Putin Is at War with the West
- john raymond
- May 31
- 3 min read
What many mistake as confusion—Trump's contradictory statements, his "shifting" allegiances, his chaotic style of governance—is not confusion at all. It is calculated disruption. It is the intentional destabilization of norms, narratives, and institutions for the benefit of an adversarial power. This is not confusion. This is the plan. And the West's refusal to see it for what it is—that refusal is part of the war.
To understand this claim, we must first understand what kind of war we are talking about. This is not just a conventional war of just armies and armaments. It is an asymmetric war—a type of conflict in which weaker actors use unconventional means to undermine stronger opponents. This war is fought not just through direct confrontation but through subversion, disinformation, institutional corrosion, and psychological destabilization. It is waged in media, politics, law, finance, and culture. Its goal is not to defeat every nation militarily, but to erode their capacity to act, think, and believe cohesively.
The most effective weapons in an asymmetric war aren’t bombs or tanks—they’re narratives, fractures, and illusions. Asymmetric war is a contest for coherence. It is fought through disinformation, economic leverage, cultural division, and political sabotage. It is not declared. It is deployed. Think "Special Military Operation."
The Kremlin’s war against the West is ongoing and structural. It does not aim just for territory in Ukraine but for destabilization globally. It targets trust in democracy, belief in shared facts, and the legitimacy of institutions. It floods the system with noise until nothing rings true. It creates crises not to solve them, but to keep systems too disoriented to function. And Trump is a master of this form in the West.
Trump is not a symptom of this war—he is a weapon within it. His rise was not an accident of populism or a glitch in the electoral system. It was a strategic success in a long campaign to place destabilizing agents within the command centers of the West. His policies are erratic only if you assume his goal is good governance. Once you understand his function is disruption, the pattern is surgical.
And the great tragedy is not that he performs this role. It is that Western democracies have refused to recognize the war itself. They debate whether Trump is sincere or self-absorbed, whether his followers are deluded or deceived, whether his inconsistencies are signs of ignorance or ideology. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates. The divisions deepen. The institutions erode.
The media, the academies, and even national security communities have treated the Trump phenomenon as an anomaly in domestic politics rather than a node in foreign aggression. They have barely asked how we got here, let alone who benefits? They have focused instead on Trump's temperament, not his trajectory.
This blindness is not a sideshow—it is the battlefield. Because the asymmetric war depends on invisibility. It needs its tools to look like chaos, not conquest. It needs its generals to look like fools, not operatives. It needs the public to keep asking, "What is he doing?" instead of "Who is this for? And who does it help?"
Every denial, every rationalization, every delay in naming the asymmetric war for what it is makes it harder to win. Refusal becomes participation. Disbelief becomes complicity.
The conflict is real. Trump is not confused. And the West is still playing pretend.
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