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> This is pretty basic supply and demand stuff. It's hard not to conclude that a major US goal was cutting Europe off from Russian gas, and replacing that with

> This is pretty basic supply and demand stuff. It's hard not to conclude that a major US goal was cutting Europe off from Russian gas, and replacing that with American LNG. You can find all sorts of quotes to this effect from the US government before 2022: It’s actually very easy to conclude that this is not the case because selling a few billion dollars worth of oil simply isn’t worth global destabilization. To the extent that this was some sort of “goal” of the US (under the Trump admin I’m guessing?) it’s a minor goal at best. The reason Biden for example said that the pipeline was a bad idea was because Europe was placing its energy security in the hands of Russia, which as we saw turned out to be a bad idea. Note previous Russian aggression in Crimea in 2014, etc. Similarly to “NATO expansion” being a dog whistle to anti-American sentiment the “the US wants to sell gas” is another attempt to distract from much more plain and serious truths such as Putin simply thought he’d be able to take over Ukraine and wanted to do so.

photochemsyn 4y ago
It's more like an extra $100 billion in revenue. Not counting the military procurement bill, which is what, approaching $20 billion? This war is a real cash cow for certain sectors of the US government (fossil fuels and defense contractors), although the resulting inflation isn't doing anyone else any favors.
- ericmay 4y ago
  Yea so not a lot of money and not worth the global instability, hence it’s a very poor theory. A much better one would be something like the US knowing that the Russian military was in very rough shape and that an invasion would lead to the permanent decline of Russia and shore up allies in Europe and elsewhere so they goaded Putin into action by not doing anything after previous actions in places like Crimea. But that’s also prescribing too much agency to the US government.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's more like an extra $100 billion in revenue. Not counting the military procurement bill, which is what, approaching $20 billion? This war is a real cash cow for certain sectors of the US government (fossil fuels and defense contractors), although the resulting inflation isn't doing anyone else any favors.

ericmay 4y ago
Yea so not a lot of money and not worth the global instability, hence it’s a very poor theory. A much better one would be something like the US knowing that the Russian military was in very rough shape and that an invasion would lead to the permanent decline of Russia and shore up allies in Europe and elsewhere so they goaded Putin into action by not doing anything after previous actions in places like Crimea. But that’s also prescribing too much agency to the US government.