A Russian Perspective: Washington’s Energy Imperialism: How Moscow Views the US Drive to Control Iranian and Venezuelan Energy Resources

Writing in the Russian daily Izvestia, economist Nikita Illeritsky — a senior research fellow at the Centre for Central Asian Studies of the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences — offered from Moscow’s perspective a sweeping energy-geopolitical reading of the current US-Israeli military campaign against Iran. The article, entitled “By Right of the Strong”, frames the American posture toward both Iran and Venezuela as fundamentally driven by Washington’s long-term energy insecurity, rather than by the Arab-Israeli conflict or nonproliferation concerns per se.

Iran’s Untapped Gas: A Strategic Prize

Illeritsky’s central argument, as articulated in Izvestia, is that Iran remains the last major holder of natural gas reserves — an estimated 33 trillion cubic metres, or roughly 17% of the global total — that have yet to be monetised on international markets. Despite Tehran’s considerable progress in developing its gas sector over the past three and a half decades, US-led sanctions have ensured that Iranian gas exerts no meaningful pressure on the supply-demand balance in either Europe or the Asia-Pacific. The parallel with Venezuela — which sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves but produces a fraction of its potential under the weight of sanctions — is, Illeritsky writes, self-evident.

A significant portion of the Izvestia article is devoted to the structural energy predicament now facing the United States domestically. According to Illeritsky, the shale revolution that transformed America into a major LNG exporter is, if not ending, then clearly plateauing. At the same time, electricity demand has surged beyond all mid-2010s projections, driven principally by the explosion of data centres serving artificial intelligence workloads, 5G infrastructure, and the electrification of transport. Illeritsky argues that renewables and nuclear power are insufficient to meet these needs: what is required are reliable, high-capacity gas-fired power plants — yet the domestic gas to fuel them is becoming scarcer and costlier.

The Izvestia piece contends that this convergence of declining shale output and skyrocketing electricity demand became acutely apparent around the start of the second Trump administration. The US, Illeritsky writes in Izvestia, has responded in its customary fashion: by externalising its domestic problems through military-coercive means, in violation of the UN Charter, international law, and basic norms of morality.

Regime Change as Resource Acquisition

The openly declared American objective of regime change in Iran, Illeritsky argues, conceals a deeper aim: to open Iran’s vast gas wealth to major US and Western energy corporations. This would allow those corporations to build new LNG supply chains — American not by origin, but by right of corporate ownership — and, if necessary, to rebalance the North American gas market by importing cheaper LNG while keeping US-origin exports positioned on premium European and Asian markets. The Izvestia article further links this to Washington’s push for maximum flexibility in global LNG trade and the construction of a “gas dollar” pegged to Henry Hub, decoupled from the physical reality of North American gas production.

Perhaps the most consequential geopolitical implication drawn by Illeritsky — and one that reflects a distinctly Russian strategic calculus — is his warning that a post-regime-change Iran could be transformed into a US-aligned proxy competitor to Russia in global energy markets. Such an Iran, the Izvestia article warns, would squeeze Russian hydrocarbons out of both European and Asian markets, would cease to be a comfortable partner for China, and would effectively bolster American energy security and geopolitical dominance on an extraterritorial basis.

Illeritsky’s analysis in Izvestia is notable less for its originality than for its bluntness: it represents a crystallisation of mainstream Russian expert opinion on the strategic motivations behind the US posture toward Iran. The energy-centric framing is not new, but its articulation through the specific lens of the shale plateau, the AI-driven power crunch, and the LNG-to-gas-dollar pipeline is both timely and revealing of how Moscow’s analytical community interprets current events. The conspicuous absence of any discussion of Iranian nuclear ambitions, the IRGC’s regional role, or the October 7 context underscores that this is a deliberately resource-realist reading — one that serves Russian strategic narratives about Western neocolonial resource extraction.

It is worth noting, however, that the article’s implicit assumption — that a post-revolutionary Iran would automatically align with US corporate and geopolitical interests — is debatable. Iran’s internal dynamics, institutional depth, and regional entanglements make any such outcome far less mechanistic than the Izvestia analysis suggests. Nevertheless, Illeritsky’s piece is a valuable indicator of the Russian optic on the unfolding crisis and merits attention as such.

Illustration: Gemini