In today’s circus, foreign policy isn’t written in smoke-filled rooms—it’s traded on the futures market. Every Trump post, every Medvedev barb, and every drone strike seems to be less about strategy and more about stock tickers.
But if you cut through the punchlines, there’s a deeper current: why do Trump’s pronouncements swing so wildly—Russia is strong one week, weak the next, sometimes even a “paper tiger”? The answer isn’t ideology. It’s oil. And weapons. Commodities.
The Fossil Fuel Flipbook
Here’s how the game works:
- Washington and Brussels quietly greenlight Ukrainian drone and sabotage ops against Russian refineries.
- Russia cuts back on fuel exports, supply tightens, and global prices nudge upward.
- Trump pops up in the echo chamber, calling Russia a busted flush, while U.S. suppliers pump Europe full of West Texas crude at a premium.
- As a bonus, Russia’s commitments to countries like India may even slip.
In 2024, the U.S. became the EU’s largest petroleum supplier—573 million barrels, or more than 16% of Europe’s total imports. That’s not just a trade statistic; it’s leverage. Every time a refinery in Ryazan or Nizhnekamsk goes up in flames, Houston and Midland smile.
And the strategy doesn’t stop at Europe. Cut Russia’s discounted flows to India, and suddenly Delhi must bargain harder with Gulf states—or, in a pinch, with Washington. The Kremlin loses a partner, the Americans rake in margins, and Trump’s backers at Big Oil chalk up another win. And underneath, is the supreme son-in-law Jared Corey Kushner on the red-hot smartphone yelling, “Buy this, sell that, hold this?” Odds are, well, you know.
The Trading Floor Angle
Don’t forget the other play: timing the noise. Wall Street and its satellites trade futures on headlines. When Trump calls Russia “finished,” prices dip or spike—and insiders who know his script trade ahead.
The same goes for defense stocks. A hawkish Trump broadside can push Lockheed Martin and Raytheon up 4–5% in a day, while one of his sudden “peace tweets” can shave billions off their market cap overnight. In this way, the political theater doubles as a trading algorithm. And the beauty of it? Plausible deniability. Trump doesn’t need to understand pipeline capacity, tanker scheduling, or NATO weapons orders. He just needs to howl at the right moon, and somebody in Houston, Bethesda, or Palm Beach cashes the ticket. The reality is, the world may not even be watching the most powerful man in the world; we could be witnessing a dancing clown run by the Larry Ellisons, the Rupert Murdochs, BlackRock, and some other rich-list machinators.
Why Medvedev’s Joke Matters
So when Medvedev cracks that Trump might soon offer Zelensky terms of surrender or a rocket ride to Mars with Musk, he’s not just trolling. He’s pointing to the absurdity of a superpower running foreign policy through social media mood swings—swings that happen to track awfully close to the cash flows of oil majors and arms dealers. As for Ukraine, we already know the European bankers and the BlackRock pirates stand waiting to rebuild, to privatize what’s left of one of the most resource-rich countries in the world.
Medvedev laughs, but his jokes have teeth. A clown in Kiev, a bubble-gum prophet in New York, and a Texan oil patch quietly getting rich off every “paper tiger” headline. That’s the new geopolitics. The people? Well, the people are just cattle mooing across the landscape, consuming what’s left over after the mighty get their cut. And all this as we all ride a razor blade edge between what we fear, and the catastrophe that looms.
Oh, and be sure and read the Forbes piece titled “How Jared Kushner’s Bold Bets In The Middle East Made Him A Billionaire.” Yeah, they no longer even care if you know.
Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books
Follow new articles on our Telegram channel
