In my opinion seeing this through the lens of nations is nearly meaningless.
What is happening is the end of oil has begun and the Ukrainian war has made it very difficult to keep oil prices high. China is moving towards alternative energy and massively investing into EVs, the writing is on the wall. If you don’t secure a buyer for your oil even if you have lots of oil it is going to become harder and harder to sell it.
The way I see it, Trump is at the end of the day attacking Venezuela and seizing tankers in order to try to introduce enough instability into the world oil markets that prices don’t crash further for the oil companies actually running all of this. I don’t really even see this as a true hostile action against Russia, it feels like a purely cynical price manipulation move that Russia just happened to be the convenient target of.
All of the other context people are providing are the details built upon this core reality.
In my opinion seeing this through the lens of nations is nearly meaningless.
What is happening is the end of oil has begun and the Ukrainian war has made it very difficult to keep oil prices high. China is moving towards alternative energy and massively investing into EVs, the writing is on the wall. If you don’t secure a buyer for your oil even if you have lots of oil it is going to become harder and harder to sell it.
The way I see it, Trump is at the end of the day attacking Venezuela and seizing tankers in order to try to introduce enough instability into the world oil markets that prices don’t crash further for the oil companies actually running all of this. I don’t really even see this as a true hostile action against Russia, it feels like a purely cynical price manipulation move that Russia just happened to be the convenient target of.
All of the other context people are providing are the details built upon this core reality.