Russian services have worked for several decades to destroy America from within. Trump Administration policies appear to be consistent with the Kremlin’s blueprint: in just a few weeks, Trump, governing by decree, has managed to sow chaos in the United States and alienate the entire world, starting with his most loyal allies, while working for Russian interests. The Kremlin’s goal, along with that of the high-tech oligarchs, is to create an irreversible situation in the United States by making it ungovernable.
“Today we’re succeeding in what we’ve been trying unsuccessfully to do for 500 years! And we are changing the West!”
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
“Today we have taken total revenge, erasing our setback at the end of the Cold War.”
Andrei Lougovoï
In an article published on February 11, 2019, Vladislav Sourkov, one of the architects of the Putin system, observed that the Russian regime had “considerable export potential”, for it is the reign of force that speaks its name. The victory of Trumpism seems to have proven him correct. In Moscow, political pundits are hysterically boasting. Russia’s leading regime guru, Aleksandr Dugin, declared on CNN on March 19: “Putin and Trump agree that the world order must be based on the great powers and not on liberal globalism.” In 2017, the same Dugin gloated even more openly, asserting in an interview with CNN: “I noticed in Donald Trump many similarities with my thinking, and I could have written his inaugural speech […]. November 8, 2016 was a major victory for Russia and for Putin himself […]. Putin taught Trump how to challenge the status quo, conventional wisdom, the totalitarian principles of globalism.”
Revenge is a dish best served cold
In the early 1950s, Stalin instructed his security services to devise ways to destroy the United States from within. The collapse of the USSR, far from putting an end to this planning, turned out to be an added incentive. For a small group of men linked to the GRU and KGB were hell-bent on revenge, as they attributed the victory of the West during the Cold War to a plot hatched in Washington. For these men, the aim was to inflict the same fate on the United States that had befallen the USSR under Gorbachev and Yeltsin: to deprive the country of its allies, plunge it into chaos, unilaterally disarm it, and result in its break up.
Their first task for this group was to win decision-makers over to their cause. They found a talented popularizer, Alexander Dugin. Dugin mobilized geopolitics to demonstrate that the antagonism between Russia and the Anglo-Saxon world remained unchanged, and that Russia must adapt its policies to this reality. In The Great Continental War, published in 1992, Dugin describes the “geopolitical conspiracy” that led to the demise of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Ukrainian independence. In 1997, Dugin developed his theses in his programmatic work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became a textbook for the Russian General Staff Academy. According to him, at the heart of geopolitics lies “the affirmation of a fundamental historical dualism between the land, the tellurocracy, Eurasia, the heart of the Earth, with its ideocratic civilization, on the one hand, and the Sea, the thalassocracy, the maritime power, the Atlantic, the Anglo-Saxon world, the merchant civilization1...”. “The West, represented by America, is Russia’s total geopolitical adversary, the pole of a trend diametrically opposed to Eurasia. The geopolitical war of position with America has been and continues to be the essence of all Eurasian geopolitics, since the middle of the XXth century when the role of the United States became evident2.” Land powers are based on the primacy of politics over economics, on authoritarianism, conservatism and collectivism. Maritime powers are characterized by liberalism and individualism. Conflict between the two is inevitable.
As early as 1997, Dugin outlined the policy of subversion of the American adversary that was to be systematically implemented by the Russian security organs: “It is particularly important to create geopolitical disorder in American domestic life, by encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements, and extremist, racist and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the United States. At the same time, we support the isolationist tendencies of American politics, the theses of those circles (often right-wing Republicans) who believe that the United States should confine itself to its internal problems. These tendencies are highly advantageous for Russia, even if ‘isolationism’ is implemented within the framework of the original version of the Monroe Doctrine, i.e., if the USA limits its influence to the two Americas. This does not mean that Eurasia should at the same time refuse to destabilize the Latin American world by seeking to remove certain regions from American control. All levels of geopolitical pressure on the United States must be activated simultaneously3.” Dugin’s theses quickly gained ground in the Russian establishment, percolating even into President Putin’s discourse, to the point where Dugin remarked with his characteristic modesty: “Putin is looking more and more like Dugin, or at least implementing the program I’ve been building all my life.” Like his mentor, Putin came to see the stakes in the war against Ukraine as “Russia’s victory or defeat in the battle against the existential enemy (Atlanticism, the global financial oligarchy, the West).”
