I so look forward to email from my Congressman, Leonard Lance (R-NJ 7th). Lance is refreshingly frank about the agenda behind his votes in the House, although I suspect some of his candor is inadvertent. His comments often provide backhanded insight into the thinking that goes on in Congress. Today's lesson is about Ukraine.
Lance conducts regular polls among his constituents. Most recently he asked whether we supported "Congress providing Ukraine with $1 billion in economic assistance that's being sought by President Obama." Generally, any Lance poll question that mentions the President is going to get a hostile response in this Rather Red district. It also is likely to be a good barometer for the direction Lance is going to take when the roll call comes.
This time, the results are a little more interesting. Two thirds of the poll respondents were opposed to the economic aid. But Leonard Lance went ahead and voted for H.R. 4152, legislation to extend U.S. loan guarantees to the new government in Kiev, anyway. The House leadership was for it; so were Democrats, and it passed almost unanimously.
It's what happened next that makes the story enlightening.
"I also joined many of my colleagues from the House Energy and Commerce Committee," Lance writes, "in introducing bipartisan legislation to help expedite the export of U.S. liquefied natural gas to our global allies, including Ukraine and other Eastern European nations currently at the mercy of Russian energy supplies.
"Expediting U.S. liquefied natural gas exports serves our national security interests as an aggressive Russian regime looks to expand power in former Soviet Union countries. This legislation helps our allies in the Eastern European region and across the globe while creating jobs and economic opportunity here in the U.S.
"Taken together these actions put needed pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin's government. Both measures send a clear signal that Congress intends [to] stand with the Ukrainian people and against Putin and Russia’s aggressive regime."
Get it?
For all the huffing and puffing about Russian troops in Crimea, the US Congress doesn't give a damn about Ukrainian sovereignty or Russian imperialism. Russia is done as an imperial power, no matter what its bare-chested leader says or does.The State Department knows this. Wall Street knows this. I imagine the Kremlin is not in the dark about it either.
What's at stake for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and, I suppose, Leonard Lance...what's at stake for their Democratic counterparts, and for John Kerry, and I imagine for Barack Obama, is the opportunity that the crisis represents to open Ukraine as a market for American liquified natural gas.
Ukraine and several of its former-Soviet neighbors get the bulk of their gas via pipelines from Russia. Culturally and politically, they may chafe at this idea, but the practical reality is that Russia is a huge supplier of gas and is strategically very well situated to be the source of a huge share of Eastern Europe's energy. So it goes. What is required for Ukraine, across which most of those pipelines stretch, to buck this trend by accepting gas from a competing source is an existential threat such as the one being sold right now.
The new regime in Ukraine hates the Russians, and now, with the threat of the Crimean occupation possibly leading to Crimean secession, it has fresh reasons for that hostility. But is Russia a serious threat to Ukraine's new government? I seriously doubt it.
The country is big enough, though, to be a significant new market for American gas, if Russia's virtual monopoly in Ukraine can be broken. The current hostility toward Russia gives Kiev a reason to consider taking some of the US's huge gas surplus off our hands -- even though, under ordinary circumstances, that would be highly impractical given the distance that gas has to travel while a plentiful supply is already flowing into the country through the Russian pipelines.
What does this have to do with "our national security interests"? Will American competition in the Ukrainian gas market cause "an aggressive Russian regime" to back off its occupation of Crimea or stop pressuring the former Soviet republics to embrace its influence? Please.
The interest Leonard Lance is talking about is the US energy companies' very compelling interest in generating demand in Eastern Europe to reduce the huge surplus of gas in the US, which would enable gas prices to rise here. Because that's the industry's biggest problem now: Gas is cheap in the US. Demand is high, but so is supply. Exports would reduce that oversupply. See the pattern?
What I see is a clear signal that Congress intends to stand with the American Petroleum Institute, and the people in the Ukraine who have positioned themselves to fatten their numbered bank accounts with American petrodollars. The rest of the Ukrainians who want to are welcome to be there for the photo op.
