With reference to Janes' The World of Intelligence podcast - Energy Security in Crisis.
There is a version of the Donald Trump foreign policy narrative that frames him as a strategic disruptor -- a chaos agent whose unconventional moves keep adversaries off-balance and produce outcomes conventional thinkers can't see coming. It's an appealing story. It's also wrong, and the evidence accumulating across global energy markets, naval competition, and great power rivalry makes that increasingly hard to argue around.
Let's start with the oil.
The Energy Compression and What It Actually Does
Global oil supply has been driven down to levels not seen since the early 1980s. The stated logic -- squeeze petrostates, starve adversary revenue streams, demonstrate American energy dominance -- has a surface plausibility. And yes, it applies real pressure to Russia and Iran, both of whom depend on oil income to fund their political arrangements.
Janes' most recent episode of The World of Intelligence, "Energy Security in Crisis," featuring Ben Cahill of the Atlantic Council, examines precisely this terrain: the unprecedented shock stemming from the Gulf region, the implications for countries reliant on energy resources, and the complex market adjustments underway. What that framing captures, and what the Trump-as-genius narrative glosses over, is that energy shocks don't hit only adversaries. They reshape the entire global system simultaneously, and not all the reshaping favors the United States. apple
China imports the vast majority of its oil. Suppressed global prices lower Chinese industrial costs while simultaneously gutting Russian and Iranian state budgets. The squeeze intended to harm enemies is delivering a structural economic subsidy to the one competitor that poses the deepest long-term challenge. That's not a strategic masterstroke. That's playing chess while looking at only one corner of the board.
The Weapons Depletion Problem
Ukraine consumed the buffer. This is the blunt reality that no amount of rhetorical reframing changes. American precision munitions stocks, particularly in the categories relevant to any Pacific conflict -- anti-ship missiles, long-range precision strike, air defense interceptors -- were drawn down significantly in support of Ukrainian operations. The U.S. defense industrial base is not built for rapid replenishment. The gap between consumption rate and production rate is not a bureaucratic inconvenience; it is a strategic vulnerability with a specific consequence: any sustained conflict in the Taiwan Strait runs into a munitions wall within weeks.
Depleting those stockpiles while simultaneously degrading alliance relationships, withdrawing from NATO burden-sharing commitments, and undermining the diplomatic architecture that enables forward basing is not a calculated gamble. It is the elimination of multiple redundancies simultaneously, with no plan for what comes next if the opening phase of a conflict doesn't produce a quick resolution.
That pattern -- overwhelming early pressure, declare victory, exit before consequences arrive -- is not confined to military strategy. It's the operating methodology of Trump's entire professional life. Which brings us to the naval comparison that may be the sharpest analytical lens available right now.
Two Navies Built for the Same Wrong War
Janes dedicated a full episode on June 1st to China's naval expansion: "China's Naval Ambition: Capability, Credibility and Global Impact," examining what the rapid modernisation of the People's Liberation Army Navy really means for regional stability and global security, drawing on unclassified intelligence, satellite imagery and long-term capability assessment. The conclusion Janes' analysts reach is the one that should be at the center of every serious strategic conversation right now: scale alone does not equal power, and the discussion explores where capability outpaces operational credibility. appleapple
This is the crux. The PLAN has built an impressive fleet on paper. What it has not built is the institutional foundation that makes a navy actually effective in sustained combat: deep crew experience, genuine logistical reach, underway replenishment capability, a maintenance culture, and the organizational adaptability that comes from decades of real operational stress.
The PLAN is optimized for a specific scenario -- overwhelming first-salvo coercion within the first island chain, forcing a decision before American force projection can respond meaningfully. If that first salvo works, the fleet doesn't need to come home. If it doesn't work, the doctrine has no compelling answer for what follows.
This is not a coincidence. It is a structural parallel to Trump's own operating logic: maximum opening pressure, bet everything on the adversary folding fast, no viable plan for a long game. A navy built around a "don't worry if the ship doesn't make it back to port" assumption is not a sustainable instrument of global power. It is a one-shot coercion tool dressed up in the visual language of great power competition.
The U.S. Navy, by contrast, is built precisely for the scenario the PLAN cannot handle -- sustained, logistics-intensive, globally distributed naval warfare with redundant systems, experienced sailors, and a culture of improvisation under fire developed over eight decades of continuous operations. That structural advantage is real. The problem is that Trump is systematically dismantling the political and industrial conditions that make it usable when it matters.
Russia: The Patient Strategist in a Corner
Russia doesn't fit the short-horizon model and shouldn't be forced into it. Putin is genuinely a long-game thinker -- willing to absorb catastrophic short-term losses (Ukraine has been devastating by any honest accounting of Russian casualties and equipment) in pursuit of objectives measured in decades, not news cycles.
But the war has exposed something important: Russian military doctrine and Russian military reality diverged sharply from the opening weeks. Precision munitions exhausted early. Conscript quality degraded. The tactical innovation that the Russian military had cultivated on paper failed to materialize at scale under real combat conditions.
