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Befitting its status as a country bridging Europe and Asia, the Turkish government’s massive crackdown on the country’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) opposition party and arrest of Ekrem Imamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul and leader of the CHP, has immediate implications for the entire region. Recent events are raising alarm bells in Europe that Turkish chaos could hurt an already energy-hungry Europe, which depends on Türkiye’s energy transit.
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President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to attain peace between Russia and Ukraine have already prompted questions about the future of Russian energy exports, the country’s main cash cow, and whether the door will open to joint projects between Russia and the E.U or the U.S. Whatever progress is made in any negotiations, will be difficult if not impossible to go back to pre-2022 arrangements. Doing so isn’t necessarily in the E.U.’s or America’s strategic or economic interests.
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Ariel Cohen discusses the water security challenges faced by the Central Asian states and potential solutions to these issues at a panel event with The Clingendael Institute.
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President Donald Trump’s guarantee to supply liquefied natural gas to Europe furthers his broader push for U.S. “energy dominance,” marking a stark reversal of the Biden Administration’s pause on the approval of new LNG export infrastructure permits. While Trump’s approach to energy policy correctly identifies LNG as a growth driver and an essential geopolitical lever, expanding LNG exports risks impacting domestic energy prices and should be balanced with other reliable sources of energy like nuclear power to maximize its benefits and ensure long-term energy security.
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As international tensions grow, scientific developments become more crucial than ever to creating war-winning technologies. There is a reason the Manhattan Project was kept under strict security measures – and even then, there were leaks.
Beginning in the 1940s, Stalin’s USSR used intelligence to steal America’s atomic secrets and develop nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets ran a massive spying operation to gain access to submarine, computer, and space tech. In preparation for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and as the conflict continued, Russia ramped up its intelligence gathering and influence activities around the world. Recently, concerns have once again been raised that Moscow has had an unobstructed path to obtaining information about cutting-edge nuclear technology from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
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The Caspian Sea, vital to Eurasia’s economy and environment, is shrinking at an alarming rate. The declining water level in the sea is one visible consequence of a larger regional water crisis faced by the C5 nations of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. This water crisis threatens the more than 82 million people who call the largely arid region home.
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Europe has been rocked by a series of decisive elections in the past months. In Germany, the populist-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, won Thuringia’s state election, marking the first victory of a nationalist party in a German state election since 1945. This follows the party’s political gains earlier this year when the ruling coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats suffered a significant defeat in the EU parliament elections at the hands of the AfD, which got the second-highest share of the votes, upending the ruling Social Democrats.
The 2024 NATO Summit, to be held this week in Washington, D.C., marks the trans-Atlantic Alliance’s 75th anniversary. NATO, which came to the U.S.’s aid after 9/11 and deployed a contingent to Afghanistan, guarantees not just strategic cooperation across the Atlantic but also bolsters the economic prosperity of its member states. America’s abundant energy resources pair perfectly with Europe’s scarcity of oil and gas to create a win-win partnership, enabling Europe to avoid total energy dependence on authoritarian suppliers in Russia and the Middle East.
In a time when the United States and the Western allies appear weak on the international scene, restoring deterrence needs to be Job One as the NATO 75th anniversary summit begins today in Washington, D.C.
In the recent presidential debate, more energy went into bickering over who deserves to be president, and even their golf scores, than about what America and the West should do next to secure our collective democratic capitalist future against challengers like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
There is nothing more important than the security and defense of the realm. The president of the United States has the unenviable position of serving as commander-in-chief, often without having the appropriate background and experience, while simultaneously addressing a myriad of other pressing political, economic, and social issues.
A superyacht is a status symbol and the ultimate pleasure boat. What ordinary people envisage doing on cruise ships, the super-rich do on their mega-yachts. Space and change of scenery have appealed to humans from time immemorial. However, with luxury yacht ownership requiring vast sums of disposable income, one would think that factors putting the global economy under pressure, such as inflation, Houthi terrorists and Somali pirates attacking ships in the Red Sea, sanctions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and before that, the COVID-19 pandemic, would slow down the demand for superyachts. Instead, despite severe disruptions, mainly because of the post-Ukraine 2022 Russian invasion sanctions, with billions sloshing around in the global economy, demand for these vessels has reached a high point, driven by changes in the tastes of the ultra-rich, innovative new uses for superyachts, and the number of buyers able to splurge on such craft.
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For Ukraine, winning on the battlefield is not enough, as Kyiv must ensure that the country’s economy stays afloat. If exports continue to slump, Kyiv could lose its ability to finance the war effort and sustain its population even further. Thus, maintaining the flow of its agricultural exports is vital.
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America’s defense industrial base is not ready for the dangerous global environment in which the U.S. and the West find themselves. For the White House, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress, continuing to neglect this situation is no longer an option. The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conducted and reported on a series of U.S.-China wargames —in nearly all of them, U.S. forces ran out of some precision-guided munitions within a week.
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Dr. Ariel Cohen appeared on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene to discuss the elections in Russia.
Watch here.
The US House of Representatives appears to be so dysfunctional that Mike Turner, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had to go public to respond to a major national security threat from new Russian anti-satellite weaponry. Meanwhile, the other Mike, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, is delaying a vote on crucial foreign aid to provide means for Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine to defend themselves.
Energy, specifically the Biden Administration’s liquified natural gas (LNG) future infrastructure development pause/ban, is also on the Congressional agenda. The recent White House decision is one of the worst in a string of failed energy decisions, including the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico.
