Life & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Yergin

Yergin’s line is built like a quiet reprimand: Europeans are “surprised” only because they kept mistaking Russia’s orientation for a cultural choice rather than a strategic one. The sentence pivots from geography (“turning east”) to psychology (European astonishment), then lands on Yergin’s real subject: the replacement of ideology with infrastructure. Marx and Lenin are invoked less as serious intellectual inheritance than as a dated brand identity Europe continued to shop from, long after the store changed ownership.

The subtext is classic Yergin: energy is not a sector, it’s a system of leverage. “Based in oil and gas” isn’t just about trade flows; it implies pipelines, long-term contracts, and the kind of dependency that outlasts summits and spats. By framing the Russia-China relationship as a shift from political doctrine to hydrocarbons, he’s arguing that the post-Cold War world didn’t become less strategic, it just became less honest about what drives alignment. Ideology offered a story; energy offers a balance sheet.

The context matters: Europe’s security assumptions were built on Russia as a European-adjacent power that needed Western markets and Western legitimacy. Yergin suggests that once Europe became an unreliable customer or an adversarial audience, Russia had an obvious alternative buyer next door, and China had a near-limitless appetite. The “surprise” is the tell: it exposes a continent that underestimated how quickly economics can redraw the map when politics hardens.