The European Union has set itself on an irreversible path to eliminate all Russian energy, a wise and long-overdue decision. Part of the Kremlin’s response is a whispering campaign: that Europe is not gaining true energy security but is simply trading one dependency for another, as it increases liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from the United States. It is an insipid argument that collapses under scrutiny.
The suggestion that US LNG and Russian pipeline gas represent equivalent dependencies is wrong on its face. Europe has not traded one vulnerability for another. It has traded coercion for commerce, monopoly for markets, and Russian caprice for US rule of law.
The European Commission has made this very distinction. On February 2, 2026, its spokesperson stated flatly that EU imports of US LNG cannot be compared to Europe’s pre-war dependency on Russian gas. The reasons are structural: before 2022, Russia supplied roughly 45 percent of Europe’s gas through dedicated pipelines controlled by a single state-owned company that had repeatedly weaponized supply. US LNG operates in a fundamentally different market—global, liquid, flexible, and governed by commercial contracts, not Kremlin edicts.
The contract data bear this out. As of mid-May 2026, US LNG export project sponsors have executed 129 binding sale-and-purchase agreements totaling 224.29 million tons per annum (mtpa) with seventy-two companies from twenty-six nations. European buyers represent the largest regional commitment worldwide: 90.84 mtpa, or 40.5 percent of total contracted volume, spanning twelve nations from Iberia to Scandinavia to the Black Sea. The 2022 signing surge alone—57.58 mtpa across thirty-three contracts—reflects Europe’s market-driven response to the energy crisis. Companies do not voluntarily enter 15- to 20-year contracts with suppliers they believe to be unreliable.
The structural distinction from Russian gas cannot be stated too plainly. Gazprom was a state-controlled monopoly; President Vladimir Putin could order supply cuts without shareholder consequences, contract liability, or political opposition. US LNG companies are private enterprises with binding contracts, shareholders, and profit motives. The president of the United States cannot instruct private companies to halt deliveries without immediate legal challenge and fierce political opposition from both red and blue gas producing states. US LNG exports are authorized under the Natural Gas Act, governed by commercial law, and subject to international arbitration. These are not comparable governance structures.
Nor is US LNG a single-source dependency. European buyers purchase globally flexible cargoes, not pipeline volumes locked into fixed corridors. They can purchase spot or long-term contracts, build storage, hedge positions, and choose among competing suppliers—the United States, Qatar, Australia, and others. These are tools available to market participants. They were never available to pipeline hostages.
Moreover, this administration’s policy record makes the supply-restriction argument logically incoherent. The US-EU Trade Agreement concluded in July 2025 placed US LNG at its center, with EU commitments to purchase $750 billion in US energy over three years. Within weeks, European companies signed over $35 billion in new long-term contracts. Cabinet secretaries have urged European buyers to accelerate purchases at conferences in Milan, Athens, Tokyo, and Dubrovnik. An administration that negotiates trade agreements premised on expanded LNG exports and sends Cabinet secretaries around the world to promote them is not simultaneously planning to restrict them.
The durability of the US LNG framework across administrations is itself a form of reliability. Former President Barack Obama approved Sabine Pass in 2011-2012. The first Trump administration reaffirmed export authorization policy. Former President Joe Biden, despite a year-long authorization pause, protected existing projects. The current administration is actively promoting expansion. Four administrations with divergent energy philosophies have maintained the same fundamental commitment. That institutional continuity is a strategic asset.
The European Commission understands this. Over the past eighteen months it has invested significant staff time developing simpler compliance pathways to the EU Methane law specifically to ensure that US LNG imports can flow unimpeded to European buyers. A regulator genuinely concerned about over-dependence does not dedicate resources to facilitating the imports it fears.
What Europe has achieved since 2022 deserves recognition, not anxiety. Total gas consumption has been reduced, through both conservation and, sadly, demand destruction. (Some of that demand destruction is permanent and has weakened EU manufacturing competitiveness.) Regasification capacity has been dramatically expanded, supply diversified across multiple regions, and Europe has demonstrated the ability to manage without Russian gas through consecutive winter heating seasons. These are structural gains.
The suggestion that commercial relationships between US sellers and European buyers constitute a risk comparable to the coercive dependency Europe endured under Russian pipeline supply disrespects the memory of Ukrainian suffering that continues today. Russia weaponizes energy to extract political concessions. US companies sell LNG to generate returns for shareholders under contracts enforceable in court.
These are not equivalent situations. The United States is not Russia. Commercial contracts are not Kremlin directives. It is time for the policy debate to catch up.
Fred H. Hutchison is founder, president, and CEO of LNG Allies, The USLNG Partnership, a Washington-based organization representing the full spectrum of the global US LNG market: producers, exporters, buyers, importers, and infrastructure providers.
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Image: FILE PHOTO: An LNG tanker is guided by tug boats at the Cheniere Sabine Pass LNG export unit in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, U.S., April 14, 2022. REUTERS/Marcy de Luna/File Photo