A nation must think before it acts.
When Russian leader Vladimir Putin addressed the media in Helsinki alongside President Donald Trump, he proposed that their countries “work together” to make oil and gas markets calmer.
Trump didn’t say whether he supported the idea but he repeated his frequent assertion that Russia and the U.S. are competitors, adding, “I think the word competitor is a compliment.”
As a scholar of global energy geopolitics, I can see why Putin might want to forge an OPEC-like alliance between the U.S. and Russia – and how this idea might interest both countries if such alliance were possible. But that is not the case.