Group items tagged

Persian Gulf has been used throughout history, in maps, documents and diplomacy, from the ancient Persians, whose empire dominated the region, to the Greeks and the British.

The push to call it the Arabian Gulf gathered steam during the Pan-Arab nationalist movement of the late 1950s, propelled by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the historian Lawrence G. Potter wrote in the “The Persian Gulf in History.” In the 1960s, Arab countries made Arabian Gulf compulsory, and the Gulf Cooperation Council uses it.

“It’s deeply emotional; it’s not simply semantic,” said Frederic Wehrey, an expert on gulf politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Google Maps shows both terms, with Arabian Gulf in parentheses. But Google will show either Arabian or Persian Gulf to local users, depending on geolocation and language settings.

The study, in other words, isn’t about how much see level rise happens this century, but whether this century’s emissions bank enough carbon for total ice melt down—or some less drastic version. “Our analysis really looks at a 2000 year envelope,” says Strauss.

Under the ice, Greenland and Antarctica are uncharted territories. In order to calculate the rate at which those massive ice sheets slough off, Levermann says he would need to know more about the texture of the underlying rock.

HMSHost, over the lack of coronavirus safety protections, which included continuing to hold anti-union captive audience meetings during the pandemic. A union election for workers to join Unite Here scheduled for late March was delayed and is currently being rescheduled due to the pandemic.

“To them, the union was a more important issue than the coronavirus. They made sure to give us papers about the union, but didn’t give us training or protective equipment for us in the stores.”

Citing the pandemic, the manager of Clark county, Nevada, unilaterally suspended all union contracts with the county.

The Teamsters union has filed federal unfair labor practice charges of unlawful termination against CORT furniture, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, accusing the furniture rental company of retaliating against workers for supporting unionization just as the pandemic broke in the US.

CORT furniture declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Amazon-owned Whole Foods is using a data-powered heat mapping tool to monitor unionization risks among its over 500 stores throughout the US, as workers have held sick-out protests in response to a lack of protections for workers during the pandemic. Workers at the online clothing retailer Everlane and the art logistics company Uovo have filed federal labor charges accusing the companies of firing workers during the pandemic for union organizing.

According to a December 2019 EPI study, in over 40% of union organizing campaigns an employer violates the law. “This is an extreme moment we’re in, but unfortunate

better pay and better health and safety provisions,” added McNicholas.

Twenty percent of Manhattan adults have been fully vaccinated, compared with 12 percent of Brooklyn adults. One of the clearest demographic trends in who is getting vaccinated is age.

There are more than 1.2 million New Yorkers age 65 and older, rivaling the entire population of Dallas. Older adults were among the first in line for the vaccine, and in general, areas of the city with more older residents have a higher percentage of vaccinations than others.

While about half of all of these New Yorkers have had at least one dose, about 70 percent of those over 65 are not yet fully vaccinated, suggesting the city still has a ways to go even as eligibility expands to younger groups.

Neighborhoods with mostly white residents, like the Upper East and Upper West Side, Riverdale in the Bronx, Breezy Point in Queens, mid-island and the south shore of Staten Island, are outpacing city averages.

The majority Black and Latino neighborhoods in large swaths of Queens, Brooklyn, upper Manhattan and the southern Bronx are in some cases 20 to 30 percentage points behind neighborhoods at the top of the list

Reasons for the disparities vary, and they will not all be clear from simply looking at a map. Many seniors are homebound or have had trouble navigating complex and confusing websites to sign up for the vaccine (obstacles not just for seniors, really).

For non-English speakers, language barriers can create fear and confusion. For poorer residents, it’s simply more difficult (and more expensive) to take a few hours or a day or two off work to get a shot.

The city is averaging 60,000 to 70,000 shots per day. At that rate, it will take months to reach the remaining seven million New Yorkers, including children, who are not yet eligible for any vaccine.