Immediate Russian goals after Trump’s second victory
For the observer of the American political scene since the advent of Trump, one thing stands out: the contrast between the chaos unleashed by the erratic President Trump and the extreme consistency in his measures taken to implement a unilateral disarmament of the United States vis-à-vis Russia and to serve Russian interests. In this area, the Trump administration is demonstrating a spirit of systematic follow-through that is absent in the other spheres of its initiatives. In our view, this contrast is the best indication that the men in the Kremlin have taken control of the aspects of American policy that are important to them.
Let’s take a quick look at the measures of direct interest to Moscow. All the agencies responsible for protecting the United States against foreign interference have been neutralized. Trump unilaterally ended cyber operations against Russia, leaving the US vulnerable to Russian hackers. The United States voted with Russia at the United Nations on the Ukraine resolution: an essential step in the eyes of the Kremlin as it figuratively stabs the Atlantic Alliance. They blocked statements condemning Russia at the G7. Trump notoriously torpedoed a G7 proposal recommending the creation of a special force to combat Russia’s phantom cargo fleet, which enables Moscow to export its oil around sanctions. The US administration has kept the Europeans outside peace negotiations with Moscow, much to the Kremlin’s satisfaction. Today, the Administration concedes that the Europeans will have their part to play: lifting sanctions in line with Putin’s demands! Trump puts pressure on Ukraine to comply with Russian demands: abandonment of occupied territories, neutrality status, and the absence of guarantees — all of which amount to isolating Ukraine for a future Russian offensive. Trump has helped Putin achieve a priority objective, reconquest of the Kursk region, by depriving the Ukrainians of American intelligence resources and neutralizing the F-16s supplied to Ukraine by Europe. Trump is in the process of dismantling American military logistics in Poland.
There seems to be literally nothing Donald Trump can refuse his friend Putin. No sooner does he appoint General Keith Kellogg as his representative for Ukraine and Russia than the Russian president lets it be known that he doesn’t want the General Kellogg. Never mind, Kellogg will be in charge of Ukraine. And for Russia Trump chooses Steve Witkoff, an investment banker, an emissary totally ignorant of that country, capable of swallowing the most enormous Putin lies, as his interview with Tucker Carlson proved: in short, the ideal interlocutor for the Kremlin. Meanwhile the United States withdrew from the international investigation group into the responsibility of Russian leaders for war crimes committed in Ukraine. The U.S. State Department halted funding for a three-year project by the Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab to trace the fates of thousands of Ukrainian abducted children. It also barred any evidence from being sent to the court. Trump ordered the closure of Radio Liberty. On March 19, US intelligence services ended a coordinated effort with the Europeans to counter sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks emanating from Russia. It gets better: the Trump administration is reportedly considering unilateral recognition of the annexation of Crimea.
We should also mention the osmosis between the Kremlin’s propaganda and the comments made by Trump and those close to him: Zelensky has no legitimacy, he is corrupt, he has embezzled Western aid. In this way, Trump joins efforts with Putin in a major objective: to bring down Zelensky, the soul of the Ukrainian resistance, by demanding immediate elections in Ukraine — the transparent holding of which is impossible in wartime. Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff stated that five Ukrainian regions annexed by Moscow were part of Russia, and “this has always been the issue.” Russia, he said, has “reclaimed them.” T In both Trumpian and Kremlin discourse, “peace” means capitulation, while Ukrainians who resist and Europeans who support them become “war-mongers”. Similar to the German-Soviet Pact, from September 1939 onwards, the British and French were called “war-mongers” by Stalinist propaganda because of their support for Poland. Note that the two points supposedly conceded by Putin on the ceasefire represent the two areas where Ukraine is inflicting sensitive blow on Russia: the strikes on energy infrastructures and on the Russian Black Sea fleet forced to hide out in Georgia because of Ukrainian drones and missiles. The crescendo of the Kremlin’s demands is literally staggering: the Russians are now requiring, as a condition of the ceasefire, that they be allowed to deploy observers in Odessa to ensure that arms deliveries to Ukraine have ceased – those from the United States as well as those from Europe.
