V. Russia Saw What We Refused to Learn
- john raymond
- Jul 3
- 2 min read
After 9/11, America launched a war that restructured its own understanding of power. But while we were busy bombing Baghdad and surveilling our citizens, someone else was watching.
Putin's Strategic Epiphany
Vladimir Putin saw what our people refused to: the United States had become epistemically fragile. Our ability to distinguish truth from fiction had been eroded by our own leaders.
The lies that led us into Iraq were not an anomaly—they were a signal. They demonstrated that the American public could be made to accept almost anything, provided it was wrapped in enough fear and patriotism.
This was not just propaganda. It was asymmetric war. And Putin understood that America had already lost the first battle by turning its gaze inward and shattering its own mirror. He saw a new kind of battlefield, one without tanks, one where belief itself was the terrain. And he began to prepare.
Psychological Operations, Not Military Ones
While America invested in aircraft carriers and drone fleets, Russia invested in information warfare. They revived Cold War-era disinformation strategies and modernized them for the age of social media. The internet became a weapon. So did cable news. So did memes.
Putin didn’t need to attack America directly. He only needed to deepen the cracks that had already formed. Our mistrust, our polarization, our hunger for spectacle—these were vulnerabilities he could exploit. America had no resistance left to asymmetric manipulation because it had never reckoned with its own susceptibility.
That reckoning should have come after the Iraq War. It never did.
Trump as the Ideal Trojan Horse
Donald Trump wasn’t chosen by the Kremlin because he believed in Putin’s vision. He was chosen because he didn’t believe in anything at all. He was deeply transactional, emotionally fragile, financially compromised, and morally bankrupt. In other words: perfectly suited for manipulation.
Trump didn’t just echo Russian propaganda. He refined it. It validated him. It helped him rise. And once in power, he governed with the same asymmetric tools the Kremlin had used to elevate him: lies, distraction, division, and fear.
The Bush-Trump Continuum
Trump was not an aberration. He was the logical continuation of Bush-era political degradation. The same public that had been taught to cheer for a war based on lies now cheered for a presidency based on grievance.
What Bush began with tanks and press conferences, Trump finished with tweets and rallies.
America wasn’t hacked. It was primed. And Putin simply pressed "enter."
We Didn't Get Smarter, So We Got Trump
The great irony is that a nation at war for decades learned nothing about the nature of war. We were too busy lying to ourselves. We never evolved our strategic thinking, so our enemies did it for us.
Putin alone didn’t give us Trump. Bush gave us Trump. We gave ourselves Trump. All Russia had to do was hold up the mirror and make sure we kept looking into it.
In the next section, we will explore how the very concept of "sides" in warfare collapses under the weight of asymmetric dynamics.
Comments