China and Russia Form an Enduring Partnership

By: American Decency Staff

On Wednesday, after wee-hours bargaining that capped more than a decade of negotiations, Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation announced the signing of a 30-year gs-supply contract, estimated by the parties to be worth $400 billion. Pursuant to the deal between the two state-owned giants, CNPC will buy up to 38 billion cubic meters of gas annually starting 2018.   

Russia sells substantial quantities of gas to Western Europe, but no one thinks Moscow is a strategic partner to nations there. But when the purchaser is China, the assessment changes, and observers see the fate of the deal as a barometer of the relationship between Beijing and Moscow and an indication of the future of the world. “Mr. Putin’s ambition of creating a ‘Eurasian Economic Union’ stretching from Crimea to Harbin has come closer to fruition,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial Thursday. “The echoes of the non-aggression pacts of the 1930s get louder in this age of American retreat.” 

So is the just-announced energy deal this century’s version of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? If the Journal is correct, the Gazprom-CNPC contract is of immense significance.

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