This monograph is meant to provide an unbiased examination of: the scarcity of natural gas in the contemporary security environment; the salience of natural gas in Russias national security strategies; and, the natural gas pipeline politics in Eastern and Central Europe. While the tendency of most energy security scholars has been to collectively analyze Europes dependency on oil and gas, this author analyzes the two energy markets separately, and demonstrates that natural gas is a more potent instrument of coercion in the contemporary security environment than oil was in the traditional...

The slow re-emergence of Russia as a world power despite its weak military force is of critical significance for the strategic interests of the United States in Europe. Since the Cold War, Russia has been perceived as a broken nation that no longer represents a threat to the North Atlantic Alliance. This monograph emphasizes that Russia overcame this major vulnerability by developing the capacity to use unilateral economic sanctions in the form of gas pricing and gas disruptions against many European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states. It agrees with many scholars and...