To qualify for the new benefits, people need to sign up for plans at Healthcare.gov or a state exchange website. The changes will be retroactive to Jan. 1, meaning that people who already have Obamacare plans will get money back. Anyone who is uninsured now can qualify for new prices as soon as they sign up.

All the eligible plans must cover a standard set of comprehensive benefits, including prenatal care, prescription drugs and mental health services

If you are receiving unemployment insurance, the legislation entitles you to a special discount: Regardless of your income, your premiums will look similar to that of the person earning $19,000 on our maps. And if you lost your coverage at work and want to keep it, the bill will also pay the full cost of your premiums for six months under the federal COBRA program.

So how big a deal is this? Huge, say industry insiders -- big enough to have already shaken the aviation map of Europe, and big enough to have knock-on effects beyond the continent -- particularly if the situation escalates further.

If it did, passengers could see their flight times increased, a rise in fares across the networks, and even long-haul, nonstop flights needing to make refueling stops along the way.

"Now that they're not flying over its airspace, that's good -- governments have acted swiftly to restore confidence -- but I think it'll throw up questions for consumers over who they're flying with, which points they're flying between and how they're flying between them. If you were flying from Athens to Lithuania, or in the region around Russia, you might think twice.

The events, described by some governments as a state-sponsored hijacking, have "inevitably redrawn the aviation map of Europe," says one airline industry insider, who wanted to remain anonymous due to the risk of being identified. (

But the issues don't just end there, they say. "The problem you have is the challenge around where you draw the new map -- that whole region has restrictions."There are already restrictions flying over Ukraine"

"So Belarus had seen a huge increase in traffic because people were going around Ukraine."

"Airlines will either have to go very far north into the polar region, or to go down to the Gulf States -- but then most European carriers would avoid flying over Iraq and Iran. So, they'd probably go over Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across India.

"There's a big lump of airspace which is strategically important to airlines and is now being denied them -- and there'll be a knock-on effect on flight times, cost, and environmental impact."

Everyone in the industry agrees that if diversions become a long-term thing, it'll be a headache.

As well as the increased fuel burn and longer flight times, he says, any unplanned stops can send crews over their allotted hours. "They might need to be swapped out, with a new crew being flown in. There are significant consequences to this sort of disruption," he says.

The rules and regulations around airline safety are "absolutely sacrosanct," he says -- and have been enshrined in international law since 1944, in the Chicago Convention, which established freedom of the skies after the Second World War.

"This is the first time that a mechanism designed to ensure the safety and security of air travel has allegedly been used for political ends, and what's also worrying is that the political response to that has also been to use another mechanism designed to ensure flight security for political ends.

If you start playing politics with flight safety, you're setting out on a slippery slope, he argues.

"This symbolizes something really big -- since the Chicago Convention, freedom of the skies has been laid out. It's supposed to be universally accepted that airlines have a right to overfly a foreign country without being forced to land," they say.

"Clearly that has been violated. What Belarus is said to have done is really horrible -- and if it turns out to be a precedent, it's even worse. It's a terrible signifier of what could happen."

In short?"Everyone is worried about what this incident means for the future."

Only the most ardent political junkies closely follow the re-shuffling and re-drawing of legislative and congressional districts that follow the decennial census. (Guilty, your honor!)

In fact, like many things that the general public either knows nothing about or has a decided lack of interest in, how these lines are drawn and by whom has an outsized impact on the sort of government we have -- and what the motivations of our elected officials are.

For decades, the line-drawing process has fallen, in most states, to state legislators and governors. What that has meant, in the main, is that when Democrats control the state capitol and, therefore, the line-drawing process, they create districts that are as favorable as possible for their side.

The strategy of both sides has been simple: Pack as many of the opposition party's voters into as few districts in the state as possible while spreading out their own voters to make as many districts winnable for their side as they can. Innovations in redistricting software have made this slicing and dicing of people based on their party registration or past voting history an art form -- allowing the line-drawers to literally go street by street when it comes to crafting new districts.

