Jason Bordoff

But clearly, when you threaten trade wars against your allies, threaten to take other pieces of territory by force like Greenland, that really did traumatize Europeans also and lead to a level of concern about dependence on the United States.

I wrote after some of these big international meetings like the Munich Security Conference or Davos, one of the questions I was getting the most was,

Are we misguided, being Europeans, to swap dependence on Russian energy for American energy?

Are you a reliable supplier, or is that going to be weaponized against us in coercive ways as leverage to get a concession for something else?

I think it's probably not the case, but I understand why they might be concerned about it.

I mean, I think U.S.

energy exports are probably pretty reliable, but we are seeing an administration that is looking for...

looking for leverage, looking for ways that it can sometimes use coercive tools to extract concessions from others.

And it seems like that's part of what the strategy with the liberation date tariffs was.

But I think what that tells us now is there's energy risk all around, right?

If you go back five years ago and talk to people about the need to have an energy transition, they would have said, okay, that's good, but we don't want to be dependent on China.

If you want solar panels and batteries and critical minerals and electric vehicles, now we're dependent on China for all of our supply chains.

And I think one consequence of this conflict and everything that came before it, the weaponization of energy, I mean, literally not just sanctions, but a physical military blockade to prevent Venezuela from selling its oil as part of what we did to oust Maduro, Russia cutting off supply.

Obviously, if you're in Europe, you're not looking at Russia the same way, again, as a reliable supplier.

Now you might not be looking at the Gulf the same way.

And maybe you have your concerns about the predictability of U.S.

energy policy with policy swings back and forth.

By the way, it was the Biden administration that put

on new permits for export of natural gas.

So there's been lots of signals that might make people a little bit concerned.