Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia.
This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman:
Europe is a bit slow in picking up on all this: Russia, the US and China are carving up the world and Macron calls a summit to determine how to make Russia and China eternal enemies. The EU (and Ukraine!) have been played since 2008/2014.
> In the Americas, United States, and Canada:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals.
I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals.
If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
The seeds for this were set in the cold war if you believe Soviet defector Yuri Besmenov. He stated that the soviets removed malcontents from their society, the revolutionary Marxists that paved the way for the USSR. Eventually they figured that instead of killing or gulaging them, send them to the USA where the egalitarian society would allow them sow their revolutionary ideas into future generations.
The idea of spheres of influnce is far older than Dugin sure, but you are not considring that the tactics being deployed are consistent with Dugin, and support the overall strategy outlined by Dugin, in service of goals listed by Dugin.
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
Russia can not dominate *ANYTHING*. Its economy is about the size of Australia's despite having nearly four times the population. Its much-vaunted military could not defeat a minnow like Ukraine.
Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons but no one would commit suicide by using them.
Russia is dying, so are Italy, Japan and China etc.
I believed this at the beginning of the Ukraine war and went to read Dugin's philosophy to get a sense of where this was all headed. I believe that the Dugin-centric view of Russian _realpolitik_ is an intellectual meme moreso than an accurate view of reality.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.
Marx isn’t being co-opted by Leninism. It builds on Marxism. Have you read The State and Revolution or Imperialism or What is to be Done? Unless you mean dominating the bourgeoisie which is what Marxism is about too.
Not driven. They influence right wing people and probably Trump himself to set the environment that moves towards their policy goals.
Lenin had a newspaper called “the spark” the concept was that a spark would light the flame to revolution. Trump was the spark in the US, but the tinder had been laid out over many years amongst political weirdos who are now prominent.
Putin isn’t a communist, but he’s a former KGB guy who wants the USSR back. They want the outcome, the ideas are a means to an end.
Pre-USSR, he sees himself as a Czar akin to one of the Greats, a resumption of the Russian Empire. Culture wide revanchism, it's not exclusive to Putin and will still occur without him.
It does seem quite implicating that both Musk and Trump have had multiple reported private calls with Putin. I dont recall other ex presidents meeting with Putin so frequently.
Missing dossiers of Russian Intel from Mar-a-Lago...which of course we never got to hear the full story of thanks to Judge Cannon and SCOTUS.
This is so on the nose it would be rejected if someone wrote it as a novel or film.
In the same vain and USA's politics it driven by Unabomber.
Dugin's influence on Putin/Russia is a total fake news. Aleksandr "Putin's favorite political/historical/cultural icon/advisor according to Western media" Dugin, has NEVER even met with Putin, as in not a single time.
And where is the evidence for such influence, on the only person that matters (Putin)? There is none.
Are you a powerful dictator? Is Wallace living under your rule? Is Wallace's writing influencing your policy? Is Wallace proclaiming everywhere that he is close to you, that he is your advisor (you can't advise without the connection), that you are worshiping him?
Don't be goofy and intentionally misunderstand my arguments.
Brexit pales in comparison to the damage that has _already_ been done to the US federal government. The dust just hasn’t settled yet so most of it not visible right now.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once... shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again!
You sure there will be a change allowing a reversal in four years? I doubt that this kind of steamrolling power will be contained by law or institutions. They came into office while blatantly disrespecting law and institutions in the first place. There will be not enough left to get back to last year's state of affairs. This is not going to be a short hiccup. This is changing the world and the path of the future and I hate to witness it happening.
Which is good for those countries. In my home country of Bangladesh, China is helping build infrastructure. While the U.S. was bankrolling left wing social and activist programs to destabilize the government (and ultimately contributed to the recent overthrow of the government, which will derail a decade of consistent growth).
The damage to the US’s global influence and stature. Whether that’s morally a good or bad thing is a separate question. There is no question the US has screwed over a lot of countries. But be aware that the Chinese will step into the void as they already have in Africa. And those countries may find themselves out of the frying pan and into the fire.
