The Bear and the Dragon

A guy who's written a couple books on the topic of Russia and energy politics gets interviewed:

Putin continued to do what his imperial and Soviet predecessors had always done. Instead of looking to the East and absorbing the implications of this new reality, he focused on the West and neglected the East. Marx might have said that Putin suffers from “false consciousness.” From the long-term perspective, both the prizes and the threats lie in the East. Yet Putin—together with the hydrocarbon-based oligarchy that surrounds him—continued to focus on Europe. In rhetoric, he talked about a “pivot to the East,” but in practice Europe remained his chief market.

An irony here is that the Russians had already begun diversifying away from gas transit through Ukraine before the war. Nord Stream 2 is actually the last of five new bypass pipelines to Europe; another decade and the gas divorce would have been final.

But Europe is declining and China is rising. Putin is focused in the wrong direction.