Congress has responded to the president’s apparent intention to improve ties with Moscow with a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia, which Trump has now signed into law. (There was no choice. Trump governs under the cloud of Russian “collusion” and Congress could override a veto.) The law does not just punish Russia, but its European trading partners, most notably Germany, which imports over a third of its natural gas from the nearby country in the natural, normal way.

But U.S. policy now, under the Trump administration, is to promote U.S. energy exports to Europe to replace Russian ones. It is both old-fashioned Cold War Russophobia and old-fashioned inter-capitalist, inter-imperialist contention.

The sanctions bill has been promoted as one that appropriately penalizes Russia for its international misbehavior. The always-cited examples being the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the (alleged) invasion of Ukraine in 2014. 

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