( Tomdispatch.com ) – That was President Trump’s blunt assessment of global power politics when it came to the United States and Russia following his inconclusive “summit” meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15th. Of all his comments about the meeting, that numerical assessment — made during a post-summit interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News — was perhaps the most revealing, if also in some strange sense the hardest to decipher.
Supposedly, the intent of the Anchorage meeting was to arrange an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and devise a path to lasting peace there — none of which, of course, occurred. Instead, Trump appeared to focus on repairing U.S.-Russia relations, which had been in a deep freeze since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“I think the meeting was a 10,” Trump exclaimed triumphantly after being asked by Hannity to rate the outcome of his talks with Putin. “In the sense we got along great, and it’s good when two big powers get along, especially when they’re nuclear powers.” Then came the observation that we’re No. 1 and they’re No. 2.
What Could Trump Have Meant by That?
Ostensibly, the comment suggests that Trump was anointing Russia as the second most powerful nation in the world after the United States. But while few would contest America’s status as the number-one world power, most analysts would certainly rank China as the world’s second most powerful nation, given its mammoth economy, expanding technological base, and growing military capacity. So, was this just a dig at China — a crude way of denigrating its rise to superpower status? Maybe, but it’s likely that there was more to it than that.
As with so much Trump says in public, his comment appeared to be both a spontaneous outburst — prompted by his chummy conversation with Putin — and a reflection of his long-held understanding of global power politics. Speaking as if international relations were a competitive sport like baseball or football, where team rankings matter, he celebrated America and Russia’s status as the top two competitors.
But there’s more that can be extracted from Trump’s comment, including hints as to his preconceptions about the core constituents of national power and his strategy for perpetuating America’s status as “No. 1.”
Calculating Global Power Rankings
First of all, what parameters might go into a calculation of such global power rankings? While there is considerable debate about this, analysts usually cite some combination of economic, military, geographic, and demographic factors when making their assessments.
In his interview with Hannity, Trump referred to the status of the two countries as nuclear powers, so that’s a good place to start. According to the most recent (2024) tally from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the U.S. and Russia possess the world’s largest inventories of nuclear warheads, far surpassing those of the other nuclear-armed powers. And in this one key area, Russia is, in fact, number 1 in total numbers, with an estimated stockpile of 5,580 nuclear warheads compared to 5,044 in the U.S. arsenal. (These figures include warheads in storage as well as those deployed with battle-ready forces.) China, with the third largest arsenal, is said to possess 500 warheads, while France, in fourth place, has about 290. (Bear in mind that you don’t need anything faintly like 5,000 nuclear weapons to completely incinerate planet Earth and kill most of its human inhabitants.)
Where else can the U.S. and Russia be said to occupy either the No. 1 or No. 2 positions in global power rankings? Certainly not in population size or, in Russia’s case, economic muscle — both considered major components of national power.
Population size matters because having more people translates into more workers, soldiers, and entrepreneurs to drive economic and geopolitical expansion. According to the most recent data from Worldometer, a respected independent source on global trends, the U.S. (with 348 million people) is the world’s third most populous nation, with India (1.5 billion people) in first place and China (1.4 billion) in second. Russia (with 144 million people) ranks ninth, following Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, and Bangladesh. Significantly, Russia’s population is projected to shrink between now and 2050 — a consequence of low fertility rates, declining life expectancy, and losses to conflict, among other factors — sending it into 13th place, behind Ethiopia, Congo, Egypt, and Mexico.
The United States can certainly claim No. 1 status in gross domestic product (GDP), a leading indicator of national economic capacity. According to recent calculations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. towers above all other countries in that category with an estimated 2025 GDP of $30.5 trillion. China occupies second place with a GDP of $19.2 trillion; Germany, Japan, India, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and Brazil follow, with Russia trailing as No. 11 on the list, claiming a GDP of $2.1 trillion.
Russia’s relatively low ranking compared to so many major powers has significant implications for its ability to wield other instruments of national power. Although seeking to match China and the U.S. in combined nuclear and conventional military power, Russia’s annual military spending is just 15% of what the U.S. spends and about half of China’s. This means that Russia can’t afford to buy as many high-tech ships, planes, and missiles as the U.S. or China. And given that much of Russia’s military spending is now being devoted to the war in Ukraine, it’s falling ever further behind those two countries when it comes to developing and possessing the most advanced conventional weaponry.
Russia also lacks the massive sums needed to support advanced research in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies that will undoubtedly power future economic and military growth. According to Spherical Insights, a market research and consulting firm, the U.S. is by far the world’s leading investor in AI, committing $471 billion to new computing capacity in 2025 alone. China comes in second, with an estimated 2025 investment of $119 billion, followed by the UK, Canada, Israel, Germany, and India. Russia doesn’t even appear among the top 10 investors in AI, which will undoubtedly significantly limit its ability to compete in the evolving world economy. Worse yet for Russia, many skilled AI technicians have reportedly fled the country rather than risk being sent to fight in Ukraine.
The Oil and Gas Dimension
From such vital data, it’s hard to imagine how President Trump could ever classify Russia as the number two power on the planet. There is, however, one critical area where, all too sadly, this ranking might indeed apply: the production and export of oil and natural gas.
