U.S. economic sewrity has become because of energy. Nothing quite like it has happened since me 1973 OPEC embargo. Administration sources say the Katrina effect, as well as ooncem over moves by Chavez, were mainly behind Bush's surprising rzll for an end to 'America's oil addiction' in his State of the Union address last January At the same time, U.S. officials have corne to reatize that there is deep anger and enmity in the Kremlin against the United States jpartiwlarfy over U.S. efforts to win Ukraine and Georgia ln the West), and that Ptriin has hisvwn agenda One example: evan as Moscow has joined the Westem effort to oonfront Tehran over its nuclear program, Russia and Iran are taking a unified stand in resisting a U.S. effort to build a trans Caspan pipeline that would reroute gas out of the Russian system lo Baku, Azerbaijan.

Putin has long been nursing ambitions of using Russias vast oil and gas supplies as an instrument of power. In themid *90s, alter 15 years in the KGB, Putin went badr to school, attending the SL Petersburg Mining Institute. tle wrote a dissertation lrlted ‘Toward a Russian Transnational Energy Company." The topic: how to use energy resources for grand strategic planning. There is reason to believe that Putin's highly publidzed confrontation with Mikhail Khodortrovsky, the forrner owner of the defunct Yukos—lhe last of the big private energy concems in Russia—was about much rnore than wresting political power from the so-called oligarchs, former apparatchiks who gained control of Russias resources after the Soviet Union's collapse. Putin is not known to be personally corrupt, or even particularly power-hungry. What he is hungry for—and indeed has been since he was elecled in 2000—is the restoration of Russla’s power and influence. Some observers believe that Putin's trumped-up arrest of Khodorkovsky—who will be spending the next few years in a Siberian labor camp was mainly about ...                    continued >