Abstract
Washington’s eyes may be on the latest developments in the Keystone pipeline dispute and the Crimean Peninsula crisis, but a bigger story is unfolding, involving an entirely different pipeline and an entirely different peninsula. In a swift move to conquer another square on its geopolitical chess board Russia has just written off 90 percent of North Korea’s debt, a gesture estimated at $10 billion, in exchange for Pyongyang’s agreement to build a natural gas pipeline that would run from Sakhalin through North Korea to South Korea, the world’s second largest gas importer, with the goal of supplying South Korea with 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually, potentially raising its dependence on Russian gas from 6 to 30 percent. Indeed, while the U.S. invests a great deal of political capital on reducing Ukraine’s dependence on Gazprom its key ally in Asia might soon be heading in the opposite direction.
Read the article here.