A new report challenges European Union (EU) claims of energy diversification, highlighting a “selective blindness” on gas that has left the continent vulnerable to an increasingly belligerent US regime.
Rather than diversifying its energy sources, European countries swapped out reliance on Russia for a rapidly growing dependence on US liquified natural gas (LNG) imports, according to a paper co-authored by the Clingendael Institute (The Hague) the Ecologic Institute (Berlin) and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. The paper was cited in the Guardian.
“Since the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has paid a high price for its reliance on Russia in energy trade. The US seemed to be a reliable alternative,” Raffaele Piria, the initiator of the report and a senior researcher at the Ecologic Institute, told the Guardian. Data on the European Economic Area (EEA), comprising the 27 EU states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, shows how Russian gas imports plummeted 81 percent between 2019 and 2025.
The paper notes a brief “phase of genuine diversification” in the months after the February 2022 invasion, as countries scrambled to find alternative sources amid soaring energy costs, before quickly sliding toward US dependence. Imports from the US shot up almost sixfold between 2019 and 2025, even as imports from all other suppliers increased a meagre 6 percent.
“Historically, interferences by the US government in gas markets to exert pressure on Europe were considered unthinkable,” Piria said. “In the current geopolitical context, this assumption is questionable.”
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With Donald Trump’s second administration came a radical new national security strategy, outlined in a paper published last November, that explicitly frames the goal of US energy dominance as enabling the country to “project power” abroad. Faced with Trump’s aggressive push to acquire Greenland, European leaders once again find themselves made vulnerable by their energy dependence.
“At the moment, gas reserves in the EU are very low, the lowest in years, and lower than at the outset of the war in Ukraine,” Professor Kacper Szulecki, of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, told Reuters. “If we have a cold winter and tensions with the US, leading to further price increases and reserve depletion, we might see a really dramatic energy crisis in the coming months.”
In the medium and long term, the paper argues, Europe needs to “accelerate the transition to an efficient and modern energy system based on indigenous renewable sources.”