But that’s not all. The Trump administration is embarking on a last-ditch economic rescue of a beleaguered Russia, destroying a number of levers available to the West to loosen Putin’s grip. American hedge funds are preparing to invest in Russian securities. Since last December, the ruble has strengthened by 40%. Reports suggest that Putin and Trump are holding secret talks to restart the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Trump’s reversal of his position on this project, which Putin holds dearest to his heart because he sees it as a means of tipping Germany (and therefore Europe) into the Russian orbit, is a good indication of how far the American president has come since his first term in office, when he opposed the pipeline. Recent partial-ceasefire talks for the Black Sea may grant Russia reentry into the SWIFT system for global money transfers under the guise of selling grain — long a desire of Putin’s government. In April Trump slapped tariffs on virtually the entire world, with one notable exception: Russia and its closest allies Belarus and North Corea. All in all, thanks to American financial and technological assistance, Russia will have the means to prepare its war against Europe at its leisure, unless Gazprom’s resumption of vassalization is sufficient to install Moscow-submissive oligarchs in power throughout Europe.
For years, Putin has dreamed of undermining the hegemony of the dollar, an objective as important to him as the destruction of NATO. Trump’s protectionist hocus-pocus, strongly encouraged in the Kremlin under the slogan of “putting national interests first”, is the best way to achieve this. “What the Wall Street Journal called ‘the dumbest trade war in history’ with Canada and Mexico threatens to blow up vast swathes of the economy, eliminate thousands of jobs and jeopardize U.S. security,” writes historian Ian Gardner, who asks, “Why would a president promising a ‘golden age’ inaugurate his reign by first setting off a series of fires, social and political, that seem to undermine every foundation of U.S. economic, diplomatic and cultural power? “ In addition, Trump has created a crypto-currency reserve fund. The idea is to weaken sovereign currencies and undermine the monetary system. In the minds of Silicon Valley billionaires, crypto currencies will make it possible to abolish an essential regal prerogative of the state.
What’s more, Trump has dealt a serious blow to American arms exports, having demonstrated in Ukraine that the United States is not a reliable supplier. In short, Moscow is rubbing its hands: in just a few weeks, Trump has managed to alienate the entire world, starting with his most loyal allies. Trump’s policy is “beneficial to Russia,” analyst Mikhail Yemelyanov wrote in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Trump is ready to make serious concessions to Russia without demanding reciprocal steps.” The multipolar world “has already arrived. And Trump is already living in it”.
The nature of Putin’s hold over Trump
Washington’s spectacular alignment with Moscow leads observers to wonder whether Trump is an agent of the Kremlin or simply falls into the category of “useful idiot”. A recent remark by Trump sheds some light on the relationship between the two men: “Let me tell you, Putin has been through quite an ordeal with me. He went through a fake witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, have you ever heard of this agreement? […] It was a Democrat story. He had to go through that. And he did4.” Trump sees in Putin a comrade-in-arms, a man who has the same enemies as he does (the liberals, the “globalists”), and who, like him, has had a difficult time because of them. Just like Putin, Trump is a predator. He can’t conceive of a win-win transaction: in a Trump deal, there’s always a fall guy. Trump and Putin are convinced that the whole world is conspiring to fleece the United States and Russia. For them, controlling an expanding Lebensraum is better than conquering markets by trade. Trump could subscribe to this remark by Alexander Prokhanov, the champion of Eurasism: “Forget about the intangibility of borders. For any empire, borders are floating, they can and must be moved. The more space we control, the less chance we have of being eaten up by others5.“ The American president admires the way Putin has neutralized his enemies at home and is all too ready to accept deferential advice from him. Like Putin, Trump is above all a man of resentments and revenge. Nothing solidifies an alliance like a shared hatred. Putin is a master at playing on Trump’s paranoid worldview and thirst for revenge. Putin has persuaded him that support for Ukraine was a Biden policy, so that Trump had completely had to distance himself from it if he didn’t want to turn to men who had served in the Democratic administration. Putin persuaded Trump that turning the FBI into a police force to deal with opponents would enrage “liberals”. In short, Putin made Trump believe that every pro-Russian measure he came up with was the best way to undermine his opponents in the old establishment.
