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Thursday, 18.04.2024, 11:52
U.S. Efforts To Derail Russian Pipelines To Europe Have Failed Since The 1960s. Will Nord Stream 2 Be Any Different?
The Trump administration and the U.S. Congress are fighting
to block the 9.5 bn-euro ($10.6 bn) Nord Stream 2 project amid fears it will
make NATO allies and other European countries more reliant on Russian energy
and damage Ukraine by depriving it of transit fees.
The 1,220-kilometer-long pipeline -- which extends from
Russia's Leningrad region along the Baltic Sea floor to the northern German
resort of Lubmin -- will double Germany's imports of Russian natural gas.
"It really makes Germany a hostage of Russia if things
ever happened that were bad," Trump said at a June 12 meeting in
Washington with Polish President Andrzej Duda, also a fierce opponent of the
pipeline.
Using its political and economic influence with European
allies, the United States has repeatedly tried to halt Kremlin energy projects
in the past -- such as the Friendship (Druzhba) oil pipeline in the 1960s and
the Brotherhood (Bratstvo) gas pipeline in the 1980s.
Those previous attempts not only failed, they raised the
hackles of European leaders who accused the United States of interfering in
their internal affairs. Some analysts say the U.S. effort to block Nord Stream
2 is headed down that same path.
"It is about European sovereignty and that is not
understood in Washington," says Josef Braml, head of the USA-Transatlantic
relations program at Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartige Politik in Berlin.
Nord Stream 2 "can be delayed and made more expensive, but it can't be
stopped. The train is gone."
Trump is to visit Poland from August 31 to September 2 and
then travel to Denmark, whose government has yet to give Russia permission to
build the pipeline through its Baltic waters.
Russia is hoping to complete the project by the end of the
year. That timeline depends on Denmark as well as the impact of any possible
U.S. sanctions.
The Danish Energy Agency is considering the project's two
proposed routes through its exclusive economic zone, which includes a review of
environmental and security-related impacts.
"It is not currently possible to say how long this
process will take," the agency said in a statement to RFE/RL on August 8.
Two days earlier, Jens Mueller, a spokesman for Nord Stream 2, told RFE/RL that
more than 70% of the project had been completed.
U.S. Alternatives
With time running out, Congress seems to be moving fast.
On July 31, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved
a bill that would impose sanctions on vessels building the pipeline as well as
their owners. The Senate could vote on the bill in September after its summer
recess.
Republican senators introduced a separate bill in June aimed
at imposing sanctions on investment, goods, and services that facilitate the
development of Russian energy-export projects such as Nord Stream 2.
Trump has recommended Germany buy U.S. liquefied natural gas
(LNG) instead of Russian gas. "We have something much better. We have
tremendous LNG. And I think that's really the way," Trump said on June 12
before announcing that Poland would buy another $8 bn worth of U.S. LNG.
Though the cost of delivering U.S. LNG to Europe is higher
than that of Russian pipeline gas, factors including different pricing formulas
mean European consumers may not end up paying more for U.S. energy, says Nikos
Tsafos, an energy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington.
Still, there is no sign yet that European companies are
stepping back from Nord Stream 2. Shell, OMV, and Wintershall are
among European companies financing the project, which is owned by
state-controlled Russian giant Gazprom.
No vessel operators have backed out of the project,
spokesman Mueller says. "More than 1,000 companies from 25 countries work
on it and are fully committed to seeing the project completed," he adds.
Meanwhile, Moscow is not happy with the opposition to Nord
Stream 2. Igor Sechin, head of state oil giant Rosneft and a close
confidant of President Vladimir Putin, in June accused the United States of
imposing sanctions on energy-producing countries -- such as Russia and Iran --
to make room for its own growing output of oil and gas.
The United States will account for slightly more than half
the world's growth in gas exports through 2024, with a portion going to Europe,
according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Kennedy And Reagan
Scraps over Soviet pipelines were a feature of the Cold War.
