If You Were Putin, What Would You Do?

 

So let’s say you’re Vladimir Putin. Scary, I know. But let’s just say you’d been trained by the old KGB to hate the United States with a white-hot passion that you’ve had on simmer since long before you became dictator.

It’s a hate you were taught in the Brezhnev years, which were almost as bad as Stalin’s but with mass death ruled out, more or less. You nursed the hate through the convulsions of the early nineties, when your beloved Soviet Union was scrapped and replaced with economic chaos and widespread privation, which the Russian people somehow endured, as usual.

Then finally, in 2000, you got your shot. You took over the whole country, and your hate was given room to breathe.

Still you took your time. Fourteen years till you “annexed” Crimea and moved on the Donbass. Two more years before you engineered Brexit and the self-destruction of the UK, the same year you stole a U.S. presidential election for a pliable con man you’ve owned for three decades. Twenty-two years till you invaded Ukraine and restored Russia to Stalinism. You were nothing if not patient.

And all this time, the destruction of the United States would clearly be a pet project. You’d have spent considerable resources, over a timeline of several decades, to bring it about. And now, at last, the ingredients are all in place, the stars would seem to be aligned.

Trump, addled and clueless as he is, is there to do your bidding. Musk, infinitely greedy and power-mad, has both the money and the tech-savvy to pull off a smash-and-grab of the entire federal government.

Together, Trump and Musk are the perfect pets for your pet project. You can see they have great instincts for cruelty, extortion, and propaganda, but they lack polish. They have no real experience of totalitarianism, especially on the administrative side. They’ll need your guidance.

So what advice would you give these two pets of yours?

You’d certainly recommend replacing the government bureaucracy, ASAP. Fire anyone they can get away with firing, heedless of the value of the people being fired. The loss of competence and institutional knowledge would be collateral damage, but that’s an end in itself. Anything that erodes Americans’ trust in government services works for you.

At the same time, you’d want to inject chaos into the economy any way you could, through, say, ludicrously exorbitant tariffs, that would trigger ruinous trade wars, that would cripple the economies of three neighboring — and traditionally neighborly — countries. This would have the added appeal of making economic adversaries of much of Europe, and even more of an adversary of China.

You’d happily assume that the chaos thus created would crash the financial markets, thereby raising the chaos to another level altogether. And while this would almost certainly trigger a global recession, maybe even a depression, that would be a feature, not a bug. It would significantly weaken, not just the U.S., but most of Europe as well.

At the same time, you’d surely want your two American pets to replace the leadership of all the agencies of justice, law enforcement, national security, and, ultimately, the military. You’d want the new leadership of these agencies to be willing to share their deepest secrets with Uncle Vlad. You’d be especially interested in the names of any Western spies currently in Russia, who would need to be eliminated.

And then think of the alliances you could undermine. NATO, a highly-effective eighty-year mutual protection treaty, would be in imminent danger of being betrayed by its biggest member. You’d have already made it so the NATO countries could never trust the U.S. again. If you could get your pets to sell out Ukraine, which has been so very stressful for you these last three years, it would be like getting a pony for your birthday.

Meanwhile, you could make sure they cut off humanitarian aid worldwide. You’d have seen the statistical estimates of what a year without USAID dollars would mean worldwide, and the numbers would’ve made your heart soar:  Roughly 1.6 million deaths from AIDS, half a million from lack of vaccines, another half million from food insecurity, and yet another half million from malaria and tuberculosis combined, two diseases that are out of sight of Western eyes, and therefore don’t exist.

But it’s not just about cruelty and death. When you cut off all those billions in aid funding, you rapidly erode American “soft power,” all the good will earned from sharing America’s wealth and bounty with the world. It took eighty years to build this soft power, and you’ve managed to destroy it in a couple of months.

But you wouldn’t be done, because you’d need to ramp up the fear. You’d want people dragged out of their homes. You’d want to designate them for “extraordinary rendering,” a euphemism from the Bush years for the kidnapping of random people, who are then smuggled off to foreign “black sites” bought with American taxpayer dollars. These hellhole prisons are in places like El Salvador, where the president invests his country’s treasury in crypto.

Of course, for you this all evokes the golden days of the “Black Marias,” those dreaded KGB vehicles with darkened windows rolling up at three in the morning, waking up the neighborhood to haul out of bed some “rootless cosmopolitan” or “suspected Trotskyite,” two dog whistles that translate as “Jew.”

No due process. No lawyers. No evidence. Moreover, the absence of evidence is actually evidence in itself, because it shows that the suspect is obviously hiding something. The fact that you can’t prove it just confirms it.

The renderings would be but one part of a more general undermining of the Constitution, and you’d encourage assaults on the rule of law wherever possible. You’d want Trump tossing out executive orders like candy, each one more illegal than the one before. You’d be challenging the entire American legal system to keep up, clogging the courts with actions against the government.

Of course, no fascist takeover would be complete without taming the media, so it must be especially gratifying for you to see the American media taming itself.

Okay stop. I won’t make you pretend you’re Putin any longer.

But the more I look at this new hellscape, the more convinced I become that much of it was made in Moscow. It’s not a shooting war, not yet. But Trump and Musk have been launched into our airspace, and it no longer matters who launched them. They don’t need explosives to blow things up.

But here’s the thing. We always overestimate how strong a hand Russia is playing. For all the suppression of independent thought, for all the suborning of the media, for all the cyber-crime and trolling and seeding of disinformation that Putin puts out there, he is in fact coming from deep weakness.

He runs a country whose very functionality was pathetic long before he came along, and has grown exponentially worse since. He has no product that the world wants, beyond natural resources that were there long before the tsars, and over whose prices he has no control. He has driven off the most productive members of his society. He’s created a kleptocracy that rewards loyalty over competence, and which crushes human initiative. On top of that, a significant piece of his population hates his guts, even those too brainwashed to know it.

He has nothing to offer the world except cruelty, lies, and an instruction manual for manipulating a base of reprogrammable fools. Seems like a weak hand to me, but we’ll need to watch how he — and his pets — play it out.