It is alleged that Russian intelligence services have been working for decades on a plan to destroy America from within. The policy of the Trump administration seems to confirm this thesis: in just a few weeks, Trump, ruling by decree, managed to sow chaos in the United States and turn the entire world against him, starting with his most loyal allies, while at the same time 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, making it ungovernable.
This is what historian and Russia expert Françoise Thom wrote in an analysis for the online publication Desk Russie.
In an article published on February 11, 2019, Vladislav Surkov, one of the architects of Putin's system, noted that the Russian regime has "significant export potential", as it is characterized by the dominance of force. The victory of Trumpism seems to prove this.
There is no modest triumph in Moscow. The supreme guru of the Russian regime, Alexander Dugin, said on CNN on March 19: "Putin and Trump agree that the world order should be based on great powers, not liberal globalism". In 2017 the same Dugin was more open in his views, saying in an interview with CNN: "I noticed in Donald Trump a lot in common with my thinking and I could write his inaugural speech [...]. November 8, 2016 was a significant victory for Russia and for Putin himself [...]. Putin taught Trump how to challenge the status quo, accepted ideas, the totalitarian principles of globalism."
"The Pope's Mule"
In the early 1950s, Stalin turned to the services with a demand to implement a policy of destroying the United States from within. The collapse of the USSR would not only not put an end to this undertaking, but would also give it clearer outlines. A small group of people connected to the GRU and KGB and dreaming of revenge attribute the victory of the Western camp in the Cold War to a conspiracy conceived in Washington.
These people are trying to inflict on the United States the same fate that befell the USSR under Gorbachev and Yeltsin: to deprive the country of its allies, plunge it into chaos, unilaterally disarm it and lead it to its collapse.
Their first task is to win over the decision-makers. To do this, they will find a talented popularizer like Alexander Dugin. He will mobilize geopolitics to show that the antagonism between Russia and the Anglo-Saxon world remains and that Russia must adapt its policy to this reality.
In "The Great War of the Continents", published in 1992, Dugin describes the "geopolitical conspiracy" that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Ukrainian independence. In 1997 Dugin develops his theses in his program work "Fundamentals of Geopolitics", which serves as a textbook for the Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
According to him, the basis of geopolitics is "the affirmation of a fundamental historical dualism between the Earth, tellurocracy, Eurasia, the heart of the Earth, with its ideocratic civilization, on the one hand, and the sea, thalassocracy, sea power, the Atlantic, the Anglo-Saxon world, commercial civilization...".
"The West, represented by America, is the total geopolitical opponent of Russia, the pole of a trend diametrically opposed to Eurasia. The geopolitical positional war with America has been and continues to be the essence of all Eurasian geopolitics since the mid-20th century, when the role of the United States became obvious." The land powers are based on the primacy of politics over economics, on authoritarianism, conservatism, collectivism. The sea powers are characterized by liberalism and individualism. The conflict between them is inevitable. As early as 1997, Dugin outlined the main lines of the subversive policy of the American adversary, which will be systematically implemented by the Russian services:
"It is especially important to cause geopolitical disorder in the internal life of America, encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements, extremist, racist and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the United States. At the same time, there will be support for the isolationist tendencies of American politics, for the theses of some circles (often right-wing Republicans) who believe that the United States should limit itself to its internal problems. These tendencies are extremely beneficial for Russia, even if "isolationism" is implemented within the framework of the original version of the Monroe Doctrine, that is, if the United States limits its influence to the Americas. This does not mean that Eurasia should at the same time refuse to destabilize the Latin American world, seeking to remove certain regions from American control. All levels of geopolitical pressure on the United States must be activated simultaneously."
Dugin's theses quickly took hold in the Russian establishment, even permeating the speeches of President Putin, to the point that Dugin observed with characteristic modesty: "Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin, or at least he is implementing the program that I have been building all my life." Like his mentor, Putin began to believe that the stakes in the war against Ukraine were "Russia's victory or defeat." in the fight against the existential enemy (Atlanticism, the global financial oligarchy, the West)."
