Trump-Putin Summit and Politicians on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Dmitry Orlov

On Friday, August 15, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Anchorage, Alaska. This is all the news so far: the presidents of Russia and the US are to talk to each other in person; details of the conversation unknown ahead of time and confidential in any case.

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The mass hysteria among Western mass media is perfectly justifiable: there is an ever-increasing level of desperation on the part of the European and the Ukrainian leaders (I hesitate to call them that) to somehow stay relevant to the situation in which their stakes could not be higher. Similar levels of desperation are palpable among the anti-Trump segment on the western side of the Atlantic.

Trump and his supporters are becoming desperate too:

• The US economy is tanking, unemployment is rising, the financial markets are overpriced by a factor of three or four and are ready for a swan dive.
• As much as two-thirds of the cost of Trump’s creative tariffs is going to be borne by the US consumer and the entire strategy of attempting to fix trade imbalances by imposing tariffs is starting to seem like a very bad idea.
• US budget deficits and interest payments are at all-time highs…And there are no successes to report.

There are, however, some failures to report. For starters:

• Greenland is still Danish, Canada still Canadian and the Panama Canal is still Panamanian and Trump is still babbling away about this and that.
• The effort to rein in US federal spending by deploying Elon Musk and his DOGE went nowhere, producing a paltry and insignificant amount of savings.
• The Dozen-Day War with Iran was, in the final analysis, a defeat for Israel which failed to defend its territory even with US help, stupidly ran out of air defense rockets and ended up begging the US to please make it stop. Luckily for Trump, an ever-increasing number of Americans already can’t remember what any of that was about.

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For the sake of completeness, let us rattle off the list of woefully overdue agenda items for this summit.

An obvious item for the top of the list are the two strategic arms limitation treaties (New START and ABM) which have either lapsed or about to lapse but need to be renegotiated. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The INF treaty is essentially already dead; Trump unilaterally pulled out of it in 2019 but Moscow continued to adhere to a self-imposed ban on violating this treaty until August 4, 2025.

It is rather important for Russia and the US, having the largest nuclear forces on the planet by far, to renegotiate these treaties in light of the fact that Russia has an entire new suite of weapons that invalidate all previous strategic calculations.

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As a result, in case of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US, complete and total destruction of the US is now guaranteed whereas the US strategic forces can no longer guarantee complete and total destruction of Russia because of Russia’s vastly superior anti-ballistic and air defense systems. Furthermore, Russia either already has or will soon have the ability to adequately deter the US without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Lastly, both the US and Russia face increasing threats from essentially terrorist actors using new, advanced drones, including ones that use artificial intelligence for targeting and detection avoidance.

Meanwhile, Mexican drug cartels have started sending their members to the former Ukraine for training and will soon be ready to start using drones for importing drugs into the US (the world’s largest market for illegal drugs) and for using drones to assassinate US officials who attempt to interfere with these very lucrative operations. The US is currently defenseless against this new threat and would benefit from Russian assistance in this matter.

Energy

The US is currently the world’s largest oil producer and consumer at over 13 million barrels a day, followed closely by Saudi Arabia and Russia. But there are a couple of major problems with US oil production while most natural gas production in the US is concomitant to oil production with a relatively small amount of specifically gas-directed drilling.

The first problem is that most of the oil the US produces is not oil — it is natural gas condensate produced from fracked shale oil wells. Condensate is a liquid rather than a gas but is much lighter than most grades of crude oil. As such, it is not directly useful for producing diesel oil, jet fuel or bunker fuel — petroleum distillates that power most of the world’s transportation. As a result, the US is both an oil exporter and an oil importer, being forced to import the heavier oil to enable its refineries to produce the needed mix of transportation fuels.

The second problem is that the US has the lowest reserves of any major oil producer. Its Reserve-to-Production Ratio is at this point less than 10 years. However, this does not mean that it has 10 years of production at 13 million barrels a day and then suddenly zero. Rather, it has an unknown but possibly quite short period of time left at anywhere near the current production level followed by a steep decline. Unlike conventional wells, which, as they near depletion are converted to stripper wells that produce perhaps a dozen barrels of oil a day for many years, being tended by a lowly roustabout in a pickup truck, fracked wells simply give out and need to be either re-fracked at great and uncertain expense or simply capped and abandoned. From this it follows that just a few years from now much of US oil (i.e., natural gas condensate) production will start to peter out, and since there is no other source of oil in the world to make up for this sudden decline, Peak Oil will once again rear its ugly head.

Now that the effort to replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy with so-called “renewables” has failed spectacularly (they are not necessarily renewable by their Chinese manufacturers) there remain two approaches open to the US for mitigating the looming energy shortage: Arctic oil and gas and nuclear energy. Both of these would require a massive amount of preparation and would also require Russian assistance.

