If Putin could not take the United States out to limit their power and damage Europe, he would buy the loyalty of wannabe-oligarchs around the world. The 1990s and early 2000s had shown that poor Westerner politicians were billionaires down on their luck—he would show them a way to improve their chances of becoming rich through Russia’s oligarchy.
Throughout history, America’s insistence on fair play, ethical conduct, and limiting kleptocracies had clearly become a liability for the Russian oligarchy. American democracy was the obstacle that led the uber-rich to steal, store, and transfer their illicit trillions across the globe. They wanted to spend it as they wished. American democracy was in the way but with the right amount of warfare, Putin believed he could flip this to his own benefit. Done right, such an operation would be a global campaign. Why stop at America and Europe?
Intelligence officers understand that preparation of the battlefield is critical to achieving one’s goals. Well before meddling in foreign elections, the Russian intelligence services would need to spread the belief that the old ways of NATO, America, and the European Union were bad for business. They saw the faulty lines in the Western economy growing deeper with time. America was getting older and the children of the greatest generation were drawing more conservative. The election of Barack Obama was an anathema to them. Russia under Putin would not preach the gospel of Marx. There would be no appeals to brotherhood and collectivism. The mission would be to tear a deflated white America away from the rest and assist them to become the dominant political force. Liberals would dismiss it as racist craziness. Putin not only harnessed a base of rising white consciousness, he found that promises of Russian riches would bring those ideas directly to their elected representatives. When oligarch money was being represented, every one of them cleared their calendar to listen.
Russia would destabilize through the conservative right-wing. These millionaires and billionaires, particularly in the Trump campaign, working for their own self-interest, would advance the policies and goals of the Kremlin in exchange for a seat at the table with wealthy fellow travelers.
Democracy itself would be the weapon that would bring down democracy. The vote would be the infectious vector—so long as the people are of one mind, they would vote their own democracy out of existence. Politicians in America would help forge a global economic alliance based on personal financial gain and self-interest. And Europe would follow.
In America, the Mexican migration would become a horde of raping, pillaging invaders. In Europe, the Syrian and African migration would challenge the concept of being “European.” These efforts to be inclusive, diverse, and liberal would be put to the test against the greatest psychological operations machine in history. With the right propaganda, fake news, and politicians willing to compromise their own national interest for the right amount of cash, the avaricious masses may be willing to reconsider autocracy as an alternative to democracy and the key to future advancement. Perhaps with the narrative framed properly, it would give them a new window from which to look for an exit. Promises of new riches in formerly closed markets such as Russia would make them embrace a more highly focused leadership and convert some of the inhibitions of democracy to global greatness.
The autocrat’s argument is that one tribe—the dominant tribe—is better suited to lead the key nations of the West. The move would be to convince the Western conservative to embrace autocratic government as a hammer to build a cultural bridge of white Western conservatism from Eastern Europe, to Central Europe, and finally to the Americas. Together they would confront the challenges of the Muslim world.
A core component to bringing Western European and American political establishments around to Moscow’s way of thinking was to join the common cause against terrorism. Russia too had been subject to Islamic extremist terrorism. The 2004 Chechen suicide-hostage barricades at Beslan elementary school had ended with 334 women and schoolchildren dead. The village raids inside of Russia where men, women, children, and the elderly were roped together and forced to walk as human shields by Chechen guerillas had also killed hundreds. The Chechen Muslim extremists were hard-core and Putin had stamped them out brutally in the second Chechnya war. That he committed atrocities not seen since World War II was beside the point.
Russia argued that the 9/11 attacks and Russia’s own massacres were a common cause that both Americans and Russians were locked in deadly wars to stamp out terrorists. Both Republican and Russian political bodies sought a higher meaning to the fight against Islamic terrorists. American Republicans saw it as a global crusade in the literal sense of the words. Many thought it was time for a religious reckoning with Islam as a whole. Many Russian and European right-wing politicians agreed. After nearly a decade of bloodletting (of mainly Muslim blood) some were calling on an alliance to fight Islam alongside of Russia. They sought a clash of civilizations.
The concept of the West engaging in a clash of civilizations was deeply believed by Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 attacks in New York City, Washington, DC, and western Pennsylvania, as well as the 7/7 attacks in London and the 3/14 attacks in Madrid, Spain; the rise of the “Islamic caliphate” of the Islamic state of Iraq; and Syrian terrorist groups were born of the belief that the West must be forced to embrace their inner xenophobia. The efforts were in place to move the terrorist struggle from low-grade regional attacks to a broad global struggle where every Muslim would be called upon to defend the religion. Bin Laden’s call for the clash of civilizations would intimidate all Westerners, Christians and Muslim alike. He sought to make them live in fear that a Muslim terrorist would kill them and their children while they slept comfortably in their beds at night. Bin Laden’s insane belief lies in the fact that he understood the inherent bigotry of the West. In fact, it was necessary to make Christians view all Muslims as evil. It was critical to his plan of a worldwide clash of civilizations between Islam and the world. It required the demonization of every Muslim man, woman, and child. Hence, his disciples could say, did we not tell you that Christians hate us and were the actual evil?
