The most significant defeat in Russia’s war on Ukraine was suffered not on a battlefield but in the marketplace.

The Russian aggressors had expected to use natural gas as a weapon to bend Western Europe to their will. The weapon failed. Why? And will the failure continue?

Unlike oil, which is easily transported by ocean tanker, gas moves most efficiently and economically through fixed pipelines. Pipelines are time-consuming and expensive to build. Once the pipeline is laid, over land or underwater, the buyer at one end is bound to the seller on the other end. Gas can move by tanker, too, but first it must be compressed into liquid form. Compressing gas is expensive and technologically demanding. In the 2010s, European consumers preferred to rely on cheaper and supposedly reliable pipeline gas from Russia. Then, in 2021, the year before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Europeans abruptly discovered the limits of Russian-energy reliability.

The Russian pipeline network can carry only so much gas at a time. In winter, Europe consumes more than the network can convey, so Europe prepares for shortages by building big inventories of gas in the summertime, when it uses less.

Russian actions in the summer of 2021 thwarted European inventory building. A shortage loomed—and prices spiked. I wrote for The Atlantic on January 5, 2022:

In a normal year, Europe would enter the winter with something like 100 billion cubic meters of gas on hand. This December began with reserves 13 percent lower than usual. Thin inventories have triggered fearful speculation. Gas is selling on European commodity markets for 10 times the price it goes for in the United States.

These high prices have offered windfall opportunities for people with gas to sell. Yet Russia has refused those opportunities. Through August, when European utilities import surplus gas to accumulate for winter use, deliveries via the main Russian pipeline to Germany flowed at only one-quarter their normal rate. Meanwhile, Russia has been boycotting altogether the large and sophisticated pipeline that crosses Ukraine en route to more southerly parts of Europe.

I added a warning: “By design or default, the shortfalls have put a powerful weapon in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s hands.”

A month later, the world learned what Putin’s gas weapon was meant to do. Russian armored columns lunged toward the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on February 24. Putin’s gas cutoffs appear to have been intended to deter Western Europe from coming to Ukraine’s aid.

The day before the invasion, I tried to communicate the mood of fear that then gripped gas markets and European capitals:

In 2017, 2018, and 2019, Russia’s dominance over its gas customers in Western Europe was weaker, and its financial resources to endure market disruption were fewer. In 2022, Russia’s power over its gas customers is at a zenith—and its financial resources are enormous … One gas-industry insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly, predicted that if gas prices stay high, European economies will shrink—and Russia’s could grow—to the point where Putin’s economy will overtake at least Italy’s and perhaps France’s to stand second in Europe only to Germany’s.

That fear was mercifully not realized. Instead, European economies proved much more resilient—and Russia’s gas weapon much less formidable—than feared. The lights did not go out.

The story of this success is one of much ingenuity, solidarity, sacrifice, and some luck. If Putin’s war continues into its second winter and into Europe’s third winter of gas shortages, Western countries will need even more ingenuity, solidarity, sacrifice, and luck.

Over 12 months, European countries achieved a remarkable energy pivot. First, they reduced their demand for gas. European natural-gas consumption in 2022 was estimated to be 12 percent lower than the average for the years 2019–21. More consumption cuts are forecast for 2023.

Weather helped. Europe’s winter of 2022–23 was, for the most part, a mild one. Energy substitution made a difference too. Germany produced 12 percent more coal-generated electricity in 2022 than in 2021. The slow recovery from the coronavirus pandemic in China helped as well. Chinese purchases of liquid natural gas on world markets actually dropped by nearly 20 percent in 2022 from their 2021 level.

[David Frum: Putin’s big chill in Europe]

Second, European countries looked out for consumers, and for one another. European Union governments spent close to 800 billion euros ($860 billion) to subsidize fuel bills in 2022. The United Kingdom distributed an emergency grant of £400 ($500) a household to help with fuel costs. Germany normally reexports almost half of the gas it imports, and despite shortfalls at home through the crisis, it continued to reexport a similar proportion to EU partners.

Third, as European countries cut their consumption, they also switched their sources of supply. The star of this part of the story is Norway, which replaced Russia as Europe’s single largest gas supplier. Norway rejiggered its offshore fields to produce less oil and more gas, I learned from energy experts during a recent visit I made to Oslo.

