The Great Oil War of 2020 Has Begun. Can Russia Win? Russia enters this oil price war with two overarching objectives: drive U.S. producers out of business, and expose Riyadh to the limits of American support. Will Putin prevail? by Nikolas K. Gvosdev After the latest round of U.S. sanctions against Russia was signed into law last year, Russian president Vladimir Putin warned that Russia would retaliate at a time and place of its own choosing. Wrecking the OPEC-Plus arrangement and provoking a demolition-derby price war with Saudi Arabia may seem to be an odd and puzzling way to respond, but there may be a method to that madness. I believe that the Kremlin is gambling that, by year’s end, it will be able to not only push back against the United States but also to reconstruct its partnership with Saudi Arabia.
One of the major flaws of U.S. politicians is their bad habit of loudly proclaiming their strategies months or even years in advance, giving their adversaries plenty of time to prepare. Over the past two years, members of Congress have made it absolutely clear that Russia’s Ukraine bypass pipeline projects—Turkish Stream and Nordstream-2—were in their crosshairs. Moscow attempted to accelerate the completion of these projects before a slow-moving U.S. legislative process could finalize another round of punitive sanctions. Turkish Stream was completed just in time and is already sending Russian energy to Turkey and Southern Europe. Meanwhile, Nordstream-2 would have made it if it hadn't been for those pesky Danes and their environmental protection processes, which held up work on Nordstream just long enough for an eleventh-hour U.S. sanctions push. Even with that assistance—and thanks to a spat with Denmark over a possible sale of Greenland—Moscow had so much advanced warning that it asked its European contractors to focus on the most technically challenging parts of the line first. Gazprom possesses the technical capacity to finish the line—way behind schedule, to be sure—but Nordstream is likely to be completed by the end of 2020. Yes, the delay was sufficient enough to compel Russia to continue to use Ukraine for some export transit, but Moscow’s position in the European energy markets remains largely intact.
So the backup U.S. plan has been to encourage Europeans, while Nordstream remains unfinished, to buy more energy produced from North American sources. Indeed, an important part of U.S. strategy in a new era of great-power competition is to compete with Russia for energy markets and to diminish the resources Moscow can accrue as an energy exporter.
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https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/great-oil-war-2020-has-begun-can-russia-win-131187
