Not just the war Three key issues to watch in Russia-U.S. relations as Trump takes the reins
As Donald Trump takes the oath of office for the second time, the world is waiting to see how he’ll seek to end Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine — something he’s previously said he would do within 24 hours (and, later, before his inauguration). But the nearly three-year-old conflict is just one of numerous interlaced geopolitical challenges involving an increasingly bold Russia that will affect the United States. Meduza explores three other critical issues Trump will have to navigate.
Nuclear fears amid growing Russia-Iran ties
A week before his inauguration, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump said he would meet with Vladimir Putin “very quickly” after his inauguration. However, another leader managed to meet with the Russian president even sooner: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. On January 13, the Kremlin announced that Putin would host Pezeshkian in Russia to sign a “comprehensive” partnership agreement.
Shortly after the announcement, The Times reported that Ali Larijani, a senior advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had made several covert trips to Moscow in recent months. Behind closed doors, Tehran is reportedly seeking not only fighter jets, air defense systems, and other weapons, but also assistance and expertise in developing its nuclear program. Meanwhile, Ukraine and its Western allies claim that Iran has provided Moscow with missiles and drones and helped establish drone production facilities in Russia.
All the while, Russia remains a party to the JCPOA, the agreement it signed with the U.S., Germany, France, the U.K., and China in 2015 to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program. (Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal in 2018.)
“Iran’s production capacity, in terms of short range munitions and drones, is far more efficient than Russia’s,” expert Nicole Grajewski told Meduza. But weapons aren’t the only thing Moscow is now seeking from Tehran: it also “wants to use Iran as a re-export zone and a transit country for its goods,” Grajewski said. The partnership agreement signed by Putin and Pezeshkian on Friday includes provisions that “solidify existing cooperation for the North-South Transport Corridor,” a planned network of ship, rail and road routes connecting Russia, India, Iran, and other countries in the region for faster cargo transport.
Iranian ballistic missiles have entered the Ukraine War
Against this backdrop, Grajewski said, Russia is “very unlikely” to support snap-back sanctions — the reimposition of international sanctions lifted under the 2015 deal — which the U.K., France, and Germany have discussed in recent months in response to Iran’s accelerating uranium enrichment.
Washington’s current policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran adds another layer of complexity. Iran and Moscow’s new partnership agreement has a clause opposing “unilateral coercive measures,” which “essentially binds both Russia and Iran to never support extraterritorial sanctions against one another,” Grajewski said. She continued:
That being said, I think a solution on the Iranian nuclear program will be incredibly difficult without Russian support because Russia was the key intermediary and also had the technical capability and trust to manage issues like the export of excess uranium.
The result, she explained, is that the agreement binds Russia and Iran closer together — essentially making them “partners whether they like it or not.”
So as Russia and a weakened Iran draw closer, how will Trump navigate Washington’s relationship with Tehran?
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In a January 13 piece for Foreign Policy, security expert Jonathan Panikoff argued that Donald Trump’s “rhetoric often reveals his intentions.” He pointed to an October 17 remark in which Trump said he would “like to see Iran be very successful,” while adding, “The only problem is that they can’t have nuclear weapons.” According to Panikoff, this suggests three broad possibilities for Trump’s approach to Iran:
- A wide-ranging deal between the West and Iran on multiple issues, including its proxies like Hezbollah and its ballistic missile program in addition to its nuclear program;
- A targeted deal that only concerns its nuclear program;
- A military strike to take out its nuclear program.
Panikoff observed that, with Iran weaker than it’s been since 1979 due to Israel’s attacks over the past year, the U.S. and Israel no longer view it as posing the same level of danger. As a result, a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear program is no longer outside the realm of possibility. According to Axios, even the Biden team discussed such a strike.
How Russia would react in this extreme scenario is an open question. While its new partnership agreement with Iran calls for joint military exercises and refraining from assisting one another’s attackers, it is not a mutual defense pact.
Competition in the Arctic heating up
Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland — and his refusal to rule out using military and economic force to do so — have provoked widespread condemnation and concern within the international community. Many fear the new president could take actions that are both destabilizing and undemocratic.
On the other hand, in a recent interview with The Cipher Brief quoted by RFE/RL, retired U.S. Air Force General and former NATO Supreme Commander in Europe Philip M. Breedlove argued the importance of maintaining Greenland’s alignment with the U.S. as it eyes independence from Denmark. “Guaranteeing a Western-leaning Greenland is extremely important,” he stated, while emphasizing that achieving this “doesn’t have to be through sovereign ownership.”
Greenland’s vast reserves of valuable natural resources, which are costly to extract, stand in contrast to the relative poverty of its residents. Breedlove warned that this imbalance makes the island an obvious target for Chinese and Russian investment, both of which are likely to “throw money” at Greenland if given the opportunity.
The Greenland episode is unfolding against the backdrop of a wider competition for control of the Arctic. Russia, with about 20 percent of its territory north of the Arctic circle, has a natural advantage in this realm; China has also been stepping up its activities in the Arctic, including as part of Russian projects from which Western companies have withdrawn.
