The Adversarial: January 26

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below. *** Russia In the economic domain, new data at the beginning of 2024 brought some bad news for Russia. Account surpluses slumped in 2023, amounting to $50.2 billion from a record $238 billion at the end of 2022. This is a result of the combined effect of an unusually high base of 2022 (when the Kremlin had collected ultra-high energy revenues), the downward trend in oil prices (which have fallen about 10 percent over the