شالوده شکنی "سلاح انرژی": تهدید روسیه برای اروپا به عنوان مطالعه موردی

As the likelihood increases that Russia will dominate the European Union's (EU) energy supply, questions have emerged as to whether Russia would use the energy weapon to influence EU member policies and extract political concessions. Countervailing voices argue that Russia would be restricted by interdependence and market forces. As of yet, no one has analyzed the assumptions underlying the energy weapon thesis. Moreover, many scholars examining EU–Russian energy relations rely on non-Russian data. This article seeks to fill several informational and theoretical gaps by including Russian sources and first-hand data and by systematically analyzing the conditions that must obtain before an energy supplier can successfully convert its energy resources into political power. The resulting model can be utilized to analyze the capacity of a supplier to use the energy weapon—whether it be Russia, Iran, Venezuela or any other energy heavyweight—and to assess whether the deployment was successful. Five purported cases of Russian manipulation are analyzed in this article and the findings indicate that, more often than not, Russia failed to achieve political concessions. Looking to the future, the plausibility of Russia using the energy weapon to exploit Europe's dependence, particularly on gas, is also examined.

The tighter energy markets of recent years combined with the political instability of several energy producing countries have elicited widespread anxiety about energy availability (Yergin, 2006). Among the primary energy security concerns of policy makers and analysts are the resurgence of resource nationalism, the prospect of resource wars, and the vulnerability of energy dependent countries to political manipulation. The threat that energy exporting countries could use their control over energy supplies to influence the political behavior of client states was called the oil weapon during the 1973 oil embargo. In recognition that suppliers can manipulate other energy sources, such as natural gas, this article will use the term energy weapon. Recent energy weapon threats include the oil disruptions vowed by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in 2008 (Wilson, 2008) and by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei in 2006 (Shanker, 2006). These threats were overt, but the energy weapon can also be deployed covertly—or implicitly—as Russia has purportedly done on numerous occasions over the past two decades. Despite the risk posed by use of the energy weapon and the numerous references to this danger expressed in the energy security literature, no one has yet systematically studied the energy weapon. In April 2010, the Council on Foreign Relations convened a group of experts to discuss the current state of energy security research. They described a need for case study work and systematic analysis of the relationship between oil and gas supply and political decision making (Levi, 2010). Russian activities in the gas sector were specifically mentioned as a valuable area of inquiry. This article fills those gaps by accomplishing several intertwined objectives: first, systematically disaggregating the component parts of the energy weapon; second, providing a model of the energy weapon that can be utilized to analyze the capacity of any supplier to convert its energy resources into political power; third, ascertaining, through a review of Russia's behavior over the past two decades, if and how Russia has accomplished the steps necessary to wield the energy weapon; and, fourth, conducting before-after analyses of several oft-cited cases of Russia's deployment of the energy weapon and ascertaining whether Russia has indeed attempted to coerce political concessions. By examining how states targeted by Russia responded, insight will be gained into Russia's potential danger to Europe.