(02-22-2020, 09:05 AM)mikesez Wrote:

(02-22-2020, 12:01 AM)MalabarJag Wrote: Walter Russell Meade nailed it:

Russia's national interest is not necessarily the same thing as Putin's interest.
It might not be in Russia's national interest to get into another arms race with the US, but some of Putin's oligarch allies could stand to make some serious rubles off of it.
And the energy market is more complicated than you might think.
If China and Japan feel like they shouldn't buy Iranian oil, they buy Russian oil instead as an example.
With fracking, American natural gas still hasn't made a dent in Russia's sales. Transporting natural gas by boat does not work as well as pipelines, and even if they wanted to boycott Russian gas, Europe would have an easier time getting LNG from Qatar rather than us.