Janes covered Ukraine's deep-strike operations in a February episode -- specifically Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine's meticulously planned series of drone strikes reaching deep into Russian territory, disrupting strategic bomber bases from European Russia to the Far East -- and the intelligence assessment of the damage illustrated something the raw battlefield numbers don't fully capture: Russia's long-range aviation and nuclear deterrent posture have been meaningfully degraded, not just tactically inconvenienced. apple
The oil compression hits Russia at its budget floor. Their state fiscal model requires sustained prices above roughly $70-80 per barrel to maintain the social contract Putin depends on. Below that floor, the pressure builds -- slowly, tolerably at first, then in ways that start to matter politically. Putin can absorb it. He cannot absorb it indefinitely.
The deeper problem for Russia is strategic: they have become functionally a junior partner to China. Russian oil flows to Chinese markets. Russian industry depends on Chinese components. Russian diplomacy operates under Chinese cover internationally. Putin traded long-term strategic independence for survival, and China is not reciprocating as an equal -- it is absorbing Russia as a captive resource dependency. Even if Putin achieves his Ukraine objectives, he emerges from this decade as a supplier state to his nominal partner. That is a significant strategic loss dressed up as a geopolitical win.
A financially cornered Russia is not a safer Russia, however. It is a more dangerous one. The nuclear dimension doesn't disappear when conventional options narrow -- it expands. That's the other side of the energy compression equation that the Trump-as-genius narrative doesn't account for.
Iran: The Asymmetric Architect
Iran is the most genuinely strategic actor in this picture, and the one most consistently underestimated. The proxy network -- Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militia networks -- took forty years to build. That is not transactional thinking. That is architecture.
Janes examined Iran's internal situation in January: Iran's latest wave of protests, sparked by currency collapse, was forcefully suppressed by a highly layered security apparatus, with elite cohesion and information control shaping events -- and the assessment was that the regime remains intact for now, while external pressures and nuclear ambitions intersect with domestic unrest in ways that will shape Iran's next moves. apple
Iran's genius is asymmetric cost imposition. They cannot beat the United States or Israel in a conventional engagement. They have never needed to. The Houthis disrupting Red Sea shipping is the model in miniature: minimal investment, maximum disruption, no direct fingerprints that force a decisive military response. Every dollar the U.S. spends intercepting Houthi drones is a dollar not spent on PLAN deterrence. Every diplomatic cycle consumed by Iranian proxy activity is a cycle not spent on alliance maintenance in the Pacific. Iran doesn't win by defeating America. It wins by keeping America too busy and too expensive to focus where it needs to.
The nuclear dimension is Iran's ultimate leverage card. Domestic instability and economic pressure don't make Iran abandon that card -- they accelerate the timeline for using it as a deterrent, because a nuclear-armed Iran is an Iran that cannot be attacked. The energy compression and the diplomatic isolation Trump has pursued don't moderate Iranian nuclear ambitions. They incentivize acceleration.
The Convergence That Doesn't Require Coordination
The most important thing to understand about China, Russia, and Iran is that they don't need a formal alliance to pursue aligned objectives. They need overlapping interests -- and right now their interests align almost perfectly around a single strategic goal: a United States that is weapons-light, diplomatically isolated, domestically divided, and unable to sustain commitment to any long-horizon conflict.
Trump is delivering all four conditions simultaneously. This doesn't require him to be an agent of any of these powers. It requires only that his operating methodology -- short-horizon, resource-exhausting, alliance-degrading, optimized for the quick win -- produces outcomes that benefit patient, long-game adversaries regardless of intent.
Janes has been tracking grey zone and hybrid warfare as the defining security challenge of the current moment -- the use of tactics below the threshold of armed conflict, blending kinetic and non-kinetic activity to disrupt societies, undermine trust and complicate decision-making. What that framing captures is that the competition isn't primarily military anymore. It's about whether democratic societies can maintain the will, the institutional coherence, and the industrial capacity to respond when the military moment arrives. apple
On every one of those dimensions, the current trajectory is moving in the wrong direction.
The Bottom Line
Trump is not a genius playing a long game that conventional analysts can't see. He is a short-horizon actor whose methodology happens to be exquisitely useful to adversaries who are playing the longest game in contemporary geopolitics. The oil suppression that was supposed to squeeze enemies is subsidizing China's industrial costs. The weapons depletion that was supposed to signal strength has created a munitions gap that constrains real military options. The alliance degradation that was supposed to demonstrate independence has isolated the United States from the relationships that make sustained conflict survivable.
The PLAN built a navy optimized for a quick, coercive first strike and doesn't much care if the ships come home. Trump governs with the same logic -- overwhelming opening pressure, bet on the fast win, no viable doctrine for what comes after. The structural parallel is not flattering to either.
What neither the PLAN nor Trump has is what the United States actually built over eighty years and is currently in the process of dismantling: redundancy, sustained commitment, institutional depth, and the capacity to absorb a bad opening and still win the long war.
The question now is whether enough of that capacity survives to matter when it's needed.
For deeper intelligence analysis on these themes, Janes' The World of Intelligence podcast with Sean Corbett AVM (Retd) is available at the link above. Recent episodes on energy security, Chinese naval ambitions, grey zone warfare, and Iran's internal trajectory are directly relevant to the dynamics examined here.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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