Russia's immediate goals after Trump's second victory
For the observer of the American political scene since Trump came to power, one thing is clear: the contrast between the chaos that reigns under the crazy President Trump and the extraordinary coherence of the measures taken to implement unilateral disarmament of the United States in the face of Russia and in the interests of Russia.
In this area, the Trump administration has shown a sense of coherence that is lacking in other areas of its initiatives. In our opinion, this contrast is the best evidence that the Kremlin is taking control of aspects of American policy that are important to it. Let us briefly consider the measures that are of immediate interest to Moscow. All agencies responsible for protecting the United States from foreign interference have been neutralized. Trump unilaterally suspended cyber operations against Russia, leaving the United States vulnerable to Russian hackers.
The United States voted with Russia at the UN on the Ukraine resolution: a significant step in the eyes of the Kremlin because it demonstratively stabs the Atlantic alliance. They blocked statements condemning Russia within the G-7. Trump notably torpedoed the G-7 proposal recommending the creation of special forces to combat Russia's shadowy fleet, which allows Moscow to export its oil while circumventing sanctions.
The US administration has kept the Europeans out of peace talks with Moscow, much to the Kremlin's satisfaction. Today, it acknowledges that the Europeans will play their part: lifting sanctions in line with Putin's demands! Trump is pressuring Ukraine to meet Russian demands: handover of occupied territories, neutral status, and no guarantees—which effectively amounts to isolating Ukraine in the event of another Russian offensive.
Trump helped Putin achieve his primary goal of retaking the Kursk region by depriving the Ukrainians of American intelligence resources and neutralizing F-16s supplied to Ukraine from Europe. Trump dismantled US military logistics in Poland. It seems that Donald Trump literally cannot refuse anything to his friend Putin. No sooner had he appointed General Keith Kellogg as his representative for Ukraine and Russia than the Russian president made it clear that he did not want him. No matter, Kellogg will be in charge of Ukraine, and for Russia, Trump will choose Steve Witkoff, an emissary who knows absolutely nothing about that country, capable of swallowing even Putin's biggest lies, as his interview with Tucker Carlson proves: in short, the ideal interlocutor for the Kremlin.
The United States has withdrawn from the international investigation into the responsibility of Russian leaders for war crimes committed in Ukraine. Trump has ordered the closure of Radio Liberty. On March 19, US intelligence agencies suspended coordinated efforts with Europeans to counter sabotage, disinformation, and cyberattacks emanating from Russia.
Even better, the Trump administration is reportedly considering unilateral recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Let us also point out the osmosis between Kremlin propaganda and the statements of Trump and his close associates: Zelensky has no legitimacy, he is corrupt, he has turned away Western aid. Thus, Trump supports Putin’s main goal - to overthrow Zelensky, the soul of the Ukrainian resistance - by insisting on immediate elections in Ukraine, which are impossible to hold during war.
In Trump’s discourse, as in that of the Kremlin, "peace" means capitulation, while the Ukrainians who resist and the Europeans who support them become "warmongers". We remember that after the German-Soviet pact, from September 1939, the British and French were treated as "warmongers" by Stalinist propaganda for their support for Poland.
It is worth noting that the two points that Putin supposedly acknowledged regarding the ceasefire represent the two areas in which Ukraine is inflicting significant blows on Russia: the attack on energy infrastructure and the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which is forced to hide in the breakaway Georgian quasi-republic of Abkhazia because of Ukrainian drones and missiles.
The crescendo of the Kremlin's demands is literally staggering - now the Russians are demanding, as a condition for a ceasefire, the deployment of observers in Odessa to guarantee the cessation of arms supplies to Ukraine - both from the US and from Europe.
But that's not all. The Trump administration has launched a last-minute economic rescue of beleaguered Russia, destroying several levers the West had at its disposal to force Putin to relinquish his grip.
American hedge funds are preparing to invest in Russian securities. The ruble has appreciated by 40% since last December. Putin and Trump have reportedly been in secret discussions about restarting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Trump's change of heart on this project, which Putin values most, seeing it as a way to bring Germany (and therefore Europe) into Russia's orbit, is a sign of the American president's evolution since his first term, when he opposed the pipeline.