In the early 1960s, Kennedy sought to halt the Friendship (Druzhba) oil
pipeline leading from the Tatarstan region to Europe by pushing West Germany to
cancel steel-pipe contracts with Moscow.
Critics of the policy said that the sanctions drove the
Soviet Union, which completed the project, to become self-sufficient in
wide-diameter pipe production, hurting Western manufacturers.
About two decades later, Reagan used a similar tactic in a
bid to block the more than 4,000-kilometer-long Brotherhood (Bratstvo)
pipeline, which was being built to bring natural gas from Urengoi in Siberia to
Western Europe.
In December 1981, he prohibited U.S. companies from selling
products and technology to the Soviets for the project. Like Trump today,
Reagan offered U.S. energy, including coal. In 1982 he extended the embargo to
include European subsidiaries of U.S. companies as well as equipment
manufactured in Europe under U.S. license, such as compressors.
Reagan imposed the sanctions after Poland declared martial
law, a move he pointed out was supported by the Soviet Union. Members of his
administration indicated one of its motives was to reduce funding for the
Soviet military.
George Ball, a senior State Department official during the
administrations of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both Democrats, asserted at the
time that the Republican Reagan's policy would serve Moscow's interests by
sowing division in the Western alliance.
"The Reagan administration's frenetic efforts to
obstruct the building of the Soviet-European natural gas pipeline are marked by
hypocrisy, self-deception and an astonishing ignorance of the past," he
said in an editorial in The New York times in September 1982. "No matter
how much we bludgeon our friends, we will not stop the Soviet pipeline any more
effectively than the Kennedy administration was able to block" the
Friendship oil pipeline.
Ball also argued that the notion that the Kremlin would cut
a dollar from the military budget for each dollar it lost in foreign-currency
receipts ignored how the Soviet Union operated: "Unlike the leaders of
democracies, the masters of the Kremlin can largely ignore public opinion in
allocating resources."
Trump and members of Congress have suggested that depriving
Russia of income it might spend on the military is among the reasons for
stopping Nord Stream 2. "We're protecting Germany from Russia. And Russia
is getting bns and bns of dollars of money from Germany," Trump said on
June 12.
European Gas Needs
Meanwhile, the view that Nord Stream 2 threatens European
energy security is not universally agreed upon.
Europe's gas markets have changed significantly over the
past decade due to the growth of LNG, development of non-Russian export
pipelines, and greater connectivity between European states.
The Trans-Adriatic Pipeline will next year begin carrying
natural gas from the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea to Europe for the
first time. The pipeline will have an initial capacity of 10 bn cubic meters
that can be doubled.
The discovery of major gas fields off the coasts of Egypt,
Cyprus, and Israel and development in the Black Sea off Romania potentially
increases the number of European suppliers in the coming years.
"The proposed sanctions goal of protecting Europe from
Russian energy blackmail is based on an obsolete understanding of energy
markets," Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote this month.
"Thanks to these new discoveries, the shale-gas
revolution in the United States and construction of LNG terminals, more
suppliers will be competing for a share of Europe's burgeoning gas
market," he said.
In fact, the IEA forecasts Russian piped gas to Europe will
remain flat over the next six years following a record high of about 200 bn
cubic meters in 2018. Russia's share of total European gas demand will decline
slightly from 37 % to between 33 and 36% through 2024, the agency predicts.
Tsafos says that those concerned about the impact of Nord
Stream 2 need only to look at its predecessor, Nord Stream. Nord Stream, which
began operation in 2011, did not so much hurt European gas security as reroute
how Europe receives Russian gas, he explains.
While it cut some transit through Ukraine, Nord Stream
allowed Kyiv to receive gas imports from its western neighbors, improving its
security, something few predicted at the time, Tsafos adds. "You have to
think about this as a dynamic system. The gas transportation network can adjust
and adapt over time. Therefore, a lot of the concerns that people have might
sometimes be overstated," he tells RFE/RL.
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