that collapsed two years ago hit new highs.
And Russia, by threatening to withhold energy exports to Europe, is being thrust closer to China.
With the war in its third week, the shifts underway are inflaming old grievances but also creating the opportunity for fresh alliances as blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order.
“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,” said Bob McNally, president of Washington-based […]
One of the most frustrating aspects of this sad reality is that we see a likely solution right in front of us, and both major schools of international relations, ‘Realists,’ and ‘NeoConservatives,’ miss it. So does much of the peace movement, obsessed as they usually are with the weaknesses and flaws of existing democracies- and so missing how they differ from other countries. There has never been a war between representative democracies. Never. Even among nations that had hundreds of years of historical conflict when one, and usually both, were not democratic.
In some ways the neocons are the worst here because they claim foreign policy should seek to democratize the world, and in pursuit of this goal they undermine the factors within existing democracies that make them peaceful in this way. Not only did Iraq fail, we got the Patriot Act and further militarization of our own society.
The ‘democratic peace’ is a systemic feature largely divorced from deliberate policies. I and others have published careful pieces on it for years and here is one example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248651907_Democracies_and_Peace_The_Self-Organizing_Foundation_for_the_Democratic_Peace