The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Using U.S. Energy as Leverage || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Trade relations between the U.S. and Europe are on the fritz. The latest in all the noise is the suggestion that the U.S. could restrict LNG exports to the EU if trade negotiations break down. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter:

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Paza della Cava in Oviedo, Italy. Today, we're looking at some of the strange things that are happening in U.S. European relations. As you may or may not remember, the Trump administration is carrying out 200 simultaneous trade talks, and none of them are really going anywhere, which means it's really up to secondary officials that normally wouldn't have much power in negotiations to kind of set terms and one of them Andrew Puzner at the US Ambassador Europe has said that if talks between the Trump administration and Europe don't go well on things like on things like auto tariff levels that the United States is going to stop sending liquef natural gas to the continent now it's a total dick move but that doesn't mean it won't work two things.

Number one, Europe imports nearly 90% of their natural gas. And before the Ukraine war, it was more or less an even split between stuff from North Africa, liquefied natural gas was imported from multiple countries, stuff from the former Soviet Union, and then Norway. What's happened now is that two of those have gone away. Because of the Ukraine war, the flows from Russia have stopped. And because of the Iran War, shutting the Strait of Hormuz, flows from Qatar, which is the largest LNG supplier to Europe pre-war have also stopped. That means U.S. natural gas is one of the few sources of energy that the Europeans can still

access. And if that is to go away for any reason, then the Europeans are kind of screwed. So that's kind of piece one. Piece two is how this would happen. It's kind of difficult to imagine. It doesn't mean it can't happen, though. The issue is private enterprise. the United States doesn't have a state oil company. It just has private companies that are buying natural gas on the American market, cooling at their facilities typically on the Texas or Louisiana

coast, and then shipping it out. So if the United States was going to bar those companies from selling to Europe as part of negotiations, there were definitely a bevy of lawsuits. But if there's one thing about this administration that we really do understand is it's deeply disinterested in general business conditions or the role. the government plays in business, and it's really not constrained by legal norms at all. So while from a clear, clean, legal point of view, I don't see how this would happen. I don't think that would really dissuade the federal government under this administration at all. So will this work?

This is one of the things that in my projects and my books in the past, pre-Trump, I said we should probably expect that the United States will try to leverage its energy security and economic strength in order to get whatever it wants out of anyone. It's just a little frustrating from my point of view to see this used against allies as opposed to potential foes. But you know, by guns.