The state's congressional districts have regularly changed hands between the parties, with Republicans winning two previously-held Democratic seats in the 2020 election. And generally speaking, three of the four districts in the state -- the exception being the Republican-friendly 4th in western Iowa -- are extremely competitive every two years. Check out the winning percentages for four incoming members of Congress in the state: 62%, 49%, 50% and 51.3%. In the state's 2nd District, the Republican candidate leads the Democrat candidate by six -- SIX! -- votes.

The vast majority of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, represent what we would call "safe" districts -- meaning that their only chance of losing their job would be in a primary, not a general election.

In 1956, for example, less than 6 in 10 House incumbents won with 60% of the vote or more, according to Vital Statistics on Congress. By 2002, the first election after the 2001 nationwide redistricting, 85% of all House incumbents seeking reelection won with 60% or higher. In 2014 and 2016, that number hovered in the mid-to-high 70s before dipping to just 63% in the tumultuous 2018 midterm election.

The practical, political effect of this trend is simple: Members of Congress have little reason to demonstrate their ability to work across the partisan aisle and every reason to be as partisan and ideological as possible in hopes of staving off any sort of primary challenge.

Independent or bipartisan commissions to redraw the maps in states -- as Hogan is trying to do in Maryland -- work to reorient the incentive structure for members by creating districts that are far more competitive between the two parties in general elections.

Maps drawn over the past two decades -- by Democrats and Republicans -- in places like North Carolina, Texas and yes, Maryland -- have come under legal scrutiny for using political considerations as the sole motivator in creating legislative and congressional districts. Maps in which one party overreached have, occasionally, led to unpredictable results in which the party in power loses seats they expected to win because they tried to divide up their own voters among too many districts.

While bipartisan -- and independent -- line-drawing commissions are on the rise in recent years, the majority of states in the country still rely on politicians to draw lines.

Brown’s Animated Atlas of African History visualizes 123 years of African political history, graphically demonstrating the rise of European colonization, decolonization, and governmental shifts throughout the continent

A fascinating way to integrate local and public history into your curriculum, Clio encourages students to find, document, and engage with the history all around them through an innovative mapping system and app

in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.

The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces.

The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.

To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected.

Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations.

Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.

Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent

even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks.

Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City.

A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones.

In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders.

by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.

Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months)

Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.

States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs — but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months

That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing.

Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.

Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent

Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control.

When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.

How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan

The biggest question thrown up by this history is why the West failed to see the danger earlier.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made a statement in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join, and over nearly 14 years never followed through on membership. The EU drew up a trade deal with Ukraine without factoring in Russia’s strong-arm response. Western policies didn’t change decisively in reaction to limited Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, encouraging Mr. Putin to believe that a full-blown campaign to conquer Ukraine wouldn’t meet with determined resistance—either internationally or in Ukraine, a country whose independence he said repeatedly was a regrettable accident of history.

The roots of the war lie in Russia’s deep ambivalence about its place in the world after the end of the Soviet Union

Viewed from elsewhere in Europe, NATO’s eastward enlargement didn’t threaten Russia’s security. NATO membership is at core a promise to collectively defend a member that comes under attack. The alliance agreed in 1997 not to permanently station substantial combat forces in its new eastern members that were capable of threatening Russian territory. Russia retained a massive nuclear arsenal and the biggest conventional forces in Europe.

Mr. Putin thought of Russian security interests more broadly, linking the preservation of Moscow’s influence in adjacent countries with his goals of reviving Russia’s global power and cementing his authoritarian rule at home.

U.S. intelligence learned in 2005 that Mr. Putin’s government had carried out a broad review of Russian policy in the “near abroad,” as the Kremlin termed former Soviet republics. From now on, Russia would take a more assertive approach and vigorously contest perceived U.S. influence.

Mr. Bush asked Mr. Putin why he thought the end of the Soviet Union had been the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Surely the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens in World War II was worse, Mr. Bush said. Mr. Putin replied that the USSR’s demise was worse because it had left 25 million Russians outside the Russian Federation, according to Ms. Rice, who was present.

