By the 1970s, western Europe had fully recovered from World War 2, and their economies were growing rapidly. Before World War 2, people all over Europe were heating their homes and businesses with coal, but coal was being phased out in favor of natural gas. In 1980, Russia proposed building a 3,500 mile long pipeline to West Germany from Siberia, where Russia had vast reserves of natural gas. The Russians were offering to sell natural gas to western Europe at a bargain price. This project alarmed President Reagan. Reagan pointed out that Russia had always had authoritarian governments, and because of that, Reagan said, the Soviet Union would always regard countries like France and West Germany as enemies. Reagan said that over time, as industrialized democracies in western Europe became more and more dependent on Russian gas for their economic survival, someday the Russians would be in a position to use their natural gas as a weapon of blackmail or extortion. Of course, the Russians promised that they would never do that. Reagan imposed sanctions on the project to try to stop the pipeline’s construction, but greed carried the day. The Russians had powerful allies in this project. Europeans wanted the cheap natural gas the Russians were offering to sell them and big U.S. oil companies, which stood to make huge profits on the project, lobbied Congress to override Reagan’s sanctions, which Congress did, and the pipelines were built. Today, Vladimir Putin receives over $200 million a day from western Europe from natural gas sales alone. He gets much more from oil sales. If western Europe was not now dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, they would have cut off their imports of it as soon as Putin invaded Ukraine. The economy of Russia would have collapsed, and the war would have come to a quick end. Reagan got this one right.

Thomas Jefferson predicted that absolute monarchs and dictators would always regard a successful democracy anywhere in the world as a threat, no matter what the democracy did. That’s because people living under a dictator will always be thinking: “Why can’t we have the kind of government and the freedom that those people over there have?” Jefferson lived to see his prediction come true. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were widely read in Europe and directly led to several revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution. Jefferson correctly explained why someone like Vladimir Putin will always view countries like Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden as threats. It isn’t because these countries are in NATO. Sweden isn’t in NATO. It isn’t because they are in the EU. Britain isn’t in the European Union. It is because these countries have democratic governments and despite Putin’s best efforts, there are people all over Russia who know that and who would like to have that kind of government themselves. Jefferson got this one right.