One of the undisputed keys to the revival of Russia’s fortunes under President Vladimir Putin has been his leveraging of the world’s largest country and its immense natural resource base to finance military and vital infrastructure improvements. Putin wrote his 1996 economics dissertation in St. Petersburg “Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region under Conditions of the Formation of Market Relations” (which Putin’s critics at RFE/RL, Brookings Institute and the Langley/Bezos Post insist was ghostwritten) about the state leveraging oil and gas production to benefit the population, as in Russia’s Arctic neighbors Norway and Alaska.

Although overlooked by the media and deep state manufactured hysteria over Trump’s ‘treasonous’ praise for Putin and their dialogue in Helsinki, CNBC did report Putin’s proposal that the U.S. and Russia work together to regulate the oil price. If implemented this plan would make Moscow, which already cooperates with leading OPEC cartel member and petrodollar pillar Riyadh, into a partner with Washington in keeping energy prices within an acceptable range. As Putin said, it would not be advantageous to the American or global economies to see prices rise too high, nor see them collapse and thereby wreck shale oil production (he didn’t need to add, also hurting Russia and the ruble in the process as the Obama Administration and globalists tried to do in an coordinated piece of economic warfare in late 2014 — Moscow would take military action to boost its leverage against the Saudis and Qataris the following autumn in Syria).

Putin knows very well that President Reagan’s CIA director William Casey worked with the Saudis to drive down the price of oil in the late 1980s, hastening the demise of the Soviet Union which had then posted the young KGB officer and his family to Dresden in East Germany. As W the Intelligence Insider says regarding that period ‘we took out the Soviet Union and the ruble but almost lost Texas’ leading to the 1989-93 recession and ‘handover’ of power from the Bushes to the Clintons. However, in an ironic role reversal, it is now the fragile U.S. economy which needs Russian cooperation to maintain a moderate to higher price, so that highly indebted frackers stay profitable as interest rates rise and steel/aluminum trade wars (including Cold War 2 sanctions on Russian metals) drive up pipeline costs. Indeed, the main problem with the shale boom is the high depletion rate of the wells, which in turn requires cheap money from the Fed and high debt loads to manage (it was no accident that fracking took off in the mid-2000s with a loose post dot.com crash and 9/11 monetary policy).