The set of decisions we have described above suggests that Trump is surrounded by Russian or Russian-controlled “advisors”, rather like the Communist stooges in the future People’s Democracies were in 1945-1946, a Rakosi or an Ulbricht, for example. The Trump administration follows through only on what is driven by Moscow in Russia’s own interests. Trump’s day-to-day closeness to the Kremlin’s men is also evident in his rhetoric. No sooner had Putin declared Zelensky “illegitimate”, than Trump was singing the same refrain, echoing Russian propaganda claptrap without understanding that he was betraying his proximity to his Russian mentors. Trump finds the border with Canada “artificial”: exactly what Putin has said about the border with Ukraine. Trump has even taken up Russian invectives. For example, outraged by the Wall Street Journal‘s criticism of his policies, he called the publication “globalist”: the ultimate insult from Vladimir Putin’s mouth. This contamination by Russian propaganda is also evident within the Republican Party. Senator Mike Johnson, for example, claims that anti-Trump demonstrators are being paid by Soros: exactly the kind of cut-and-paste that the Russian media have used over and over about opposition to Putin’s regime.
Chaos all around
Although the Trump administration has reached impressive results in paralysing the opposition and in the decerebration of Americans by copying Putin’s propaganda methods, the Kremlin’s aim is clearly not to create a strong state across the Atlantic. In the words of historian Ian Garner, Trump is a “demolisher with no sense of direction“, sawing off the branches he’s sitting on. Apart from the very specific objectives pursued by Moscow mentioned above, which are aimed on the one hand at neutralizing the immune system of the American state and on the other putting American resources at the service of Russian ambitions for power, the Kremlin’s aim is to create an irreversible situation in the United States by rendering it ungovernable. The Russians favored Trump’s election not because he was perceived as a strong man with whom we could get along, but because they saw in him a wrecking ball that would cause irreparable damage to the United States.
Since the start of Trump’s blitzkrieg against the American establishment and America’s traditional allies, people have clung to rational explanations for his behavior: Trump is allegedly attacking NATO countries to make them pay more for their defense; Trump is flirting with Russia to distract it from the alliance with China, his administration’s priority being the Sino-American confrontation. In reality, as David Frum, columnist for The Atlantic, recently demonstrated, these rationalizations don’t stand up to scrutiny. For example, Trumpists support the AfD in Germany, even though this party is hostile to increased military spending. And in Asia, everyone understands that the abandon of Ukraine foreshadows that of Taiwan. Trump’s policy is not isolationist, it is predatory, and in no way hostile to “regime change“, as Vance’s speech in Munich showed.
The same applies to the economy. Many American observers have the impression that Trump is deliberately scuttling it. But here, too, rationalizations are being invented. For example, Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat, accuses Trump of having “manufactured a recession” on purpose to enrich his favorites: “It seems logical when you know that his goal is to create an economy similar to Russia’s, run by a handful of oligarchs who are loyal to him […] Creating such a recession would be a mistake. […] Creating such a state is difficult in a vast, dynamic and powerful economy, where too many players can oppose him. It therefore accelerates the concentration of money and power in the hands of its loyalists, while it crushes the rest.”
The truth is that, apart from the areas of direct interest to it, the Kremlin favors maximum chaos in America, and it’s safe to assume that it’s giving free rein to the devastating impulses of its protégé. What’s more, with their infallible flair for destruction, the Russians have discovered fanatical accomplices among the billionaires of Silicon Valley. It was thanks to them that the Republican Party has been transformed into a Russian Party, a shift that came to light in July 2024, at the Republican National Convention that marked the triumph of its isolationist direction. David Sacks, a tech oligarch, accused President Biden of being responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “He provoked – yes, provoked – the Russians to invade Ukraine by talking about NATO enlargement. Subsequently, he rejected any possibility of peace in Ukraine, including an agreement ending the war only two months after its outbreak”, while Marjorie Tailor Greene, Putin’s fiery supporter, raged against the “globalists”. Dugin boasted on January 4, 2025: “I have many good friends in the United States.” And he congratulated himself on “the bro-revolution and the turn to the right“.
The Kremlin’s allies: Silicon Valley’s ideological project
The Kremlin-led demolition of the American state obviously cannot be displayed in its true light – the kidnapping of a state by a hostile power. Camouflage is provided by the ideologues of Silicon Valley, whose objective is the same as Moscow’s: to destroy the American state. Let’s see how the dogmas peddled by the Tech bros, as they are called, converge with the Kremlin’s project for America, while masking it.