All in all, Russia will have, thanks to American financial and technological assistance, the means to prepare its war on Europe whenever it suits it, unless renewed vassalage to Gazprom proves to be enough to bring Moscow's oligarchs to power throughout Europe. For years, Putin has dreamed of undermining the hegemony of the dollar, a goal as important to him as the destruction of NATO. Trump's protectionist hobby, vigorously promoted in the Kremlin under the slogan "national interests first", is the best way to achieve this.
"What the "Wall Street Journal" "The trade war with Canada and Mexico, which he called "the stupidest trade war" ever, threatens to blow up huge swaths of the economy, eliminate thousands of jobs, and threaten American security," writes historian Ian Garner, who asks: "Why would a president promising a "golden age" begin his presidency by first setting off a series of fires, social and political, that seem to undermine every foundation of American economic, diplomatic, and cultural power?"
In addition, Trump has created a cryptocurrency reserve fund. The idea is to weaken national currencies and undermine the monetary system. According to Silicon Valley billionaires, cryptocurrencies will allow the elimination of the most important sovereign prerogative of the state. Let's add that Trump has dealt a serious blow to American arms exports after the United States showed in Ukraine that it is not a reliable supplier. In short, Moscow is rubbing its hands together: in just a few weeks, Trump has managed to turn the entire world against him, starting with his most loyal allies.
The nature of Putin's influence on Trump
This dramatic rapprochement between Washington and Moscow has observers wondering whether Trump is an agent of the Kremlin or simply a "useful idiot". A recent remark by Trump sheds some light on the relationship between the two men: "Let me tell you. Putin went through hell with me. He was subjected to a fake witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, have you heard of that deal? [...] It was a democratic lie. He had to go through it. And he did".
Trump sees Putin as a comrade-in-arms, a man who has had the same enemy for years as he has (the liberals, the "globalists"), and who, like him, has suffered because of them. Trump is as much of a predator as Putin. He can't imagine a win-win deal: in a Trump-style deal, there's always someone who takes the brunt of the ridicule.
Trump and Putin are convinced that the whole world is conspiring to rob the United States and Russia. For them, controlling the expansion of living space is more important than conquering markets. Trump can agree with this remark of Alexander Prokhanov, a defender of Eurasianism: "Forget the inviolability of borders. For any empire, borders are mobile; they can and should be moved. The more space you control, the less likely you are to be eaten by others".
The American president admires the way Putin has dealt with his enemies at home, and is ready to accept respectful advice from him. Like Putin, Trump is above all a man of discontent and revenge. Nothing strengthens an alliance like shared hatred.
Putin plays masterfully on Trump's paranoid conspiracy theories and his unhealthy thirst for revenge. He convinced him that supporting Ukraine was Biden’s policy, so he absolutely had to distance himself from it if he didn’t want to have to turn to people who had served in the Democratic administration. He convinced him that turning the FBI into a police force to fight opponents would anger “liberals.” In short, he made him believe that all the pro-Russian measures he was proposing were the best way to deceive his opponents in the old establishment.
The set of decisions we mentioned above suggests that Trump is firmly supported by Russian or Russian-controlled “advisors,” much like the communists in the future people’s democracies of 1945-1946, such as Rakosi or Ulbricht. The Trump administration has demonstrated consistency only in what is directed from Moscow in the interests of Russia. Trump’s daily closeness to figures in the Kremlin is also revealed in his rhetoric. As soon as Putin declared Zelensky "illegitimate", Trump began to sing the same refrain, repeating the lies of Russian propaganda, without realizing that he was betraying his closeness to his Russian mentors.
Trump calls the border with Canada "artificial": exactly what Putin said about the border with Ukraine. We even see Trump picking up on Russian insults. Thus, outraged by the criticism made by the "Wall Street Journal" regarding his policies, he calls this publication "globalist": the greatest insult from Vladimir Putin. This contamination by Russian propaganda is also evident in the Republican Party. So, Senator Mike Johnson claims that the anti-Trump protesters are paid by Soros: this is a copy of what the Russian media repeats about the opposition to the Putin regime.
