Russia attacks the West’s Achilles’ heel

Russia has found the Achilles’ heel of the US colossus. In concert with its oil-producing partners and the rising powerhouse economies of the East, Russia is altering the foundations of the current US-led liberal global oil-market order, insidiously working to undermine its US-centric nature and slanting it toward serving first and foremost the energy-security needs and the geopolitical

aspirations of the rising East.

All this is at the impending incalculable expense of the West. What is increasingly at stake is secure US access to global energy resources – strategic US energy security – because the West’s traditional control respecting those global resources is seriously faltering in the face of the compelling strategies undertaken by Russia and its global partners.
Conventional wisdom holds that neither the West in general nor the US in particular can be effectively targeted with the energy weapon any time soon. This is because the structure of the global oil market prevents targeted oil embargoes from being effective. Once oil is sold on the global market, no producer can control where it does or does not go, the argument says. Additionally, the argument continues, producers attempting an embargo cannot afford to withhold their products for long enough to damage the targeted economy lest their own economies, which are inordinately dependent on oil and gas exports, themselves collapse.

The clear insinuation is that any talk of an energy-based economic checkmate of the West is merely hyperbole and sensationalism.

But these arguments are already in the process of collapsing under their own weight in the face of an entirely new array of mounting trends and developments that constitute an impending and grave threat to the strategic energy security of the West.

First in a series called The new world oil order at Asia Times