Norwegians also made sacrifices for their neighbors. Norway has an abundance of cheap hydroelectricity, and exports much of that power. During the 2022 energy crisis, those export commitments pushed up Norwegian households’ power bills and helped push down the approval ratings of Norway’s governing Labor Party by more than a quarter from its level at the beginning of that year. Nevertheless, the government steadfastly honored its electricity-export commitments (although it has now moved to place some restrictions on future exports).

The redirection from Asia of shipments of liquid natural gas from the United States, the Persian Gulf, and West Africa also contributed to European energy security. In December 2022, Germany opened a new gas-receiving terminal in Wilhelmshaven, near Bremen, which was completed at record speed, in fewer than 200 days. Two more terminals will begin operating in 2023.

The net result is that Russian gas exports fell by 25 percent in 2022. And since the painful record prices set in the months before the February 2022 invasion, the cost of gas in Europe has steeply declined.

Russian leaders had assumed that their pipelines to Europe would make the continent dependent on Russia. They did not apparently consider that the same pipelines also made Russia dependent on Europe. By contrast, only a single pipeline connects Russia to the whole of China, and it is less valuable to Putin—according to a study conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the gas it carries commands prices much lower than the gas Russia pipes to Europe.

To reach world markets, Russia will have to undertake the costly business of compressing its gas into liquid form. A decompression plant like the one swiftly constructed in Wilhelmshaven costs about $500 million. Germany’s three newly built terminals to receive liquid natural gas will cost more than $3 billion. But the outbound terminals that compress the gas cost even more: $10.5 billion is the latest estimate for the next big project on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Russia depended on foreign investment and technology to compete in the liquid-natural-gas market. Under Western sanctions, the flow of both investment and technology to Russia have been cut.

[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

Russia lacks the economic and technological oomph to keep pace with the big competitors in the liquid-gas market, such as the U.S. and Qatar. In April, CNBC reported on a study by gas-industry consultants that projected growth of 50 percent for the liquid-natural-gas market by 2030. The Russian share of that market will, according to the same study, shrink to 5 percent (from about 7 percent), even as the American share rises to 25 percent (from about 20 percent).

If the war in Ukraine continues through the next winter, Europe will have to overcome renewed difficulties. For example, Germany’s nuclear-power plants, which eased the shock last year, went offline forever in April. And this time, the winter might be colder. But gas production by non-Russian producers keeps rising, outpacing demand in the rest of the world. The Chinese economy continues its slow recovery from COVID; India lags as a gas buyer.

Risks are everywhere—but so are possibilities. When this war comes to an end, the lesson will be clear: We have to hasten the planet to a post-fossil-fuel future—not only to preserve our environment but to uphold world peace from aggressors who use oil and gas as weapons. Yet perhaps the most enduring lesson is political. Through the energy shock, Europe discovered a new resource: the power of wisely led cooperation to meet and overcome a common danger.

Most war correspondents don’t become household names, but as the Second World War raged, every American knew Ernie Pyle. His great subject was not the politics of the war, or its strategy, but rather the men who were fighting it. At the height of his column’s popularity, more than 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies syndicated Pyle’s dispatches from the front. His grinning face graced the cover of Time magazine. An early collection of his columns, Here Is Your War, became a best seller. It was followed by Brave Men, rereleased this week by Penguin Classics with an introduction by David Chrisinger, the author of the recent Pyle biography The Soldier’s Truth.

Pyle was one of many journalists who flocked to cover the Second World War. But he was not in search of scoops or special access to power brokers; in fact, he avoided the generals and admirals he called “the brass hats.” What Pyle looked for, and then conveyed, was a sense of what the war was really like. His columns connected those on the home front to the experiences of loved ones on the battlefield in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. For readers in uniform, Pyle’s columns sanctified their daily sacrifices in the grinding, dirty, bloody business of war. Twelve million Americans would read about what it took for sailors to offload supplies under fire on a beachhead in Anzio, or how gunners could shoot enough artillery rounds to burn through a howitzer’s barrel. Pyle wrote about what he often referred to as “brave men.” And his idea of courage wasn’t a grand gesture but rather the accumulation of mundane, achievable, unglamorous tasks: digging a foxhole, sleeping in the mud, surviving on cold rations for weeks, piloting an aircraft through flak day after day after day.

We’ve become skeptical of heroic narratives. Critics who dismiss Pyle as a real-time hagiographer of the Greatest Generation miss the point. Pyle was a cartographer, meticulously mapping the character of the Americans who chose to fight. If a person’s character becomes their destiny, the destiny of the American war effort depended on the collective character of Americans in uniform. Pyle barely touched on tactics or battle plans in his columns, but he wrote word after word about the plight of the average frontline soldier because he understood that the war would be won, or lost, in their realm of steel, dirt, and blood.

