Trump announced on Friday that he clinched a deal with Putin wherein “Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel.“ This is a step closer towards their long-negotiated resource-centric rapprochement.
The gist thereof was first floated here in November 2024, expanded upon here in January 2025 shortly before Trump returned to office, and most recently elaborated on here in early October amidst the latest reports about potential US stakes in Nord Stream. To summarize for the convenience of casual readers, who can review these analyses here and here from December for more details, Russia and the US have shared interests in strengthening their resource cooperation that long predate the Third Gulf War.
Basically, Russia wants to preemptively avert any potentially disproportionate dependence on China brought about by the West’s unprecedented sanctions over the past nearly half-decade, while the US wants to advance that goal in parallel with denying China access to more Russian resource deposits. Per the last-mentioned interest, American investments (and possibly later those of its sanctions-waived Asian allies like India, Japan, and South Korea) in such deposits would ipso facto deny them to China.
The grand strategic goal that the US is pursuing has been described as the “Strategy of Denial” by Elbridge Colby, who’s now the Under Secretary of War for Policy and considered to be the mastermind behind NATO 3.0 and the US’ complementary “Pivot (back) to (East) Asia” for more robustly containing China. Its control over Venezuela’s oil exports and its (imperfect) blockade’s influence over Gulf energy exports, both from Iran and the Arab Kingdoms, empower the US to decelerate China’s superpower trajectory.
Around half of the foreign energy required for fueling it has now fallen under some degree of US influence, and replicating this approach through mutually beneficial resource deals with Russia as part of the Ukrainian peace process will radically exacerbate the US’ pressure campaign against China. The ultimate goal is to coerce China into a lopsided trade deal that would cap its superpower rise and instead make it the most significant Great Power below the US for ending the systemic challenge that it poses.
Russian officials will never publicly declare as much, but it can be reasonably assumed that they’re deeply disappointed with China, which is why their country is going along with the US’ plans. Not only did China bend to US sanctions pressure by pulling out of a major energy project, but the BRICS and SCO banks that it hosts shockingly comply with these restrictions too, and China still sells drones, spare parts, and fiber optics to Ukraine to this day for indefinitely perpetuating NATO’s proxy war on Russia.
Since China declined to radically accelerate multipolarity by defying the US’ sanctions against Russia and cutting Ukraine off from drone-related sales, it’s poetic justice for Russia to radically exacerbate the US’ pressure campaign against China through a resource-centric rapprochement with the US that will derail China’s superpower trajectory. China had its chance to shape the world order by throwing its weight behind Russia but declined, so now Russia is shaping it instead by throwing its weight behind the US.
