Oil bullying: Love me, love my dog

Oil bullying is not a new phenomenon, and has been part and parcel of oil politics for a long time. In a globe clearly divided into camps of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (in oil and gas perspective), the growing instances of latter being victimised by the former is quite natural. Earlier US, largely an oil-importing country, was the only original Big Bully doing anything it wished to do for its energy security. It used its oil-giants in bullying the suppliers, but those were the good old days. In the current scenario of growing global energy requirement and increasing price hike, there is resurgence of several oil bullies, notwithstanding US influence. Now the players have changed and so has their mission.

Presently, Russia, the largest exporter of gas and second largest exporter of crude oil, leads the pack. Under the Putinist rule, it made every effort to regain the super-power status, by making deliberate attempts to spread its tentacles all over the Europe and CIS. Europe’s thirst for gas made itself a very easy target. Even before Russia had started making inroads into Europe, it had tried to influence foreign-policies of several CIS partners. Russian refineries, which had subsidiaries in many of these countries, had stopped making supplies in guise of 'maintenance shut-down or commercial consideration', as and when a government of choice was not elected or a suitable bill was not passed in their parliaments. Ukraine, in 2005, suffered from its 'old ally'. Recently Russia stopped making oil supplies to another one time ally-Czech Republic- when the latter signed a missile treaty with US, it was merely a replay of the old game. Russia also tried to influence many countries to sell their natural gas companies to Gazprom, or face the consequence of ’No gas for you'.

The bad news for oil-importers' camp is that oil-bullying is a growing tribe, though sometimes in a very veiled manner, with many new and unruly players gaining prominence. Thanks to the growing demand of oil, some of these players even use their prominent clients (oil importers) to gain international recognition and thus continue the misrule, like Sudan and Myanmar did with help of China.

Certainly not good days ahead.