By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--November 29, 2017
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Poland wants to reduce its reliance on Russian energy, and last week its state-owned oil and gas company, PGNiG , signed its first five-year deal to buy American liquefied natural gas. The agreement illustrates how the energy boom from the fracking revolution can serve U.S. national interests and deter the reach of dictators abroad.
Moscow has long used its energy resources as a political weapon. Gazprom , the Kremlin-owned energy company, currently provides more than two-thirds of Poland’s gas, and other European nations also rely heavily on Russian energy. President Vladimir Putin has used that dependence as a diplomatic cudgel, threatening to cut off supplies. And on several occasions he has followed through. But Russia’s era of go-freeze-yourself foreign policy may be drawing to a close. In 2015—the year Moscow cut off gas supplies to Ukraine—the U.S. surpassed Russia as the world’s top natural-gas producer. By February 2016 major shipments of American LNG were headed abroad for the first time. Two months after U.S. LNG from the lower 48 states hit the export market, Poland’s PGNiG announced that it didn’t intend to renew its long-term agreement with Gazprom, which will expire in 2022. President Trump has built on that momentum. “America stands ready to help Poland and other nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” he said during a July visit to Warsaw.America's emergence onto the global energy markets has been nothing short of a megabomb in its impact on both the world's economy and our geopolitical positioning. It is much harder for nation's to resist Putin's imperialist ambitions when they rely on him for a commodity they desperately need, and there is no one else capable of providing it. Trump is now making sure nations have that other option, and the Poles quickly saw the wisdom in availing themselves of it.
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