Chaos in all directions
If the paralysis of the opposition and the brainwashing of Americans through propaganda are a copy of Putin's methods, the Kremlin's goal is clearly not to create a strong state across the Atlantic. In the words of historian Ian Garner, Trump is a "aimless destroyer" who cuts off the branches on which he sits.
In addition to the very specific goals pursued by Moscow, mentioned above, which aim, on the one hand, to neutralize the immune system of the American state and, on the other, to put American resources at the service of Russian power ambitions, the Kremlin's goal is to create an irreversible situation in the United States, making it ungovernable. Russians supported Trump’s election not because he was perceived as a strongman with whom they could get along, but because they saw him as a wrecking ball that would cause irreparable damage to the United States. From the very beginning of Trump’s blitzkrieg against the American establishment and America’s traditional allies, people clung to rational explanations for his behavior: Trump is attacking NATO countries to make them pay more for their defense; Trump is flirting with Russia to divert it from its alliance with China, while his administration’s priority is the Sino-American confrontation.
In reality, as David Frum, a columnist for The Atlantic, recently showed, these rationalizations do not hold up: for example, Trump supporters support the "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) in Germany, even though that party is hostile to increased military spending; and in Asia, everyone understands that abandoning Ukraine portends the same for Taiwan. Trump's policy is not isolationist, it is predatory and not at all hostile to "regime change", as Vance's speech in Munich showed.
The same applies to the economy. Many American observers are left with the impression that Trump is deliberately sabotaging it. But here too we make excuses. Thus, Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat, accuses Trump of "creating a recession" on purpose to enrich his favorites: "This seems logical when you know that his goal is to create an economy similar to that of Russia, run by a handful of loyal oligarchs. [...]"
Creating such a state is difficult in a large, dynamic and powerful economy, where too many players can oppose it. So he accelerates the concentration of money and power in the hands of his followers, while crushing the rest. The truth is that outside the areas that directly interest him, the Kremlin is for maximum chaos in America, and one might think that Trump is giving free rein to his protégé’s destructive impulses.
Moreover, with his unerring sense of destruction, he has found fanatical supporters among the billionaires of Silicon Valley. It was thanks to them that the Republican Party transformed into the Russian Party, a change that became apparent in July 2024, during the Republican National Convention, which marked the triumph of the isolationist line.
David Sachs, a tech oligarch, accuses President Biden of being responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "He provoked - yes, provoked - the Russians to invade Ukraine by talking about expanding NATO. He subsequently rejected any possibility of peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it began", while Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ardent Putin supporter, fiercely opposed the "globalists". Dugin boasted on January 4, 2025: "I have very good friends in the United States." And congratulate yourself on the "fraternal revolution and the turn to the right".
The Kremlin's Allies: The Ideological Project of Silicon Valley
The Kremlin-led operation to destroy the American state cannot, of course, be presented in its true face as the kidnapping of a state by a hostile power. The cover-up is being carried out by Silicon Valley ideologues whose goal is the same as Moscow's: to destroy the American state. Let's see how the dogmas propagated by the so-called "technobrots" coincide with the Kremlin's plan for America, while simultaneously disguising it.
Let's start with their guru, the acerbic Curtis Yarvin, author of a plan called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). This former tech entrepreneur is one of the most influential thinkers on the pro-Trump technophile far right. Yarvin is the founder of an anti-egalitarian movement called "neo-reaction" that emerged on the Internet in the late 2000s and combines a classically anti-modern and anti-democratic worldview with a call for technological capitalism as a means of controlling people.
In 2012, Yarvin wrote: "If Americans want to change their government, they will have to overcome their phobia of dictators."
His ideology, called "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 is not elections that make democracy work, but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, in alliance with the federal bureaucracy.
