Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe

Earlier this week, one gas-industry insider told The Financial Times that without access to U.S. technology, Russia’s hopes to develop a liquefied natural-gas industry would be squashed “like a bug.”

.. Obama repudiated the lies Vladimir Putin has told about Ukraine: that the Ukrainians somehow provoked the invasion, that they are Nazis, that their freely elected government is somehow illegal. He rejected Russia’s claim that it has some sphere of influence in Ukraine, some right of veto over Ukrainian constitutional arrangements. And he forcefully assured Estonians—and all NATO’s new allies—that waging war on them meant waging war on the United States. “[T]he defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London,” Obama said. “Article 5 is crystal clear. An attack on one is an attack on all. So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, who’ll come to help, you’ll know the answer: the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America, right here, present, now.”

This is the ultimate commitment, given by the ultimate authority, in the very place where the commitment would be tested—and would have to be honored. There’s no turning back from that. Today, for the first time perhaps, Eastern Europeans have reason to believe it. And Vladimir Putin? His depredations have brought about the very result he claimed most to fear: a reanimated NATO rededicated to the defense of all its members, new and old, West and East, backed by the ultimate commitment of the United States.

Oil and Erbil

Obama’s defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal—as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example—are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company,

For Western Oil Companies, Expanding in Russia Is a Dance Around Sanctions

To keep it that way, oil companies are publicly and privately pushing back against more sanctions by speaking out at shareholders’ meetings and by lobbying in Washington.

“We have a responsibility to stand with our partners in a difficult time,” Mr. Dudley of BP told an audience at the St. Petersburg forum.

.. From its swamps, tundra and wilderness, Russia pumps about the same volume of oil as Saudi Arabia, while exporting more energy than the desert kingdom, if oil and gas are counted together. Russia supplies about one-third of the gas to heat homes and generate electricity in Europe. And Russian oil and gas exports help ease energy reliance on the politically volatile Middle East.

For that reason, many analysts think Russian energy companies like Rosneft are simply too big to punish.