Perceptions changed in January 2007, when Mr. Putin vented his growing frustrations about the West at the annual Munich Security Conference. In a long and icy speech, he denounced the U.S. for trying to rule a unipolar world by force, accused NATO of breaking promises by expanding into Europe’s east, and called the West hypocritical for lecturing Russia about democracy. A chill descended on the audience of Western diplomats and politicians at the luxury Hotel Bayerischer Hof, participants recalled.

“We didn’t take the speech as seriously as we should have,” said Mr. Ischinger. “It takes two to tango, and Mr. Putin didn’t want to tango any more.

“I need a MAP. We need to give the Ukrainian people a strategic focus on the way ahead. We really need this,” Mr. Yushchenko said, Ms. Rice recalled. Ms. Rice, who was initially uncertain about having Ukraine in NATO, gave a noncommittal answer. When the request was debated in the National Security Council, Mr. Bush said NATO should be open to all countries that qualify and want to join.

Try as it might, the White House couldn’t overcome German and French resistance to offering a MAP to Ukraine and Georgia.

Berlin and Paris pointed to unsolved territorial conflicts in Georgia, low public support for NATO in Ukraine, and the weakness of democracy and the rule of law in both.

Ms. Merkel, remembering Mr. Putin’s speech in Munich, believed he would see NATO invitations as a direct and deliberate threat to him, according to Christoph Heusgen, her chief diplomatic adviser at the time. She was also convinced Ukraine and Georgia would bring NATO no benefits as members, Mr. Heusgen said.

Ms. Rice, a Soviet and Russia expert, said Mr. Putin wanted to use Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia to rebuild Russia’s global power, and that extending the shield of NATO membership could be the last chance to stop him. German and French officials were skeptical, believing Russia’s economy was too weak and dependent on Western technology to become a serious threat again.

In the final session, Ms. Merkel debated in a corner of the room with leaders from Poland and other eastern members of NATO, who advocated strenuously on behalf of Ukraine and Georgia. Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus strongly criticized Ms. Merkel’s stance, warning that a failure to stop Russia’s resurgence would eventually threaten the eastern flank of the alliance.

“We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” it read. But it didn’t say when. And there was no MAP.

Many of Ukraine’s supporters were heartened. But some officials in Bucharest feared it was the worst of both worlds. NATO had just painted a target on the backs of Ukraine and Georgia without giving them any protection.

Mr. Putin joined the summit the next day. He spoke behind closed doors and made clear his disdain for NATO’s move, describing Ukraine as a “made-up” country.

“He then became a fervent nationalist,” said Mr. Heusgen. “His great anxiety was that Ukraine could become economically and politically successful and that the Russians would eventually ask themselves ‘Why are our brothers doing so well, while our situation remains dire?’ ”

Mr. Putin’s show of military force backfired politically. He had won control of Crimea and part of Donbas, but he was losing Ukraine.

divisions manifested themselves during Ukraine’s bitterly fought elections and during the Orange and Maidan revolutions. But they receded after 2014. Many Russophone Ukrainians fled from repression and economic collapse in separatist-run Donbas. Even eastern Ukraine came to fear Russian influence. Mr. Putin was doing what Ukrainian politicians had struggled with: uniting a nation.

Mr. Putin never tried to implement the Minsk accords, said Mr. Heusgen, the German chancellery aide, because their full implementation would have resolved the conflict and allowed Ukraine to move on.

At a conversation at the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane, Australia, during a G-20 summit in late 2014, Ms. Merkel realized that Mr. Putin had entered a state of mind that would never allow for reconciliation with the West, according to a former aide.

The conversation was about Ukraine, but Mr. Putin launched into a tirade against the decadence of democracies, whose decay of values, he said, was exemplified by the spread of “gay culture.”