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Congressional hearings scheduled for February 6 and 8 expose the Biden administration’s massive energy policy blunder. This misstep will impede American energy production, undermine economic growth, endanger the hard-earned U.S. status as the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, and threaten Washington’s strategic credibility among friends and foes. The hearings are set to unite a strange assortment of political bedfellows, including liberal democrats determined to support Ukraine and conservative Republicans determined to expand LNG exports. In late January, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a series of new measures aimed at the U.S. LNG sector. Projects already completed or near completion, including several large export terminals in Texas and Louisiana, will be put on hold indefinitely.
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Vladimir Nekrasov, a prominent executive in Russia’s energy sector who criticized Putin, has had a tragic accident. These unavoidable twists of fate mean that up to 40 of the top managers in Russian energy have died since the war in Ukraine began. Coincidentally, they all commonly express skepticism towards Russia’s energy strategy, its funding streams, and its ability to fund the Kremlin’s war effort.
Prior to exposés recently released by Le Monde and Der Spiegel, it was assumed these deaths were Putin sweeping away the opposition and shaking down oligarchs for much-needed capital. While this remains true, the revelations that multiple French and German companies were cooperating with the Russian state in an “arctic pivot” for energy exports may have revealed another reason. Many of these Russian executives stood to lose significantly from Russia’s new energy strategy: pivot exports to the difficult-to-monitor Arctic to mitigate sanctions and may have resisted the transition.
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In one of the most important energy deals in its history, Germany is purchasing its single largest power grid thus far. It plans to acquire Dutch state-owned operator TenneT Holding BV for $20 billion Euros. In doing so, it hopes that this will help it realize its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045 through the nationalization of its power grid and utility system. However, local politics and an inflexible energy policy may turn out to be Germany’s worst enemies.
Germany is still recovering from a self-inflicted crisis which spurs its spending spree. After it halted Gazprom’s gas deliveries in September 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the largest economy in Europe was forced to scramble for coal and ad-hoc energy arrangements from around the globe to buttress its energy baseload. Electricity prices went up over 500% in 2022 before dropping. GDP is also stagnant, with 2022’s GDP growth lagging at 1.8%. One may think that in the midst of the worst energy crisis since the 1974 Arab oil embargo, Germany would be happy with all of the energy it could get. It was not.
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Carl Sagan once said, “The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist-deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” The near-universal recognition of the futility of an all-out nuclear war led to widespread cuts in nuclear armaments since Gorbachev’s perestroika and the Soviet collapse in 1991. Even anti-communist hawks like former President Ronald Reagan pragmatically cut nuclear arms. The US and the USSR cut strategic arsenals from over 30,000 warheads each to approximately 1550 by 2011.
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Putin’s chef and international villain par excellence, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s half-baked coup against Russia’s Vladimir Putin highlighted just how toxic Russia has become as a global business partner. While Prigozhin ostensibly failed and his power base is being purged, his failed coup revealed the fragility of the Russian state.
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In the year after Russia’s 2022 reinvasion of Ukraine, freight volume more than doubled on the Middle Corridor, a transportation network connecting Asia with Europe via rail, boat and highway. In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new U.S. approach to Central Asia that stressed the facilitation of the Middle Corridor, which bypasses Russia. This route removes Russia’s ability to extort its neighbors by leveraging its transit infrastructure while expanding an independent economic artery to the states of Central Asia and further to China.
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Interstate relations are normally governed by self-interest and restraint but the ongoing war in Ukraine, when coupled with Russia’s escalatory bent, have rendered predictions about a return of political and energy stability precarious, if not impossible.
The Cipher Brief recently spoke with Ariel Cohen, director of the Energy Growth and Security Program at the International Tax and Investment Center, about the spillover of the war into a global energy crisis and what that means for 2023, when Cohen says we may experience “the toughest circumstance in Europe probably since World War II.”
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While Putin may no longer see the utility in showing unity with Russia’s business elite, going from “unshakable unity” in March 2022 to imploring “patriotism over profit” in March 2023, this does not mean they are unimportant. After being banned from traveling to most Western nations, these oligarchs lost 97 billion dollars and counting. Sanctions deeply hurt the Russian economy and even resulted in some non-energy oligarchs risking their lives publicly calling for peace.
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The West must understand the groundswell of anti-Russian sentiment that is sweeping Central Asia while understanding the structural constraints facing these governments. An Atlantic Council event “How can Kazakhstan and Central Asia power and feed the world?”, for a forthcoming report by Margarita Assenova, Ariel Cohen, and Wesley Alexander Hill elucidates many of these problems and solutions.
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On its one-year anniversary of invading Ukraine, Russian gas sales were halved compared to before the war. Russia hoped that Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow would allow for some relief. Xi did deliver some flowery language, stating “Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven't seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together” when describing relations with Russia. Xi also emphasized the importance of energy in an earlier open letter, writing that “China is ready to work with Russia to forge closer partnership in energy cooperation.”
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The Green icon Greta Thunberg seems to be taking a pro-nuclear stance. The Swedish climate activist once decried nuclear energy as being “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming”. Her views seem to have changed in tandem with recent trends in public opinion as she recently argued that Germany shutting down its nuclear plants was a ‘mistake’. Greta, alongside other climate activists, emphasized that the alternative to nuclear would be coal, a most polluting energy source.
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