The US president’s Venezuela raid and the oil tanker seizures were publicity stunts

One suspects Donald Trump has no intention of really taking on the Russia-China axis Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

International Business Editor

09 January 2026

If Donald Trump is genuinely worried about Russian warships stalking Greenland or genuinely motivated by the new Great Game of Arctic supremacy, the easiest way to secure US objectives is to break Russian imperial powerwhere it is most acutely vulnerable.

The key pressure points are the Russian treasury and applying “asymmetric attrition” on the front line in Ukraine where significant parts of Vladimir Putin’s war machine are being degraded.

Exploit these two advantages and Greenland will take care of itself.

The Venezuela raid – or rather, Trump’s joint venture with the neo-Marxist Chavista regime to divvy up plunder – is a publicity stunt. The stated rationale for the seizure of Nicolás Maduro is largely bogus. The deployment of an entire armada is out of all proportion to the strategic threat, which is practically nil.

The Chavistas are undoubtedly mixed up with drug trafficking but they have almost nothing to do with the fentanyl epidemic in the US. The precursor materials for fentanyl come from China and are processed at clandestine labs in Mexico.

Venezuela does not grow coca plants in any volume. I have a pretty good idea where it is grown since I was once held and interrogated at gunpoint by a drug militia in the Amazonian ceja de selva. The Colombian cocaine that is smuggled through Venezuela mostly goes to Europe.

The charade is now continuing in a new form, with British help, in the North Atlantic. It is another stunt. The US navy is boarding the wrong shadow fleet.

The tankers violating oil sanctions against Venezuela are strategically and economically irrelevant. They make no difference to the global oil market or to the strategic balance of power.

China used to buy Venezuela’s heavy tar-like oil for use in asphalt and roofing during the overbuilding boom, which is now history and will never be repeated. Teapot refiners still buy shadow barrels at a discount, opportunistically, for a wafer-thin profit.

But this is a sideshow. China can buy as much oil as it needs, anywhere it wants, and its oil import demand is in secular and irreversible decline in any case.

You can argue that forcing Venezuela and its oil back into the US orbit thwarts efforts by China and Russia to create a rival payments system for oil priced in yuan (nobody wants rubles) but this is a stretch.

US control over international payments certainly matters but that is a function of America’s enduring economic strength, a tight G7 alliance and the perceived political “safeness” of US financial instruments – all of which are in jeopardy.

Ultimately, it is a secondary issue whether a fungible commodity is traded in dollars, yuan, Venetian ducats or Cowrie shells.

If Trump really wants to take on the Russia-China axis – which, one suspects, he has no intention of doing – he should be leading and enforcing a total blockade of the Russian shadow fleet passing through the Danish Straits. That would deprive the Kremlin of circa 1.5 million barrels a day of export revenue.

Russian oil and gas exports are already in precipitous decline – falling 34pc in November from a year earlier – and are about to fall a lot further.

Brent crude prices have dropped to a five-year low of $60 a barrel as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states flood the global market to regain lost share. That alone would not be enough to halt Putin – but Russia is in reality receiving barely more than half of this price.

The trade price of Urals crude has crashed to $36.69 at the Baltic port of Primorsk and $34.82 at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, now a dangerous and uninsurable venue for tankers running the gauntlet past Ukrainian drones.

Total oil revenues have been running at less than a billion a week since early December, thanks in great part to tightening sanctionsimposed upon a foot-dragging White House by both parties in the US Senate.

The Russian war economy is running on fumes.

The liquid assets of the national rainy day fund have dropped to 1.9pc of GDP. The fund has sold two thirds of its gold, down to 173 tonnes from 555 tonnes in late 2022. These gold sales have pushed up the ruble exchange rate in a mechanical fashion, which some mistake for evidence of Russian resilience.

“Russia is losing,” write William Dixon and Maksym Beznosiuk in a commentary for the Royal United Services Institute.

The proper strategic choice for the West is crystal clear: “double down” on the current strategy of military aid to Ukraine, tighten the economic noose further and keep going until the Kremlin breaks.

This entails other dangers, of course.

“Facing an economic spiral and depleted conventional forces, Vladimir Putin is entering a window of maximum danger. We must prepare not for a resurgent Russia but for a desperate one: 2026 will be the year of hybrid escalation,” Dixon and Beznosiuk said.

The best proxy gauge of the Russian economy is what is happening to RZD, the state railway company now facing insolvency with debts of $51bn (£38bn). Freight volumes have fallen by 20pc. Some 300,000 wagons are lying idle, clogging the marshalling yards and blocking tracks.

“The Russian railways are a microcosm of a much broader economic contraction and incipient collapse. They are massively in debt and are being hammered by a shrinking industrial base that looks increasingly like the prelude to a major depression,” said Jeff Hawn, from the London School of Economics.

Russia’s military advance in key areas of Ukraine has been just 50 metres a day – slower than the battle of Somme in 1916 – and Russia has not broken the fortress belt in four major offensives and four years of war.

Totting up Russian losses is a parlour game but the rough levels from “confirmed” open-source intelligence are 3640 tanks, 8200 infantry fighting vehicles, 380 howitzers, 920 self-propelled artillery pieces, 480 rocket and missile systems, 104 aircraft, 107 helicopters and 18 ships – and, of course, some 1.1 million casualties, on Nato estimates, leaving a generation of war wounded that cannot be concealed.

Some of this is being replaced but much of it is not. It is Russia that is on the wrong side of this asymmetric attrition.

Trump has either fallen for the Kremlin’s cultivated narrative of inevitable victory or actually prefers a three-way carve-up of the world between the US, Russia and China, leaving him with a free hand to build his American empire. Take your pick.

Trump’s lust for Greenland has nothing to do with US security. That can be secured only by further US military bases in cooperation with Denmark – if the Pentagon can in fact spare the forces. To take Greenland by force or coercion would surely turn Europe into an enemy, leaving the US loathed, alone and far less powerful than it thinks.

Trump appears obsessed by critical minerals that lie under Greenland’s glaciers and other such commercial fantasies – but I wonder whether the motive isn’t even more atavistic.

Thomas Jefferson added 830,000 square miles from the Mississippi to the Rockies with the Louisiana purchase in 1803. Greenland would just outdo him by adding 836,000.

Trump has more work cut out if he wants to beat James Polk, who added a million square miles with the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the seizure of North Mexico in 1848. For that he would need Canada.

It is a frivolous thought. Shame on me for even suggesting it.