US Congress Clears Lindsey O. Graham Sanctions Act Enabling 100% Tariffs on Big Russian Energy Buyers

Washington is reviving an old playbook: in 1982 President Reagan sanctioned European firms helping build the Soviet Union’s Urengoy-Uzhgorod gas pipeline—moves Europe deemed “extraterritorial” and ultimately forced the White House to retreat. The new bill similarly projects US financial leverage beyond its borders, counting on access to the American market to police third-party trade. It sits at the intersection of two long-term arcs: the weaponisation of the dollar-centred trading system (from the 1941 Lend-Lease oil embargo on Japan to the 2012 Iran sanctions) and the accelerating East-Asian effort to de-dollarise energy commerce, evident in the ruble-renminbi settlement surge and BRICS currency talks. Whether the measure bites depends less on statutory text than on how aggressively future presidents invoke it—and whether China, India and others can build alternative payments and logistics chains fast enough. On a 100-year horizon, this episode may be remembered either as a footnote in an iterative sanctions spiral or as a catalyst that sped the fragmentation of the post-1945 US-led trade order.