The author & the daughter of a US-Middle East spy explains why one must understand energy & pipelines to get the Russia/Ukraine war.
Charlotte Dennett on Russia/Ukraine war & pipelines
“So the war in Ukraine is not just a war for territory,” Dennett explains, although an oft-ignored fact is that Ukraine holds the second biggest known gas reserves in Europe. “We are in a pivotal moment in world history where the US and Russia (and their respective allies) are vying for world supremacy through enhanced energy security. That means military protection of their energy supplies (once conquered) their pipeline routes and the necessary financing of the entire operation.”
They’re all wrapped up in the Great Game gone insane, Dennett adds, evidenced by Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine and the West’s response in the form of economic warfare, with its massive financial sanctions and buildup of military supplies to Ukraine and its East European neighbors.
For the past 150 years, oil has become a crucial ingredient for economic, military, and political power. Henry Kissinger, protégé of Nelson Rockefeller, once said, “you control the oil, you control the world.” The Rockefellers, the leading oligarchs of the 20th century chronicled in Dennett’s earlier book with Gerard Colby, have known all along that you can’t be a superpower unless you control oil.
Charlotte Dennett, the author of the recently published Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil. predicts the war in Ukraine could become the Mother of all Energy Wars if US and NATO troops intervene, risking a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
Aptly described by Time Magazine as an ‘expert in resource-based politics”. Dennett views conflicts like the war in Ukraine through the lens of geopolitics and The Great Game for Oil and Natural Gas.
As the daughter of America’s first master spy in the Middle East who became one of America’s first victims of the Great Game, Dennett has unveiled an amazing story of big power rivalry, intrigue, assassinations, and regime change that goes as far back as WW I and World War II and takes us right up to the endless wars in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine.
During the early days of the war in Ukraine, she says “most Ukrainians and most people in the world responded with disbelief over the intensity, savagery, and brutality of Russia’s invasion. ‘What’s it all about?’ they asked.” The Western press wasn’t particularly helpful, focusing instead on play-by-play coverage while ignoring a larger context. But then the imposition of severe anti-Russian Western sanctions, along with NATO countries’ scrambling for energy alternatives to Russian gas and skyrocketing prices at the pump, brought “energy security” front and center into peoples’ lives.
Listen to the entire interview. It is very enlightening.
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