Trump’s Economic Team Pursues the Chimera of Collapsing the Russian Economy, by Larry Johnson

The Russians don’t do a lot of promotion and PR. Maybe that’s why the rest of the world, particularly the U.S., chronically underestimates Russia. From Larry Johnson at sonar21.com:

I don’t know US Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Scott Bessent, but I am told by people who worked with him on Wall Street that he is a really smart guy. But based on his most recent claim over the weekend that he believes a new round of sanctions — which includes shutting off the flow of Russian oil and natural gas to China and India — will collapse the Russian economy. Bessent’s statement tells me he understands nothing about the resilience of the Russian economy, nothing about the nature of Russia’s bilateral relations with India and China, and not a damn thing about Russia’s military industrial complex. In short, he may be really smart about trading bonds and securities on Wall Street, but he’s a dummy when it comes to Russia and its economy.

The belief in Washington policy circles that the Russian economy can be collapsed is not a new goal hatched by Bessent. That scenario figured prominently in the Rand Corporation’s April 2019 report, which was prepared for the US Department of Defense — Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground. The authors assessed the Russia economy in 2019 as follows:

The common charge that modern Russia is just a petrostate like Saudi Arabia is grossly overstated, but its economy and state budget are disproportionately dependent on energy exports, the value of which has collapsed.28 Russia possesses sizable manufacturing and service industries, but these are relatively uncompetitive on the world market, and the country exports few manufactured goods other than weapons. Recognizing the folly of Russia’s economic dependence on energy exports, the liberalizing technocrat Dmitry Medvedev pursued a policy of economic modernization during his presidency that sought to diversify Russia’s economy. . . .

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