On the other hand, he admires the way the Chinese state uses violence. Yarvin finds that China’s overall “Covid-zero” surveillance policy in the face of the pandemic involves “fewer Covid-related restrictions than those imposed on citizens in the reddest (Republican) state in the United States.” For Yarvin, even if libertarianism is accepted as the best way to organize society, its weakness is that it fails to take power seriously. What is needed is an omnipotent state, a sovereign Leviathan, capable of imposing order by force with such absolute power that it then disappears from everyday life.
For him, the state "should be run like a business with a CEO at the helm who has the same powers as an absolute monarch", that is, a person who is not responsible to his people or to the law. States should be dissolved and replaced by smaller territories, a kind of high-tech phalansteries or even floating islands, competing with each other and run by tech billionaires: one thinks of the exotic dominions run by the villains we see in James Bond films. We will therefore have network or patchwork states.
Technological millionaires believe that they will control the world, run by AI. Musk seeks to control the global financial system through his social platform X. As he moves closer to power, the sect of Silicon Valley billionaires adopts an increasingly millennial discourse. The techno-brothers are convinced that countries will collapse, that we are heading towards an apocalypse.
This is especially true for Peter Thiel, a close friend of Curtis Yarvin. For him, democracies are outdated. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", Thiel wrote in 2009. The great task of libertarians is to find a way out of politics in all its forms, from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the senseless demonstrations that rule so-called "social democracy".
He dreams of recreating nature, challenging "the ideology of the inevitability of death for every human being". He plans to live to be 120. Obsessed with the apocalypse (he wrote an essay on the subject), Peter Thiel built a bunker in New Zealand to take refuge in at the end of time (he spent the Covid pandemic there).
Like Dugin, Thiel seems to believe in a global conspiracy that will be revealed once Trump comes to power. That’s what he said in early January in an article published by the Financial Times, welcoming “Trump’s return to the White House” which “presages an apocalypse of the old regime’s secrets. The apocalypse is the most peaceful way to resolve the old regime’s war with the internet – a war that the internet won…” And he sings the line about “the state-funded media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and NGOs that traditionally define the boundaries of public discourse.” Although many of these billionaire ideologues are well-read, their writings reveal the personalities of backward teenagers who do not realize the consequences of their actions and words, perhaps because they are used to developing in the virtual universe of science fiction or video games, where everything is reversible. These computer geniuses have a reptilian brain, devoid of ethics and empathy, indifferent to the truth, allergic to the law.
Their dominant passion seems to be crime. They are reminiscent of the generation of 60-year-olds, admirers of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. For them, the latest fashion is to take an iconoclastic stance to impress the bourgeoisie, especially if they do not understand anything about what they are saying. Thus, Musk scientifically explained that "Stalin, Mao and Hitler did not kill millions of people. Their public servants did". In short: another coup by the deep state!
All this makes the environment highly receptive to the lessons of Russian propagandists, who have a rich and unique experience in manipulating crowds. Starting with the far-right movement, which strongly resembles the neo-Nazis, nationalists and monarchists founded by Richard Spencer.
His ex-wife, the Russian Nina Kupriyanova, Dugin's translator, provides him with a close connection to Putin's entourage. Dugin and Vladislav Surkov, the architect of the Putin regime, are considered to have exerted enormous influence on the far-right in the United States. Far from simply spreading lies, the goal of propaganda, according to Surkov, is to completely destroy the ability to process information.
Steve Bannon, the conceptualist of MAGA propaganda, sifts out the most important thing: "This is not about persuasion. It's about disorientation." "Darkness is good... It only helps us when people make mistakes. When they don't see who we are and what we're doing." "The main goal is not the opposition," Bannon explains. "Democrats don't matter," he told the writer Michael Lewis in 2021. "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to fill the perimeter with garbage."
The Kremlin's next move: to make the change in the US irreversible
How does the Kremlin see the situation in the US? Unlike Americans, who understand nothing about Russia and are not interested in it, the Russians have acquired serious expertise on the US. They know the American mentality and politics in depth. For them, the Trump phase is a first step, but victory is not yet final. "Donald Trump is like our Zhirinovsky," says Margarita Simonyan.
