It looks like Putin outfoxed your moronic president, AGAIN. How incompetent is this obama failure anyway?
(why am I asking that of somebody just as hypocritical and incompetent?)
Putin Outfoxes Obama Again With China Gas Deal
Leadership: In a historic game changer, Russia and China have signed a $400 billion natural gas deal, and Iran is now offering to supply Europe's gas needs. What a wasted opportunity for a U.S. bereft of any energy strategy.
The full chess-master acumen of Russia, China and Iran was on display this week, foremost in a massive, 30-year Russian agreement to supply Siberian natural gas to China, signed Wednesday by Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation officials as Russia's President Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping looked on.
The "Power of Siberia" deal will supply 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas each year to China, expanding Russia's presence to a major new market in the still-growing Far East at preferential prices to China, and more to the point, undercut sanctions imposed on Russia by the West over its annexation of the Crimean peninsula and invasive actions in the Ukrainian east.
Weak as those U.S. and European Union sanctions were, they are now weaker still because Russia now has a great big new market. Analysts say that Russia and China view this deal, signed fast after 10 years of talks, as a way of showing that "the West doesn't matter."
And sadly, it doesn't, given the lack of leadership and strategic vision coming from Obama's administration.
The deal comes on the heels of Iran's offer to supply Europe with 50 million cubic meters of natural gas through a pipeline across Turkey, which could be expanded from its current capacity.
The idea is to entice Europe to lift its sanctions so the deal can go through and Iran can get access to the $300 million in capital it needs for the project.
European Union officials have been silent on the idea. But they have stated that they want access to other markets and are actively looking to Qatar, Azerbaijan, Norway and Algeria to expand their suppliers as well, because Russia supplies 34% of Europe's natural gas.
As Putin slips the sanctions noose, the U.S. is caught flat-footed, because it has no energy strategy to secure U.S. leverage in the region.
Fact is, the Obama administration has stubbornly failed to use U.S. energy development to its strategic advantage, just as the U.S. energy industry, astonishingly, is on the cusp of an innovation revolution with new technologies for extracting oil and natural gas from places no one thought possible a decade ago, making the U.S. poised to become the new Saudi Arabia. |