One big reason access to the Arctic is so important is that infrastructure there is crucial to satellite technology, including weapons, U.S. Naval War College professor Jahara Matisek told RFE/RL. “If you want to be a powerful space-faring nation, […] you have to have infrastructure in the Arctic Circle — not to mention the Antarctic Circle — to seamlessly communicate and control all of your satellites," he said.
In Matisek’s view, Trump’s Greenland rhetoric is “obviously an attempt to make sure the Chinese and Russians don’t get a footprint there.” However, even if his Greenland obsession is all talk, this approach risks unintended consequences. Norwegian researcher Andreas Østhagen told Politico that the incoming U.S. president’s statements could inspire China or Russia to see “the use of military force against another country to pursue their national interests as a legitimate means of operations in international affairs.”
Some of Russia’s pro-war bloggers have already interpreted Trump’s words in exactly this way.
The limits of ‘drill, baby, drill’
On January 10, just over a week before the end of Joe Biden’s presidential term, the U.S. imposed a major set of sanctions designed to hit Russia’s energy sector. The new restrictions marked a “significant shift” in the Biden administration’s strategy, Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) noted: more aggressive than Washington’s previous energy sanctions, these measures “significantly constrain Russia’s ability to circumvent the price cap” on Russian oil exports imposed by the G7 in 2022.
Among other things, the new measures use secondary sanctions to target the “alternative supply chain” Moscow has built to evade the G7’s price cap. However, CGEP notes, if the Trump administration fails to strictly enforce these sanctions, “Russia’s oil export volumes could recover much of their losses by Q2.”
Meanwhile, whether Trump keeps the pressure on Russia up through sanctions or not, Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told the Financial Times in November that the new U.S. president could force Putin into a peace deal with Ukraine through other means: by driving down global oil prices.
“The president very much understands leverage and we have tremendous economic leverage on Russia,” he said. “The first step would be, in his words: ‘drill, baby, drill.’ You flood the world with cheaper, cleaner American oil and gas. You drive down the price.”
Trump has indeed vowed to cut regulations that restrict oil drilling, with his Treasury Secretary nominee promising to increase U.S. oil and gas production to the equivalent of 3 million barrels per day by 2028 in order to achieve global “energy dominance.”
But the reality, according to analyst Sergey Vakulenko, isn’t so simple. Because of “the cost structure of shale oil,” he writes, drilling new wells in the U.S. requires the price of a barrel to be at least $64, while many existing wells would close if the price fell below $50 per barrel. Additionally, he explained, the Biden administration “has not been too hard on the oil industry” — which means the steps Trump could feasibly take to increase production are limited.
“Trump's deregulation for drilling and any environmental standards are largely irrelevant for the scale of U.S. production. U.S. producers operate based on market conditions,” expert Nicholas Trickett told Meduza. “The trigger for a surge in drilling would be a sustained surge in oil prices, but that surge would eventually face constraints for capacity to transport to market.”
Another question is whether the E.U.’s imports of Russian oil will decrease even further than they already have — and whether the U.S. could replace it.
On January 1, Russian gas supplies stopped flowing to Europe through Ukraine after the expiration of a contract between Moscow and Kyiv. Two weeks later, Reuters reported that 10 European countries had called for the E.U. to ban imports of pipeline gas and liquified natural gas (LNG) from Russia, citing a document saying that as “an end goal, it is necessary to ban the import of Russian gas and LNG at the earliest date possible.”
“Even when Trump repeals the pause on new LNG projects, it takes time to build new terminals,” Trickett told Meduza. “The same applies for importing. The E.U. already uses LNG for over 40 percent of its consumption, and it’s expanded import capacity significantly in the last few years, but it has further to go if the intention is to fully replace Russian gas at pre-invasion levels of consumption.”
While a full E.U. ban on Russian gas would create “discomfort,” Trickett explained, he described the global LNG supply currently in the pipeline as “healthy,” noting that China is replacing coal with renewable energy sources rather than gas.
The main issue, he said, is timing. “Investments take time to pay off. Any full ban is likely going to have a decent lead time for that reason or otherwise be matched with a renewed effort to reduce residential demand among EU members,” he said. “Having it take effect in spring or early summer would also buy a bit more time.”
“Any large increase in U.S. oil production above already record-breaking levels would largely depend on a significant escalation of U.S. oil sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Russia,” Trickett continued. “Even in that scenario, there’s scope for OPEC members to increase output and U.S. production is not a perfect substitute since the crude blends affected by sanctions have different qualities.”
In this case, the bigger disaster for Russia, he said, would be not sanctions but “the abundance of supply and weakening or plateauing demand,” which “would put considerable strain on Russia because of the very high cost of state borrowing at current interest rates.”
On January 16, Bloomberg reported that Trump’s advisers were working on a “wide-ranging sanctions strategy” aimed at facilitating an agreement between Moscow and Kyiv, while also “squeezing” Iran and Venezuela.
According to the outlet, Trump’s team is considering two different approaches. The first, designed for a scenario where a ceasefire agreement appears to be in reach, would include “some good-faith measures to benefit sanctioned Russian oil producers” to help get a Ukraine peace deal to the finish line. The second option would increase energy sanctions against Russia even further than their current level.
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Article by Sam Breazeale