As bad as the USA is (and it’s pretty bad) it’s still better than China (though at the rate it’s digressing this may not be true for much longer).
It’s instructive that you mention only USAID. Based on past conversations, you were born and raised in Asia, right? So maybe you have an ax to grind. What about all the other agencies that are being gutted?
It’s more than that I’m Asian. The same arrogance and disregard for popular sovereignty in other countries that you see at USAID/State/NED has metastasized and been turned inward. “Deplorables” is how Acela types see Iowans and Bangladeshis alike.
My dad spent his career in public health. He did things like convince villagers in Bangladesh to trust hospitals instead of midwives. So I’m thrilled to see cuts at NHS and CDC, which torched public trust by making exceptions to Covid lockdowns for protests. Those people are just bad at their jobs—everyone in public health knows you don’t do shit like that.
I can’t wait to see what Tulsi does to the intelligence services that lied us into the Iraq War, and what Kash does to the FBI that investigated conservative parents as domestic terrorists. These agencies are full of disloyal people who think they know better than the public, and few people are going to lament them getting canned.
As a train nerd who took Amtrak every day to work for two years I hope we fire every manager at Amtrak.
I hope the social security checks keep coming. The FAA and FCC generally seems to do a pretty good job. That’s about it.
The Tulsi that pushes Russian disinformation? That should do well for rooting out lying. Also some facts: Intelligence services did not lie us into the Iraq war - politicians did. Politicians manipulated intelligence reporting to fit their narrative. Since you seem to like conspiracy theories, it should be obvious that this was so Halliburton, the company vice president Dick Cheney was CEO of, could profit from government contracts. Guess what CEO will now profit from government contracts due to all the lying from the current slate of politicans.
And by conservative parents as domestic terrorists, I assume you mean the people convicted of crime due to their actual criminal actions on Jan. 6?
I randomly sampled a few articles. And I think you’re right and I’m wrong. The economic messaging is aggressive and was wrong, but I’m not seeing famine and war.
Here is an article that sampled various expert opinions:
“ This event will unleash the kind of uncertainty that Keynes had in mind when he said “we simply do not know” when referring to the likely effect of war. Such uncertainty can only be disruptive for financial markets. We will enter a new era of volatility that is likely to last until these difficult negotiations are completed.”
“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
“ Such market reactions could sharply contract economic activity, further depressing asset prices in a self-reinforcing cycle”
>“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
We have had 5 Prime Ministers since 2019.
Some of the problems we are seeing are due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Brexit is the biggest factor by far. And 100% self-inflicted. It is the elephant in the room that the politicians can't even talk about it, as it's electoral poison.
I live in Texas and contract for a company based in Europe. Comparable UK software engineering salaries are about 1/3-1/2 of what my salary expectations are.
The UK’s GDP per capita trajectory diverged around the end of the Great Recession. That was before the Brexit vote (2016) and long before the actual Brexit (2020). France and Italy have been stuck in more or less the same doldrums since the same time: https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore...
It would be somewhat unusual if they didn't all look similarish given the level of trade between them.
The UK government predicted a 2% reduction in growth over 15 years with a soft brexit compared to what it would have been otherwise, but seeing it on a graph may be difficult given those countries were also hurt by Brexit.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point (by a host of metrics, the UK and EU have stagnated economically compared to the US since the end of the great recession), but I also don't think GDP per capita is the best metric to use here given widening levels of inequality. Median income levels taking into account government transfers are much more informative in my opinion.
As a fairly regular visitor (for work), what particular doldrums are you referencing?
Admittedly, the loss of the US market will be a big blow for exports, but the anti-US (Trump) feelings strongly would put up with a financial hit rather than dealing with Mr. Loopy.
And Tesla's are becoming very unpopular...and unsellable.
I'm as anti-Brexit as they come, but it didn't change the UK's direction much. It's still the 2nd richest European state (with the 1st declining fast), the 3rd largest tech ecosystem worldwide, one of the premier military powers. Brexit wasn't great, or even good, but it's not disastrous.
That’s because Europe overall is declining fast. However the rest of the world is rising fast and the next ten years should be interesting from this alone.