After the invasion of Iraq, Saddam and bin Laden’s terrorists knew America feared the drip, drip, drip of soldiers lost to suicide bomber terrorist attacks—so they put everything they had into creating the most spectacular attacks and distributing them through slick news media video releases. Their successor organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), would take that to a completely different level by emphasizing brutality, blood spectacle, and mass murder. ISIS made videos and crafted their own global information distribution system where images of their men and women literally bathing themselves in the blood of their enemies would shock the senses. These spectacles would create a political backlash that would be exploited by Russia in 2016. Right-wing extremist groups all around Europe rallied to the “anti-Islam” movement after the million refugees from Syria were sent from Turkey and when immigrants and refugees were stopped crossing from Libya to Italy over the past decade.
The terrorism we experience worldwide today is a direct reading of the ideology of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. Even with both men dead, the spark of an individual jihad designed to stoke hatred of Muslims required Western politicians to embrace that spark for their own political needs. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are two who have taken up the challenge. They believe that both Eastern and Western Christianity must come together with the objective to set aside the Old World Order created after WWII, and create three pillars of a new conservative Christian global leadership: 1) American conservatives would rule in the Western Hemisphere; 2) France would lead an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant alliance of ultra-right-wing governments from Poland to Britain; and 3) in the East, the strong ultranationalists of Russia would support, finance, and defend this new alliance.
In a Foreign Affairs piece “How Democracies Fall Apart,” authors Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, and Erica Frantz detail how populism can easily lead to autocracy. They note the increase in democratically elected “strongmen” such as Putin, al-Sisi in Egypt, Duterte in the Philippines, and Erdogan in Turkey, is due to their ability to capitalize on citizen grievances: “These leaders first come to power through democratic elections and subsequently harness widespread discontent to gradually undermine institutional constraints on their rule, marginalize the opposition, and erode civil society.”1
The world has been under threat of losing democracies to ideologies for decades. However, there has been a wave of authoritarian states growing and directly challenging the established norms. Andrea Kendall Taylor and Erica Frantz wrote, “In the last decade, however, populist-fueled ‘authoritarianization’ has been on the rise, accounting for 40 percent of all democratic failures between 2000 and 2010 and matching coups in frequency.”2 They continued: “Data show that just under half (44 percent) of all instances of ‘authoritarianization’ from 1946 to 1999 led to the establishment of personalist dictatorships. From 2000 to 2010, however, that proportion increased to 75 percent. In most cases, the populist strongmen rose to power with the support of a political party but then proved effective in sidelining competing voices from within.”3
Venezuela is a good example.
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela came to power through a wave of populism spouting whichever tropes worked at the moment that he spoke. He called his ideology Bolivarianism, named after the General Simon Bolivar who defeated the Spanish colonialists and is widely revered in Latin America. Chavez created a mélange of social justice, street action, and Marxist platitudes to be elected numerous times in a wave of populism. He slowly and systematically dismantled the democratic pillars of Venezuela before nationalizing all the country’s oil industry. Once that was complete, he used state power and oil money to remain in power until his death. His successor, Nicholas Maduro, maintained the populist mantle has become a beacon of personal corruption. The nation is devoid of food with people thronging the border to be able to buy even the simplest foodstuffs. The situation became so bad that in 2018 the international community and the United Nations offered to provide food aid, but like all dictators, Maduro refused unless the demoralized opposition accepted his government’s National Constituent Assembly, a rubber stamp body that would invest in him all national power. This is the crushing power of a populist dictator. Invariably, their greatest enemy is democracy, which they always immediately seek to stamp out.
It should be noted that Russia is Venezuela’s strongest partner in the oil trade and weapons sales. Russian military scholars have warned the Kremlin that Venezuela’s unrest stems from the United States trying to overthrow the regime with a “color revolution” akin to Ukraine.4 Some have suggested that Russia step in to stop what they believe are American-backed revolutions.
Populist dictators and strongmen use divisive techniques and attacks to foster splits in their societies and to break the hold of establishment norms in order to rise to national leadership through a negative form of “people power”—to assert that the system “is rigged against you,” where in many cases, the system is built and working properly for these very same people. The populist authoritarian is the master of the rant, a demagogue of the highest order, and runs an agenda which generally brings about ruin. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel openly warned the West of the dangers of the new populist movement washing around the world:
“With a few exceptions, that also applies to most authoritarian-led countries. Often, economically and socially weak countries are led by men who are only ostensibly strong. The assertion of power, the instigation of confrontations outside the country, often conceals even bigger domestic problems. There’s a danger that this authoritarian style of politics is now making inroads into the Western world. And they all have in common the fact that they place their national interests over those of the international community. We Europeans do not do that. But that’s also why we tend to be laughed at by these authoritarian-led countries. I am convinced that we are living in an era of competition between democratic countries and authoritarian countries. And the latter have already begun trying to gain influence in the European Union and to divide us. The first cracks are apparent in Europe. We will have to do far more to defend our freedom in the future than we have had to do in the past.”5