Let’s start with their guru, the sulphurous Curtis Yarvin, author of a plan called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). This ex-tech entrepreneur is one of the most influential thinkers on the technophile far right, which has embraced Trump. Yarvin is the founder of an anti-egalitarian current known as “neoreaction“, which emerged on the Internet in the late 2000s, combining a classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview with an embrace of technological capitalism as a means of governing people. In 2008, the young Yarvin proposed a rational solution to the problem of the “unproductive”: “Convert them to biodiesel, which can help fuel public transport.” “But,” he adds, “the problem with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transport is powered, even in part, by the distilled remains of its former working classes. However, it does allow us to address the problem we’re trying to solve. In a word, our goal is a humane alternative to genocide.” Yarvin prides himself on having found the answer: it involves “virtualizing” these people by imprisoning them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid driving them mad, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual reality interface” so that they could “live rich, fulfilling lives in a completely imaginary world”. In 2012, Yarvin wrote: “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to overcome their phobia of dictators.” His ideology, dubbed “Dark Enlightenment”, advocates the end of democracy: “I don’t believe in the right to vote” or “Democracy is weak and outdated.” In Yarvin’s worldview, it’s not elections that allow the democratic regime to function, but the illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, in cahoots with the federal bureaucracy, in a nebula he calls the Cathedral. This invisible Cathedral is all-powerful because it is located everywhere and nowhere, woven into our way of life, our ways of communicating and thinking. “For all revolutionary purposes,” Yarvin wrote in May 2020, “the Deep State is as decentralized as Bitcoin and as invulnerable – to ballots as to bullets.”
On the other hand, Yarvin admires the Chinese state’s use of violence. He finds that China’s “zero Covid” policy of total surveillance in the face of the pandemic involves “fewer Covid-related restrictions than those imposed on citizens of the reddest [Republican] state in the United States”. For Yarvin, even if libertarianism is right for the best way to organize society, its weakness is that it doesn’t take power seriously. An all-powerful state is needed, a sovereign Leviathan, capable of imposing order by force with such absolute authority that it can then disappear from everyday life. The state “should be run like a business, with a CEO at its head who has the same powers as an absolute monarch” – in other words, someone who is accountable neither to his people nor to the law. States are to be dissolved and replaced by smaller territories, a kind of high-tech phalansteria a self-contained community, or even floating islands, in competition with each other and governed by tech billionaires. (One thinks of the exotic fiefdoms governed by the villains seen in James Bond films.) The result will be network states or patchwork states. Curtis Yarvin writes: “The fundamental idea of Patchwork is that, as the failed governments we have inherited from history are dismantled, they must be replaced by a global spider’s web of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of sovereign, independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock company, regardless of the opinion of its inhabitants.”
Tech millionaires think they’ll be in control in an AI-driven world. Musk‘s ambition is to control the global financial system with X. The closer Silicon Valley’s billionaire sect gets to power, the more millenarian its rhetoric becomes. The Tech Bros are convinced that states will collapse, that we’re heading for the apocalypse. This is particularly true for Peter Thiel, a close associate of Curtis Yarvin. According to him, democracies are obsolete. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” wrote Thiel in 2009. “The great task of libertarians is to find a way out of politics in all its forms — from totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’.” He dreams of remaking nature, challenging “the ideology of the inevitability of each individual’s death”. He proposes to live to 120. Obsessed with the apocalypse (he has written an essay on the subject), Peter Thiel has built himself a bunker in New Zealand as a refuge at the end of time (he spent the Covid pandemic there). Like Dugin, Thiel seems to believe in a planetary conspiracy that the advent of Trump will reveal. Thus he asserts in early January, in an op-ed published by the Financial Times, that “Trump’s return to the White House …augurs the apocalypse of the secrets of the old regime. Apocalypse is the most peaceful way to resolve the old regime’s war on the Internet – a war the Internet has won…” And he goes as expected about “the state-funded media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation”.
Although many of these ideological billionaires do read books, their writings reveal the personalities of retarded teenagers, oblivious to the consequences of their actions and words, perhaps because they have evolved in a virtual universe of science fiction or video games where everything is reversible. These computer whizzes have a reptilian brain, alien to ethics and empathy, indifferent to the truth, allergic to the law. Their dominant passion seems to be transgression. They resemble our admirers of the Maoist cultural revolution in the 1960s. For them, the latest chic is to display an iconoclastic posture, to shock the bourgeois, especially if they know nothing about what they’re talking about. Musk, for example, explained that “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. It was their public sector employees who did”: in short, yet another Deep State coup!