This comparison speaks volumes. Let us recall that Zhirinovsky's party was first created by the KGB after the Communist Party's monopoly on power was abolished in 1990, in order to discredit democracy in the eyes of both Russians and Westerners. Zhirinovsky played the role of a court jester who could say anything with impunity and whose words did not matter.
In his election program in the spring of 1991 he promised to feed Russia in 72 hours: "I will send a detachment of 1.5 million people to the former GDR, I will increase the nuclear threat and we will be provided with everything... We will send strikers to prison, racketeers abroad to protect Russian national interests, we will bring workers from abroad who will work for us conscientiously for 100 rubles a month". He promises to provide a man for every woman in Russia and to give away free vodka to everyone.
Over time, Zhirinovsky's role expanded. His role was both to break taboos and to construct an alternative reality in which good Russian people would be trapped as if in a bubble. Zhirinovsky instilled a cult of violence in Russia, encouraged military expansionism, global racketeering, and dictatorship. Having powerfully accelerated the moral degradation of Russians by responding to their worst instincts, he paved the way for the construction of a new political system made possible by this mutation of people who had reverted to the reptilian brain.
With Putin's rise to power, the jester gave way to the serial killer. There are many hints in the Russian media that the Trump phase is somehow the initial stage of the American revolution. Trump plays the same role as Zhirinovsky: he breaks taboos, makes Americans addicted to sin, and all this in the form of a media or clown spectacle that excludes moral response and rational interpretation. The Kremlin is pleased with the defeat of the liberal elites. The first instinct is to make the most of this favorable period. But he is also concerned about winning the second round.
Dugin, who always has his share of intrigue, warns: "Trump's revolution is too good to be true". Part of the deep state has certainly been involved in this, Trump "would not have been able to make such radical changes and could not even have been elected and survived to take office if he had not received the exclusive support of very influential forces in this same deep state".
This second deep state, according to Dugin, is made up of Silicon Valley billionaires, whom he distrusts, and whose sympathies are directed towards populist conservatives like Steve Bannon. We understand his reluctance: there is a gap between the patchwork state and the empire. The Kremlin’s course of action is clear. Russia should encourage Trump’s imperial ambitions, pushing him to annex Canada and Greenland.
So what does Trump need Europe for?
“He doesn’t care if it dies,” explains Solovyov, who believes we should hurry: “Trump gave us four years to prepare for the big European war, which is inevitable. But for this effort to bear fruit, for Russia to reestablish its bases in Eastern Europe, to return to Berlin, "Vance or someone like him must succeed Trump in 2028".
Dugin also looks very favorably on Trump's conquest ambitions, but for an even more important reason: he wants the United States to transform from a thalassocratic power into a continental power, because only this transformation will prevent the return of liberal elites to power and ensure the sustainability of America's conservative turn. What place does the Kremlin reserve for this reformatted America? The Russian-American condominium with which Putin’s propaganda lures the MAGA useful idiots is nothing more than bait.
When Duma deputy Adalby Shkhagoshev suggested offering Trump “the opportunity to lead the construction of a multipolar world,” he was sternly rebuked by host Yevgeny Popov: “No! We will not let him lead anything else.” A Russian foreign policy analyst in Moscow recently told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “Trump does not understand that Putin is simply manipulating him to achieve his main goal: to undermine America’s international standing, to destroy its network of security alliances—especially in Europe—and to destabilize the United States from within, thereby making the world safer for Putin and Xi.”
The United States will never be considered an ally by the Russians. The latter's thirst for American humiliation is far from being quenched, as Putin's conversations with Witkoff show, which are intended, among other things, to expose to the entire world the enormous stupidity of the American leadership.
The fate predetermined by the Kremlin resembles that of a spider bitten by a pompilid wasp - an insect that reproduces by laying eggs inside a spider that it has previously paralyzed by injecting with venom. The larvae feed on live prey. In this way, Russia intends to feed on the juices extracted from an immobilized America, to pump out investments and technology transfers, and to extract from it the human resources that will give it the means to achieve its project of global hegemony.