TheAltWorld US Beta-Testing China Blockade with Attacks on Russian Energy Exports
The expanding drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure represent a long-term U.S. strategy aimed at weakening Russia and constraining China’s rise through an emerging, de facto energy blockade.
The incremental build-up toward an overt blockade against Russian energy exports continues with recent aerial and naval drone strikes on both Russian energy production facilities deep within Russian territory, as well as Russian energy terminals and ships used to carry Russian energy exports moving to and from them.
The most recent incidents include attacks on tankers off the coast of Turkey in the Black Sea and naval drone strikes on the Novorossiysk Fuel Oil Terminal. There was also an apparent attack on a tanker involved in moving Russian energy exports off the coast of Senegal in West Africa, Newsweek would report.
Western media sources have, over the course of several years now, admitted that Ukraine’s aerial and naval drone campaigns are facilitated and directed by the United States through its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, as well as through the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has assumed control over Ukraine’s intelligence services since as early as 2014, the New York Times admitted.
The New York Times, in its 2025 article, “The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War,” would admit specifically that:
“…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture, and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.”
Besides admittedly directing the attacks itself, the US enables such operations through the use of unique intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities no other Western nation possesses. Thus, attempts to assign responsibility to nations like the UK and France still ultimately implicate the US.
In regard to aerial drones strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russian territory, Reuters would publish its article, “US intelligence helps Ukraine target Russian energy infrastructure, FT reports,” noting:
“The U.S. has been helping Ukraine mount long-range strikes on Russian energy facilities for months in a joint effort to weaken the economy and force President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
U.S. intelligence has helped Kyiv strike important Russian energy assets, including oil refineries, far beyond the front line, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Ukrainian and U.S. officials familiar with the campaign.”
While the recent attacks on Russian energy production and exports are being presented by the Western media and even some independent commentators as being at cross purposes with US President Donald Trump’s various “peace” proposals, they are actually the manifestation of long-standing US geopolitical objectives aimed at stretching out and undermining Russia and beyond.
Attacks on Russian Energy Production and Exports Years in the Making
This strategy was laid out years before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, aimed at “extending Russia,” eventually precipitating a Soviet Union-style collapse, and all as part of a much wider strategy of likewise isolating and containing a rising China.
In a 2019 RAND Corporation paper literally titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” in its table of contents included both “geopolitical measures,” like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine” to trigger the now ongoing proxy war with Russia, and “economic emasures” including “hinder petroleum exports” and “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions.”
Very clearly these policies have been implemented for years under the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations and include, first sanctions targeting the construction of Nord Stream 2 and eventually its destruction, as well as sanctions placed on Russian energy production and exports from 2014 onward. The more recent physical attacks on Russian energy production inside Russian territory with the aid of US intelligence and now strikes on tankers used to transport Russian energy exports abroad represent an escalation of these long-stated US objectives.
Not only do these attacks have an impact on Russia’s economy regardless of whether this impact meets US expectations, but they also create a dilemma for another nation targeted by US encroachment, encirclement, and containment — Russia’s close partner, China.
A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” would explicitly lay out a strategy to blockade China, noting the obstacles impeding any attempt by the US to do so when the paper was written. An array of proposals were made in order to remove these obstacles —proposals that have since begun implementation, including the reconfiguration of the US Marine Corps into an Asia-Pacific anti-shipping force, enabling the US to establish chokepoints depicted in a map included in the 2018 paper.
The paper also discussed land routes China was creating through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to bypass these maritime chokepoints and the necessity to pressure nations hosting BRI infrastructure to close it down during a US-Chinese conflict or face US military strikes to physically destroy it. However, long before any open US-Chinese conflict has begun, the US has already conducted strikes-by-proxy on BRI infrastructure, particularly in Pakistan and Myanmar, through US-backed militants.
The paper also noted the significance of Russia’s and China’s shared land border and the already large supply of energy exports Russia was sending China in 2018 and how these exports would only expand over time. The paper made it clear that even with a US maritime blockade imposed on China and the physical destruction of BRI infrastructure, Russian energy exports to China may be enough to allow China to endure.
The implications were clear: in order to successfully and fully blockade China and deliver a crippling blow to its economy and thus its continued rise, not only would the US need to continue preparing for a maritime blockade and the targeting of BRI infrastructure, it would also need to degrade Russia’s ability to supply China with energy.
Now, just as the US is using armed proxies to strike at Chinese BRI infrastructure, the US is using Ukraine to carry out an expanding armed campaign against both Russian energy production within its borders, and Russian energy exports around the globe.
The 2018 paper, far from an obscure, random brainstorm, reflects US policy both past and present. Just as the 2018 paper linked Russia to US efforts to contain China, current US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has linked the ongoing US proxy war on Russia to US efforts to contain China and the urgent necessity of a “division of labor” with which Washington’s European proxies continue “extending Russia” in Ukraine while the US continues its expanding strategy of encircling and containing China in the Asia-Pacific.
Not only does the US strategy of attacking and degrading Russian energy production and exports serve its stated objective of “extending Russia,” it is also a prerequisite for Washington’s stated objective of containing a rising China. The nascent blockade the US is incrementally imposing on Russia will also serve as a “beta-test” for likewise imposing a blockade on China.
Conversely, Russia and China’s ability to counter this US strategy will determine not just the viability of America’s proxy war on Russia in Eastern Europe, but that of its growing confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific.
Russia’s and China’s Deterrence Deficit
The US’ ability to impose such dilemmas on both Russia and China through proxies affords it the illusion of plausible deniability — preventing Russia and China from retaliating directly and instead forcing both nations to retaliate against US proxies the US itself sees as fully disposable.
Following attacks on Russian energy production and exports, Russia has threatened to, in turn, blockade Ukraine. While this will have devastating consequences for Ukraine itself, it will do little to deter the United States, which devised this strategy, enables Ukraine to conduct these attacks, and even directs the attacks itself.
Unless Russia and China can devise a means to actually deter the US itself from its strategy of waging war by proxy (or prevent the US from politically capturing nations and using them as proxies in the first place), the US will continue to inflict damage on both Russia and China, at little to no cost to itself.
Alternatively, Russia and China can continue building up their military and economic capabilities faster than the US can degrade or destroy them, preventing the US from ever successfully blockading and strangling either nation socioeconomically, while continuing to invest in and build up a multipolar alternative to US unipolar hegemony.
Only time will tell whether or not Russia and China fully understand both the actual objectives of US foreign policy and the means by which to defend against and overcome it. The future of not only Russia and China hangs in the balance but also that of all other nation — from those used as proxies by the US to those the US seeks to target or use next in its global pursuit of primacy.
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US Beta-Testing China Blockade with Attacks on Russian Energy Exports
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