All of which makes this milieu highly receptive to the teachings of Russian propagandists, with their unique experience in crowd manipulation. Starting with the alt-right movement, which brings together neo-Nazis, nationalists and monarchists, and is created by Richard Spencer . His Russian ex-wife, Nina Kouprianova, Dugin’s translator, provided him with a direct link to Vladimir Putin’s entourage. Dugin and Vladislav Surkov, the architect of the Putin regime, are said to have exerted a strong influence on the alt-right movement. Rather than simply spreading lies, the aim of propaganda is, for Surkov, to completely destroy the ability to process information. Steve Bannon, the designer of MAGA propaganda, has taken a leaf out of Surkov‘s book: “It’s not about persuasion: it’s about disorientation.” “Darkness is good… It only helps us when people get it wrong. When they can’t see who we are or what we do.” The main target is not the opposition, Bannon further explains. “Democrats don’t matter,” he tells writer Michael Lewis in 2021. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with it is to flood the area with shit.”
British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis defined Surkov’s work as follows: “His aim is to undermine people’s perceptions of the world, so that they never know what’s really going on. Surkov has turned Russian politics into a confusing, ever-changing, play. He has financed groups of all kinds, from neo-Nazi skinheads to progressive human rights groups. He has even supported parties opposed to President Putin. But the key element has been that Surkov then let it be known that it was he who was behind these groups, so that no one was ever sure what was true and what was bogus. As one journalist described it: “It’s a power strategy that keeps any opposition in permanent confusion”. Such perpetual, incessant change is unstoppable because it is indefinable.”
Speaking of the war against Ukraine, Surkov noted that “the underlying objective is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a permanent state of destabilized perception, in order to manipulate and control.” Contrast this with Ian Gardner’s description of Trumpian America: “Confusion is not a dysfunction or an unwanted effect: it is the very engine and purpose of the Trumpist spectacle that endlessly generates attention.” Gardner also diagnoses the dangerous spiral of one-upmanship that is set in motion in regimes where the cult of personality is rampant and the masses are associated with power only for the sake of destruction: “The further the government goes, the more the crowd demands. In an exponential dynamic, spectacular power can only lead to greater, bolder, more outrageous acts of destruction.” “Trump’s politics passes through an aesthetic of total destruction, because only participation in destruction and dismantling seems to open up a political option for the disenchanted: the semblance of a possibility to act.” This is the logic that led to Russia’s war against Ukraine. The dictator, sensing his illegitimacy, feels obliged to continuously accumulate new successes for fear of losing his hold on the masses.
The osmosis between Silicon Valley ideologues and certain ideologues of the Putin regime can be seen in a futuristic article by Vladislav Surkov, published on October 11, 2021, entitled “Deserted Democracy and Other Political Wonders of 2021”. Surkov argues that parliamentary representation is now irrelevant, as the wishes of the population can be communicated in an instant via the Internet. In short, political representation is to be discarded and replaced by algorithms. The only ones left in charge will be the computer scientists and siloviki who will run the artificial intelligence giants behind the scenes. “The digitization and robotization of the political system will result in the creation of a high-tech state and a democracy without men […] in which the hierarchy of machines and algorithms will pursue goals beyond the comprehension of the people who serve them.”
The next step for the Kremlin: making the American changeover irreversible
How do they see the American situation in the Kremlin? Unlike Americans, who understand nothing about Russia and have no interest in it, the Russians have developed significant expertise of the United States. They know the American mentality and politics inside out. For them, the Trump phase is a first step; however, victory is not yet definitive. “Donald Trump is like our Zhirinovsky,” opines Margarita Simonian. This comparison speaks volumes.