In the following passage, Pyle describes a company of American infantrymen advancing into a French town against German resistance:

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren’t warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.

I imagine that when those words hit the U.S. in 1944, shortly after D-Day, readers found reassurance in the idea that those “good boys” had what it took to win the war, despite being afraid, and despite not really being warriors. However, today Pyle’s words hold a different meaning. They read more like a question, one now being asked about America’s character in an ever more dangerous world.

[Read: Notes from a cematary]

The past two years have delivered a dizzying array of national-security challenges, including the U.S.’s decision to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A rising authoritarian axis threatens the West-led liberal world order birthed after the Second World War. Much like when Pyle wrote 80 years ago, the character of a society—whether it contains “brave men” and “good boys” willing to defend democratic values—will prove determinative to the outcomes of these challenges.

The collapse of Afghanistan’s military and government came as a surprise to many Americans. That result cannot be fully explained by lack of dollars, time, or resources expended. Only someone who understood the human side of war—as Pyle certainly did—could have predicted that collapse, when the majority of Afghan soldiers surrendered to the Taliban. Conversely, in Ukraine, where most experts predicted a speedy Russian victory, the Ukrainians overperformed, defying expectations. The character of the Ukrainian people, one which most didn’t fully recognize, has been the driving factor.

Pyle often wrote in anecdotes, but his writing’s impact was anything but anecdotal. His style of combat realism, which eschews the macro and strategic for the micro and human, can be seen in today’s combat reporting from Ukraine. A new documentary film, Slava Ukraini, made by one of France’s most famous public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy, takes a Pyle-esque approach to last fall’s Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russians. The film focuses on everyday Ukrainians and the courage they display for the sake of their cause. “And I’m amazed,” Lévy says, walking through a trench in eastern Ukraine, “that while weapons were not always their craft, these men are transformed into the bravest soldiers.”

Ernie Pyle at the front in 1944.(Bettmann/CORBIS/Getty)

War correspondents such as Thomas Gibbons-Neff at The New York Times and James Marson at The Wall Street Journal take a similar approach, with reporting that’s grounded in those specifics, which must inform any real understanding of strategy. The result is a style that’s indebted to Pyle and his concern with the soldiers’ morale and commitment to the cause, and reveals more than any high-level analyses could.

Pyle wasn’t the first to search for strategic truths about war in the granular reality of individual experiences. Ernest Hemingway, who didn’t cover the First World War as a correspondent but later reflected on it as a novelist, wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Pyle took this advice to heart when introducing characters in his columns. He would not only tell you a bit about a soldier, their rank, their job, and what they looked like; he would also make sure to give the reader their home address. “Here are the names of just a few of my company mates in that little escapade that afternoon,” he writes, after describing heavy combat in France. “Sergeant Joseph Palajsa, of 187 I Street, Pittsburgh. Pfc. Arthur Greene, of 618 Oxford Street, Auburn Massachusetts …” He goes on to list more than a half dozen others. Pyle knew that “only the names of the places had dignity.” And sometimes those places were home.

As a combat reporter, Pyle surpassed all others working during the Second World War, outwriting his contemporaries, Hemingway included. This achievement was one of both style and commitment. Was there any reporter who saw more of the war than Pyle? He first shipped overseas in 1940, to cover the Battle of Britain. He returned to the war in 1942, to north Africa, and he went on to Italy, to France, and finally to the Pacific. On April 17, 1945, while on a patrol near Okinawa, a sniper shot Pyle in the head, killing him instantly. His subject, war, finally consumed him.

[Read: The two Stalingrads]

Reading the final chapters of Brave Men, it seems as though Pyle’s subject was consuming him even before he left for Okinawa. “For some of us the war has already gone on too long,” he writes. “Our feelings have been wrung and drained.” Brave Men ends shortly after the liberation of Paris. The invasion of western Europe—which we often forget was an enormous gamble—had paid off. Berlin stood within striking distance. The war in Europe would soon be over. Pyle, however, remains far from sanguine.

“We have won this war because our men are brave, and because of many other things.” He goes on to list the contribution of our allies, the roles played by luck, by geography, and even by the passage of time. He cautions against hubris in victory and warns about the challenges of homecoming for veterans. “And all of us together will have to learn how to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war cannot soon be possible … Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be the master of the peace. All we can do is fumble and try once more—try out of the memory of our anguish—and be as tolerant with each other as we can.”

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