Arctic hydrocarbon exploration and production requires technologies that only Russia has, such as a large and growing atomic icebreaker fleet, a growing fleet of tankers designed to operate in the Arctic, and a lot of other experience and technology relevant to energy projects in the Arctic. The US has neither the required technology, nor the time or the required skill sets for developing it, but could perhaps start a few Arctic oil projects with Russia’s help in the little time that is remaining.

Nuclear power is likewise Russia’s prime domain. Russia is the only large-scale exporter of nuclear power technology. Its projects currently include nuclear power plants in China (Tianwan & Xudabao plants), India (Kudankulam), Turkey (Akkuyu), Egypt (El Dabaa), Bangladesh (Rooppur), Hungary (Paks II) and Iran (Bushehr), adding up to some 60% of the world’s nuclear reactor portfolio. China builds lots of nuclear power plants — in China. Everyone else’s nuclear energy efforts can charitably be described as boutique.

Unlike American and European companies, Russia’s Rosatom has the ability to build and operate nuclear power plants on schedule and within budget, providing an end-to-end solution that includes not just construction of the reactor, but fuel for its entire 100-year operating lifetime, reprocessing for its spent fuel, and training of local staff. Russia has the world’s largest and most advanced set of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment and the world’s only closed nuclear fuel cycle, giving it the ability to reprocess and neutralize spent nuclear reactor fuel. Meanwhile, the US allows spent fuel to accumulate in storage pools at nuclear power plants, eventually moving it to nearby dry cask storage, because there is nowhere for it to put the dry casks.

The US could partially compensate for its coming steep decline in oil production by building out its nuclear reactor fleet, but would be unable to do so without Russia’s help. Even then, the success of such a project would be far from certain because of the hostile regulatory regime in the US and exorbitant overall costs of doing business because of overpriced health care, housing, legal costs, the insufficient educational level of the work force, problems with finding workers who are not heavy drinkers or drug users and other factors that make the US increasingly noncompetitive.

The slow-motion fiasco currently unfolding in the former Ukraine is the result of a massive strategic miscalculation borne of an equally massive level of ignorance about Russia within the increasingly mentally and morally degenerate US establishment. The original plan was to force Russia to intervene militarily to stop the genocide of Russians in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, then saddle it with sanctions while supporting the Ukrainians militarily in order to deal Russia a strategic defeat. Three years later, Russia’s economy is growing nicely, though not as fast as it could if it weren’t for the Ukraine and not as fast as China or India. Meanwhile the Ukrainian military is nearing collapse and Ukrainian society is past boiling point and approaching civil war. Meanwhile, Russia’s goals for its Special Military Operation in the former Ukraine (not a war, mind you) remain unchanged: demilitarization, denazification, neutral, non-bloc status (no more NATO expansion!) and the complete absence of foreign (non-Russian) troops.

Talking heads and Western politicians are desperate in their determination to deny that Russia is winning. They are giddily yammering away on the topic of the possible deal Trump and Putin could reach in the Ukraine, but their enthusiasm seems rather misplaced. First, recent events have demonstrated that Trump has no leverage on Russia: empty threats to impose secondary sanctions on the buyers of Russian oil have been rebuffed by both India and China while Brazil offered to stop trading with the US altogether.

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• Russia gets to keep the very temporarily Ukrainian Crimea (no longer worthy of discussion), all of the rather temporarily Ukrainian Donetsk and Lugansk, but only the portions of the equally temporarily Ukrainian Zaporozhye and Kherson which Russian forces currently occupy, essentially freezing the conflict along the line of contact.
• In return, Russia would have to withdraw from Sumy, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk regions, which it is partially occupying in order to prevent Ukrainian forces from attacking its neighboring Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions.
• Also, this would be a de facto arrangement with no official recognition of what are now Russian territories and any sudden change in US leadership could suddenly invalidate it, putting Russia in a disadvantageous situation.
• Lastly, after a long series of broken promises by the US and the rest of NATO, such a deal would require a level of trust from the Russian side which is altogether missing.

Is Trump ready to admit that the entire Ukraine fiasco is a fiasco and the fault of the US? Perhaps not; admitting as much would cause the already shrill denials coming out of Kiev, the EU, NATO and much of the establishment in the US to become positively deafening. Beyond that, is Trump ready to make amends? For starters, he could:
• order the US to restore the Nord Stream pipelines which are Russian properties the US destroyed.
• Unfreeze the $300 billion of Russian state assets which have been frozen and the interest earned on which has been funneled to the Ukrainians.
• Lift all sanctions on Russia (since it is now clear that they were imposed in error).

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/c4afe0bb-e37c-42e7-be04-1c26c618d1a4