The Russian warned Ms. Merkel earnestly that gay culture was corrupting Germany’s youth. Russia’s values were superior and diametrically opposed to Western decadence, he said

He expressed disdain for politicians beholden to public opinion. Western politicians were unable to be strong leaders because they were hobbled by electoral pressures and aggressive media, he told Ms. Merkel.

Ms. Merkel’s policy reflected a consensus in Berlin that mutually beneficial trade with the EU would tame Russian geopolitical ambitions.

The U.S. and some NATO allies, meanwhile, began a multiyear program to train and equip Ukraine’s armed forces, which had proved no match for Russia’s in Donbas.

The level of military support was limited because the Obama administration figured that Russia would retain a considerable military advantage over Ukraine and it didn’t want to provoke Moscow.

President Trump expanded the aid to include Javelin antitank missiles, but delayed it in 2019 while he pressed Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look for information the White House hoped to use against Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s son, an act for which he was impeached.

in telephone conversations from 2020 onward, Mr. Macron noticed changes in Mr. Putin. The Russian leader was rigorously isolating himself during the Covid-19 pandemic, requiring even close aides to quarantine themselves before they could meet him.

The man on the phone with Mr. Macron was different from the one he had hosted in Paris and the Riviera. “He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,” recalled an aide to Mr. Macron.

The U.S. no longer saw Europe as a primary focus. Mr. Biden wanted neither a “reset” of relations with Mr. Putin, like President Obama had declared in 2009, nor to roll back Russia’s power. The NSC cast the aim as a “stable, predictable relationship.” It was a modest goal that would soon be tested by Mr. Putin’s bid to rewrite the ending of the Cold War.

In early 2021, Mr. Biden became the latest U.S. president who wanted to focus his foreign policy on the strategic competition with China, only to become entangled in events elsewhere.

When Mr. Zelensky met with Mr. Biden in Washington in September, the U.S. finally announced the $60 million in military support, which included Javelins, small arms and ammunition. The aid was in line with the modest assistance the Obama and Trump administrations had supplied over the years, which provided Ukraine with lethal weaponry but didn’t include air defense, antiship missiles, tanks, fighter aircraft or drones that could carry out attacks.

U.S. national security officials discussed the highly classified intelligence at a meeting in the White House on Oct. 27. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned that Russian forces could be ready to attack by the end of January 2022.

On Nov. 17, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, urged the U.S. to send air defense systems and additional antitank weapons and ammunition during a meeting at the Pentagon, although he thought the initial Russian attacks might be limited.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Reznikov that Ukraine could be facing a massive invasion.

Work began that month on a new $200 million package in military assistance from U.S. stocks. The White House, however, initially held off authorizing it, angering some lawmakers. Administration officials calculated arms shipments wouldn’t be enough to deter Mr. Putin from invading if his mind was made up, and might even provoke him to attack.

The cautious White House approach was consistent with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s thinking. He favored a low-profile, gradual approach to assisting Ukraine’s forces and fortifying NATO’s defenses that would grow stronger in line with U.S. intelligence indications about Russia’s intent to attack.

A paramount goal was to avoid a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces—what Mr. Austin called his “North Star.”

On Dec. 27, Mr. Biden gave the go-ahead to begin sending more military assistance for Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles, mortars, grenade launchers, small arms and ammunition.

Three days later, Mr. Biden spoke on the phone with Mr. Putin and said the U.S. had no plan to station offensive missiles in Ukraine and urged Russia to de-escalate. The two leaders were on different wavelengths. Mr. Biden was talking about confidence-building measures. Mr. Putin was talking about effectively rolling back the West.

Gen. Mingus had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been wounded and earned a Purple Heart, and he spoke frankly about the challenges Russian forces would face. Invading a territory was one thing, but holding it was another, and the intervention could turn into a yearslong quagmire, he said. The Russians showed no reaction.

Mr. Macron found Mr. Putin even more difficult to talk to than previously, according to French officials. The six-hour conversation went round in circles as Mr. Putin gave long lectures about the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine and the West’s record of hypocrisy, while the French president tried to bring the conversation back to the present day and how to avoid a war.

