Adam N. Stulberg

Moving Beyond the Great Game: The Geoeconomics of Russia’s Influence in the Caspian Energy Bonanza

Emboldened by the recovery of the domestic oil industry and determined to exploit comparative advantages in world markets, President Putin put Russia once again on the move to secure control over Caspian energy spoils. The revitalization of Moscows posture renewed debate over the contours of geopolitical competition in the region, and the effectiveness of non-military instruments of statecraft more generally. Yet, much of the controversy is misplaced due to empirical and theoretical oversights. The first is due to a misreading of the record of Moscows Caspian energy posture, and an under-appreciation for the mixed success of Russias energy leverage across the oil and gas sectors. The second comes from the failure to understand the conditions under which institutionally weak states can manipulate markets and regulatory mechanisms in global energy relations for purposes of national security. The article offers a first cut at substantiating these claims by examining the geoeconomic dimensions to Russias Caspian energy policy.

Out of Gas?: Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the Changing Geopolitics of Natural Gas

Curiously, a gas war was averted at the apogee of the 2013/4 Ukrainian crisis. Russia, Ukraine, and European consumer states not only refrained from precipitous shut-offs that marred conflicts in 2006 and 2009, but deepened mutual energy ties as the crisis unfolded. This article highlights shortcomings with the contemporary debate over Russia’s energy weapon made evident by the mixed diplomacy and outcomes in these successive gas crises. It then probes change to the roles, postures, and relationships among key stakeholders embodied by an emerging Europe-Eurasian gas network. The latter arguably upends classic realpolitik assumptions about pipeline politics, while illustrates how Russia is down but not out amid transformation in the regional gas landscape.

Strategic bargaining and pipeline politics: Confronting the credible commitment problem in Eurasian energy transit

ABSTRACT The resurgence of Russias energy diplomacy animates debate among realists, who regard pipelines as instruments of competitive resource nationalism, and their critics, who treat them either as mechanisms for strengthening cooperation or reflecting ‘obsolescing bargains’ that empower transit states upon construction and operation. Yet, this debate conspicuously overlooks the variable record of the arbitrary disruption of Eurasian energy transit. This article addresses these oversights by explicating pipeline politics as an international ‘credible commitment’ problem. It focuses specifically on the different incentives among producer, consumer and transit states and on how insights into the economic and institutional dimensions of bargaining shape the value, risks and capacity of the parties to forge and uphold pipeline agreements. Accordingly, arbitrary disruption is more likely under conditions in which the primary stakeholders are not preoccupied by recouping returns on investment and face incentives to gamble on new terms, as well as operate within opaque national regulatory settings. Credible commitments to uphold cross-border transit arrangements are more likely when the opposite conditions obtain. These claims are probed in comparative cases of arbitrary interruption of Soviet legacy pipelines and curious ‘non-events’ in Eurasian oil and gas transit.

Nuclear Energy Development: Assessing Aspirant Countries

Of the more than 40-plus countries that have expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear energy, only a few have the odds in their favor.

Triangular Diplomacy and Europe’s Changing Gas Network: From “Trying-Angles” to Stable Marriage

This chapter explicates the puzzle of strategic restraint in gas relations during the 2013–2015 Ukrainian crisis. It spells out the logic of structural energy balancing and traces the transformation of cross-border gas ties from three interacting, but asymmetric “point-to-point” relationships to a triangle system embedded within a broader regional gas network in the lead up to the 2013–2015 conflict. The chapter then probes the strategic consequences of this emerging Euro–Eurasian gas network for facilitating more resilient and diversified relationships in and across Europe, while preserving Russia’s lasting prominence as a commercial supplier. The conclusion explores implications for coercive diplomacy, as well as for strengthening US–Euro–Russian energy governance in the transition to a global gas network.

Analysis of political and trade decisions in international gas markets: A model-based systems engineering framework

By taking a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach, a framework can be developed for long-term exploration of a complex adaptive system in multiple contexts. The framework uses MBSE tools to define the complex system architecture and modern internet state transfer and structured data format standards to integrate natural language descriptions, datasets, and models. These can constitute a knowledge architecture that can be used as a long-term research tool. The long-term goal is a framework that captures conceptual models of the complex system, data sets and relationships, dynamic models and simulations, and decision analytics within a common environment. This paper presents a scenario in which we evaluate links between transformations of complex natural gas systems and analyze political intervention into the Russian-European natural gas markets. In this example, we specifically examine geographical, physical (cross-border infrastructure), and commercial value streams through the prism of network analyses. This is one context of a more general model of international gas relationships and flows at multiple levels. The resulting framework provides insight into dynamic behaviors at multiple levels of the system, such as the emergence of infrastructure network and intricate relationships of strong corporate ties and knowledge networks, along with possible strategies for political and economic intervention. The primary goal of an MBSE approach is to capture interrelationships in the complex system at varying levels of abstraction, which enables a common reference for diverse models and datasets.

Nuclear regionalism in Russia: Decentralization and control in the nuclear complex

Adam N. Stulberg is Assistant Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously, he was as a consultant at RAND and Senior Research Associate at the Center for NonproUferation Studies (CNS). He has written several articles and monographs on the strategic implications of Russian regionalism, as well as on energy security issues in the former Soviet Union.