Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan’s Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto was famously quoted with the line that the attack had “awoken a sleeping giant.” Though one would hardly qualify Russia’s invasion and occupation of Georgia as an event of Pearl Harbor-like magnitude, the war has certainly been effective in awakening a sleeping energy competitor in the European Union, which seems to have spent the past five years since the takeover of Yukos unconscious to the advance Russian energy imperialism. It’s really quite amazing that it has taken this long for Europe to show awareness of what’s being orchestrated from Moscow. For several years now, this blog and many other sources have documented the innumerable aggressive moves, both political and corporate (often with Gazprom, one cannot separate the two), to staple down and co-opt alternative suppliers, businesses, and routes literally across the world with the universal goal of increasing Europe’s dependency on Russian state-owned or state-controlled oil and gas. Though the war in Georgia highlighted concerns of Russia’s increasing stranglehold over access to Central Asia’s energy, the first big move made by Europe is focused on Nigeria, where the Financial Times is reporting that the European Union has offered Abuja financial and political backing for a $21 billion trans-Saharan pipeline to pump its gas directly to Europe – posing direct competition to an alternative proposal from Gazprom.