The crisis in Ukraine has injected a new element of Cold War politics, as well as a supporting cast of European diplomats and Washington lobbyists, into the debate on Capitol Hill over natural-gas exports, Jonathan Broder reports in Roll Call .  

Until now, the debate has broken down along familiar lines. The oil and gas industry and its Republican supporters have argued that larger exports of American liquefied natural gas would reduce the national deficit and create jobs.  

Opposing them is a coalition of Democrats, consumer advocates, chemical companies and manufacturers who counter that increasing LNG exports would raise domestic gas prices, hurting both consumers and companies such as Dow Chemical and DuPont. Environmentalists who oppose fracking, meanwhile, fear that expanding exports will encourage more production.  

But with Russian troops tightening their grip on Ukraine’s strategic Crimean Peninsula, the advocates for more U.S. gas exports have added what they hope will be a compelling geopolitical argument to their quiver: The Obama administration and Congress can use the nation’s enormous gas reserves as a weapon to help Ukraine and other European countries break their dependency on Russian gas and thereby reduce Moscow’s political leverage over them.