Putin: There are other markets for our natural gas and oil besides Europe

The $400 billion deal inked this past week between Russia and China means that the Kremlin can prioritize its customer base for energy differently now:

While President Obama was lauding hashtag campaigns to free kidnap victims in Nigeria and opining on the fate of an NBA franchise owner, Russia was busy concluding a historic deal that instantly replaces the European Union--its number one market, its number one strategic commodity--with China. It thereby eliminated what remained of Europe’s already-diminishing leverage against Russian aggression, not just in Ukraine, but in Eastern Europe in general. While the two sides have been unwilling to make public many of the terms of the long-sought arrangement, the outlines alone appear sufficiently ominous to Western analysts. 

Russian President Vladmir Putin’s promise to strengthen his country’s geostrategic balance by reducing its dependence on Western markets and capital through deepening Russia’s ties to China and other rapidly developing economies of the East have come to fruition more quickly and comprehensively than even he might have imagined.

Russia does not only instantly obtain a privileged position as the primary supplier--initially of natural gas, but perhaps soon of oil also--to the world’s largest and fastest growing country. It also ensures dramatic expansion of Russia’s energy sector with the infusion of at least $75 billion in capital required to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide its natural gas to China and the tens of thousands of high paying, high skilled jobs that will come with it. 

Consider the implications:  For one, the Most Equal Comrade willfully keeps the US out of the world energy marketplace by dithering on the Keystone XL pipeline and coal-industry-killing EPA regs.  Canada thereby sees, as Russia does, China as a promising market for its wares.  And then there is the matter of where Europe will go for its natural-gas and oil needs.  Who do you think will step up to the plate on that one?

While Obama refuses to exercise U.S. resources to advance U.S. interests, the EU is being cravenly seduced with offers of cheap gas by medieval theocrats ruling the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently on the negotiating table from Iran is an offer to supply the EU with 50 million cubic meters of Iranian natural gas provided through recently installed and easily upgradable pipelines through Turkey to meet growing EU demand.
The price of this offer is one Europeans seem only too happy to pay: dropping sanctions and all other tangible opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program to enable Iran to access the Western funding needed to develop the infrastructure. Rather than providing a ferocious and matched objection to any possible EU capitulation to Iranian energy offers with offers of its own, the U.S. says and does nothing. 

When you're ruled, as post-America is, by a radical socialist who welcomes his own country's decline, and, in his arrested development, sees foreign policy as boring when compared to golf and parties with celebrities, you get a world in which we're much less in charge of our destiny.