According to the 2025 edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, the U.S. leads the world in those categories, while Russia is No. 2 in natural gas production and exports but No. 3 in oil production and exports, just slightly behind Saudi Arabia. However, if oil and natural gas exports were to be tabulated in identical units of measurement (such as barrels of oil or the equivalent) and combined, Russia would indeed move ahead of Saudi Arabia to become the world’s second leading exporter of hydrocarbons, making this one key area in which President Trump would be all too accurate in saying, “We’re No. 1 and Russia is No. 2.”
Is this what Trump was indeed thinking about? After all, there’s no doubt that he’s intent on waging a global campaign to encourage the continued consumption of oil and natural gas, while discouraging investments in any of the noncarbon sources of energy — especially wind and solar — so necessary to slow the pace of global warming. For example, as part of the U.S.-European Union (EU) trade and tariff deal agreed to by Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on July 27th, EU countries are now obliged to buy $750 billion worth of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG), oil, and nuclear energy products over the next three years — a move that will surely undermine the EU’s plans to lessen fossil-fuel consumption in accordance with its commitment to substantially reduce carbon emissions by 2030.
A fossil-fuel alliance with Russia and No. 3 oil exporter Saudi Arabia to extend the Fossil Fuel Era and slow the adoption of green energy could indeed be the ultimate objective of Trump’s diplomacy, in which case touting a successful meeting between “No. 1” and “No. 2” makes a lot of (grim) sense. In fact, senior Russian officials have spoken with their White House counterparts about U.S.-Russian energy cooperation, a subject that reportedly was also discussed during the Anchorage summit. According to an August 26th Reuters report, a number of proposed oil and gas joint ventures were first brought up in an August 6th meeting in Moscow between Vladimir Putin and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, and those proposals were indeed revisited during the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
A U.S.-Russian or U.S.-Russian-Saudi alliance to perpetuate fossil-fuel dominance on planet Earth, while suppressing the adoption of renewables, would have profound and ultimately catastrophic consequences for the fate of humanity. It would almost certainly guarantee that the world community will prove incapable of limiting global warming to (an already disastrous) 2 degrees Celsius rise above the pre-industrial level, the maximum temperature increase scientists believe the planetary ecosystem can accommodate without generating even more massively destructive and life-threatening storms, floods, fires, and droughts.
Indeed, such an alliance would likely ensure that warming climbs well above 2 degrees Celsius, resulting, sooner or later, in the inundation of coastal cities globally (as the Antarctic ice sheets melt) and the collapse of the food and water systems upon which billions of people depend. Can human civilization survive such catastrophes? At this point, it’s hard to know.
A U.S.-Russian-Saudi fossil-fuel alliance would also imperil Europe’s commitment to climate-change mitigation, as well as to an independent Ukraine. Conceivably, Europe could choose to join a green-energy alliance with China, the world’s leading producer of solar panels and electric cars and the country that’s installing renewables faster than any other (even if it’s also consuming record amounts of coal). That, of course, would risk the disintegration of NATO, helped along by President Trump’s crippling U.S. tariffs and other punitive measures.
A Perilous Future?
Another way of interpreting Trump’s comments to Sean Hannity is by way of George Orwell’s brilliant 1949 dystopian novel about the (then) future, 1984. Although largely focused on the perils of a future authoritarian system in which a godlike ruler called “Big Brother” exercises absolute control over the population of Oceania (an amalgam of North America and Western Europe), Orwell’s prescient novel also took aim at pervasive militarism. He portrayed a world in which Oceania, where the novel takes place, is forever battling with two other superstates, Eurasia (then corresponding to the Soviet Union and its satellite states) and Eastasia (China and its neighbors). The citizens of Oceania, he wrote, were constantly being exhorted to prepare for war with the enemy of the moment — which, without explanation, could change from one day to the next between Eurasia and Eastasia.
In the geopolitics of 1984, a former enemy suddenly becomes a valuable ally when a new enemy is identified. Eurasia is Oceania’s chief adversary at one point in the novel but is then welcomed as a loyal friend when Eastasia — formerly an ally — is identified as the new enemy. Today, it’s easy enough to imagine something like that shaping Trump’s thinking. Whereas former President Joe Biden lumped Russia and China together as adversaries, complicating U.S. strategic planning, Trump clearly views Russia as a potential ally, thereby diminishing the global clout of China — the real “No. 2” in today’s international power hierarchy.
Russian leaders have clearly sought to foster just such a possibility, regularly touting the advantages of a U.S.-Russian entente in conversations with American officials. Mind you, they have by no means abandoned their reliance on China for economic and diplomatic aid in their drive to conquer Ukraine, a stance underscored by Putin’s lavish praise of the Russo-Chinese alliance during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on September 2nd. That, however, doesn’t mean that Trump and his aides see little chance of pulling Moscow into Washington’s orbit at Beijing’s expense. Indeed, this would appear to be the principal aim of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Anchorage and U.S. diplomacy towards Russia in general.
How all this will play out remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that Trump’s designation of the U.S. as “No. 1” and Russia as “No. 2,” as well as his observation that “it’s good” when those “two big powers get along,” has multiple, conceivably terrifying implications. At the very least, it portends a grim future for Ukraine, as the U.S. embraces Moscow’s war aims and deters Europe from playing a key role in Kyiv’s defense. The planet as a whole could face an even more perilous future if the U.S. joins Russia and Saudi Arabia in ensuring that global fossil-fuel dependence will last far into the future. Further observation and analysis will be needed to determine which of these outcomes is most likely to materialize, but as of this moment, the prospects aren’t very promising.
Copyright 2025 Michael Klare
Via Tomdispatch.com
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