Mr. Scholz argued that the international order rested on the recognition of existing borders, no matter how and when they had been created. The West would never accept unraveling established borders in Europe, he warned. Sanctions would be swift and harsh, and the close economic cooperation between Germany and Russia would end. Public pressure on European leaders to sever all links to Russia would be immense, he said.

Mr. Putin then repeated his disdain for weak Western leaders who were susceptible to public pressure.

Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading. Aides to Mr. Scholz believed Mr. Putin would maintain his military pressure on Ukraine’s borders to strangle its economy and then eventually move to occupy the country.

Mr. Putin said he had decided to recognize the independence of separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. He said fascists had seized power in Kyiv, while NATO hadn’t responded to his security concerns and was planning to deploy nuclear missiles in Ukraine.

“We are not going to see each other for a while, but I really appreciate the frankness of our discussions,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Macron. “I hope we can talk again one day.”

For Berlin, loosening its energy dependence on Russia is not simply about hitting Moscow’s main revenue stream. It’s a threat to roll back “Ostpolitik,” a totemic post-World War II policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and by extension later Russia, that involved economic and political engagement, notably through oil and gas links.

Yet as customers desert Russia, its partnership with the oil titans of the Middle East, with which it jointly leads the OPEC+ coalition, has so far stayed intact. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the world’s top oil exporters, accounting for 29% of the global total. 

“The U.S. can try to make Saudi Arabia increase production, but why would they accept a break in the alliance, which is key for them?”

Riyadh’s OPEC+ partnership with Moscow calmed years of distrust between the two oil rivals, and saved the kingdom from relying exclusively on Washington.

“Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to switch horses mid-race when they do not know if the other horse is actually going to show up,”

Gulf Arab nations accused the U.S. of a lack of support in the face of repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militia on Saudi oil facilities and Gulf tanker traffic, and on Abu Dhabi this year. In a measure of the discord, the United Arab Emirates abstained in a U.S.-led United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Russia’s invasion.

“Now that we are in a crisis moment, we’re reaping the effect of that lack of trust that’s been building over the years,” said Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

Another source of friction lies in U.S. efforts to reinstate the nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

Demonstrating just how exceptional the times are, a U.S. delegation traveled to Russian ally Venezuela last weekend in an overture to a country that holds the largest known crude reserves in the world.

Venezuela has been subject to international sanctions since the Trump era that have crippled its ability to sell oil. While there is not yet talk of allowing exports to resume, President Nicolas Maduro responded by offering to turn on the taps anyway, saying that state oil company PDVSA is prepared to raise output to as many three million barrels a day “for the world.”

the U.S. visit was “unexpected, surprising, a complete change in policy orientation,” with energy as the strategic catalyst.

“But I think there is a more important geopolitical move that is redefining the West,” he added. The U.S. is looking to confine the spheres of influence enjoyed by Russia and especially China, and for Venezuela that means a gradual process “to reincorporate with the West, through energy.” 

China will continue to carry on “normal trade cooperation” with Russia, including in oil and gas, said Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesperson. China is considering buying or increasing stakes in Russian companies such as Gazprom PJSC,

Even assuming a discount on the price per barrel, state-owned importers would weigh very carefully the impact on their global business of large purchases from a country that’s subject to so many sanctions, according to Qin Yan, an analyst with research house Refinitiv.

Neither would buying energy from Moscow be an easy solution, even if it meant less pollution, said Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “To change China’s current energy structure, to replace a lot of coal it uses now with Russia’s oil and gas, would be a huge project for China, and it would take time,”

In Europe, the EU is refusing to budge on its climate commitments as it seeks to slash imports from its biggest supplier this year and replace flows from Russia completely by 2027. Those efforts were given a jolt by a suggestion that Moscow might shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe.

“We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said as she unveiled the bloc’s plans this week. 

as Scholz told the Bundestag, Russia’s attack on Ukraine means “we are in a new era.” The world today “is no longer the same world that it was before.”