Let’s remember that Zhirinovsky’s party was first launched by the KGB after the abolition of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in 1990 to discredit democracy in the eyes of both Russians and Westerners. Zhirinovsky assumed the persona of a madman who could say anything with impunity, and whose words were of no consequence. In his spring 1991 election manifesto, he promised to feed Russia in 72 hours: “I’ll send troops to the former GDR, 1.5 million men, I’ll use the nuclear threat and everything will be supplied to us… We’ll send the strikers to jail, the racketeers abroad to defend Russian national interests, we’ll bring in workers from abroad who’ll work for us at 100 rubles a month.” He promised to procure a man for every woman in Russia and distribute free vodka to all. Over time, Zhirinovsky’s role expanded. His task was both to break down taboos and to construct an alternative reality in which the Russian people would be enclosed as if in a bubble. Zhirinovsky acclimated Russians to the cult of violence, promoting military expansionism, global racketeering, and dictatorship. After having powerfully accelerated the moral degradation of Russians by playing to their worst instincts, he paved the way for the construction of a new political system made possible by this mutation of human beings brought back to the reptilian brain. With Putin’s arrival in power, the buffoon gave way to the serial killer.
Numerous hints in the Russian media suggest that the Trump phase is in some way the initial stage of the American revolution. Trump plays the same role as Zhirinovsky: he breaks taboos, gets Americans hooked on transgression — all this disguised as a media or clownish spectacle that prevents moral reaction and rational interpretation. The Kremlin is delighted by the routing of the liberal elites. The first reflex is to make the most of the good times. But Russian leaders are also concerned about winning the second round. Dugin, never short of conspiracies, warns that the Trumpian revolution is too good to be true. Part of the Deep State was surely in on it: Trump “would not have been able to bring about such radical changes and would not even have been able to get elected and survive to the inauguration if he had not received the exceptional support of highly influential forces at the level of this same Deep State.” According to Dugin, this second Deep State is made up of Silicon Valley billionaires, whom he distrusts, his sympathies going to populist conservatives like Steve Bannon. His reticence is understandable: there’s a gulf between the patchwork state and the empire.
The line to follow for the Kremlin is obvious. Russia must encourage Trump’s imperial ambitions, pushing him to annex Canada and Greenland. “So what need will Trump have of Europe? He doesn’t care if it’s dying,” explains Soloviov, who believes Russia should hurry: “Trump has given us four years to prepare for the great European war that is inevitable.” But for this effort to bear full fruit, for Russia to set up bases again in Eastern Europe, to return to Berlin, “Vance or someone like him must succeed Trump in 2028″. Dugin also welcomes Trump’s desire for conquest, but for an even more important reason: he wants the United States to transform itself from a maritime to a continental land power, because only this will prevent the return of liberal elites to power and guarantee the durability of America’s conservative turn.
What place does the Kremlin have in store for this reformatted America? The Russian-American condominium that Putin’s propaganda dangles in front of the MAGA’s useful idiots is nothing but an illusion. When Duma deputy Adalbi Shkhagochev proposed offering Trump “the opportunity to lead the construction of a multipolar world”, he was harshly rebuked by presenter Yevgeny Popov: “No! We won’t let him lead anything anymore.” A Russian foreign policy analyst in Moscow recently told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “Trump doesn’t understand that Putin is simply manipulating him to achieve his main goal: to undermine the US’s international position, destroy its network of security alliances – especially in Europe – and destabilize the US from within, thus making the world safer for Putin and Xi.”
The United States will never be considered an ally by the Russians. The Russians’ thirst for America’s humiliation is far from quenched, as shown by Putin’s talks with Witkoff, which are designed, among other things, to expose to the world the limitless foolishness of American leaders. The fate reserved by the Kremlin for America resembles that of a spider bitten by the pompilid spider wasp, an insect that reproduces by laying its eggs in a spider it has previously paralyzed by injecting venom. The larvae feed on the living prey. In this way, Russia intends to feed on the juices extracted from an immobilized America, pumping in investments and technology transfers, and drawing from it the human resources that will give it the means to realize its project of global hegemony.
She has a degree in classical literature and spent 4 years in the USSR from 1973 to 1978. She is an agrégée in Russian and teaches Soviet history and international relations at Paris Sorbonne.
Footnotes
- A. Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki (The Foundations of Geopolitics), I, 10.1.
- Ibidem, V,1.
- Ibidem, V, 1.
- Jonathan Chait, “The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky”, The Atlantic, February 28, 2025.
- A. Prokhanov, “Rasti, inatche sozhrut” (“We need to spread out, so we don’t get eaten”), Argumenty i Fakty, 29/10/08.
