How the US Empire won the Cold War and lost the world

the entire ideology of Putin’s regime is what America would be like after 20 years of uncontested Republican rule (w/ a Republican president and supermajority in Congress, states and courts). Ideologically Putin’s regime copypasted American Conservatism… You can see step by step a 20 year conservative supermajority evolving (or devolving) into authoritarian corporate state. (March 15, 2022)

This hypothesis was based on the way American post-Cold War policy changed the world, and in particular Russia, and the rule “what goes around comes around,” which I suspect might be the most important law of politics.

Post-Soviet Russia, as it is, is largely a product of American policy in two ways:

1. The US directly interfered in Russian politics, dictating Russia’s economic course, imposing neoliberal economic dogma during the most important period of choosing a strategic direction in 1993-1995. During this period, all the seeds that would grow in Russia in the next 30 years were sown.
2. The side effects of a cynical, aggressive and short-sighted, destructive imperialistic US foreign policy, that ended up turning a regime that literally dismantled the USSR, the archenemy of the United States, from the inside just so they could be allowed at the table of Western imperialists once more, into a closed, authoritarian, paranoid reactionary regime that verbally declared America to be the worst evil and Russia’s main enemy.

And, because of the rule “what goes around comes around,” neither of these are just Russia’s own problems. The world, as they say, is round: and by setting conditions for others, the United States ultimately set the conditions for itself. Directly, if we are talking about neoliberal economic policies, or indirectly, when it comes to foreign policy.

I. Neoliberal conditioning

Since the early 90s, American and Russian policies have been moving in sync, sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of neoliberal devolution: deindustrialization, dismantling of the welfare state, deregulation of markets, which untied the hands of monopolists and unleashed capital for unlimited accumulation and concentration—in other words, unlimited redistribution of wealth to the top, mainly due to the devastation of the middle class, which led to the formation of a super-rich oligarchic elite.

This synchronization was not accidental, but man-made: initiated and imposed on both Russians and Americans by the same people—the Bill Clinton administration in the process, which Robert Kuttner broke down in detail in his Was Putin Inevitable? in The American Prospect, and which Jeffrey Sachs then led, and now actively repents for publicly (How The West DESTROYED Russia on Breaking Points).

In a sense, they were honest brokers: Clinton imposed on post-Soviet Russia as “shock therapy” the same measures that in the US finished off the remnants of the industrial era and violated the last terms of the class truce established in the 1930s, known as the New Deal.

Neoliberalism is capitalist revanchism. Russia and the US in the 1990s were returned to their previous (pre-1917/1933, respectively) state of unlimited class war: capital unleashed against everyone.

And with the same results as those prior periods: deregulation of markets led to the financialization of the economy, which:

1. Inflated a financial bubble, the bursting of which would cripple the economy—a mechanism of self-destruction inherent to economic liberalism;
2. Plunged into depressive darkness yesterday’s industrial centers of the USSR and the USA, which have now become synonymous with crime and despair—fueling an anti-liberal political reaction, the wave of which raised Putin and Trump to power.

Like Trump, a Democrat supporter in the 1990s, Putin was a liberal in the 1990s, part of the Yeltsin regime, reciting in its public statements the same incantations about capitalism and democracy, free markets and free speech, property rights and human rights as the other Yeltsin liberals – to whom Putin would later, having come to power, contrast himself, blaming them for all of Russia’s problems and presenting himself as the solution – just as Trump would do later.

And, finally, both post-Soviet Russia and the US share the same system: a capitalist imperialist oligarchic republic. Post-1991 Russia is not only not challenging the US system, like the USSR did, but adopted it, copying the American model to a cargo-cult extent in some respects (like trying to model the Russian Constitution and federalism after the US Constitution and states), and increasingly following the American lead in international politics, as an aspiring imperialist power trying to carve out its own piece of the global imperialist pie. Even the configuration of oligarchic interests behind Russian foreign policy—Big Oil, big banks and the military-industrial complex—is becoming almost indistinguishable from the American one.

The only difference is that America in 1992 was much richer and had much stronger institutions than Russia, so it took longer for the neoliberal rust to eat away at the economic margin of safety and political guardrails in the US:

• In Russia market liberalization led to the financial collapse in 1998, when the ruble depreciated (and with it the purchasing power of Russians) by five times—10 years before the United States. In post-Soviet Russia, the 1990s alone were enough for liberals to squander all of whatever goodwill there was for democracy and liberalism in the beginning of the decade, and ruin the very notions of “liberalism” and “democracy.”
• In the US it took four terms of two Democratic presidents for liberalism to fully self-destruct (in my previous analysis 1992-2024: at the End of the Neoliberal Rope I wrote that no one could capture the energy of the liberal aspirations of the masses and leave them with the taste of ashes in their mouths like Clinton and Obama: both resoundingly won their first terms and led to a historical defeat in their first midterms—1994’s Conservative Revolution and 2010’s Tea Party).

And in both countries, the illiberal political hard turn to the right followed the financial economic collapse as a result of liberal economic reforms. What goes around comes around.

II. The problem of being a winner in the Cold War.

There is something to be said about the striking similarities and coincidences that made the USSR and the USA very similar in many real respects by the end of the Cold War. The logic of total confrontation really does lead to the transformation of irreconcilable opponents by mutual comprehensive pressure into mirror images of each other at a fundamental, structural level. The question of how much of the difference between the USSR and the USA, supposedly feeding the Cold War, disappeared in its course, remains underestimated and understudied, lost behind the superficial total opposition in every possible way, dictated by the narrative of “competition of systems.”

But at least one similarity cannot be avoided: regardless of who is considered the winner and who the loser, the end of the Cold War presented a challenge for both sides to adapt to a new reality from which the gigantic constitutive element of the confrontation had disappeared. And to survive such a victory is no easier than to survive a defeat: a force that becomes excessive after the previous threat has been removed becomes a threat itself. Excessive force, inadequate to the existing material threat, turns into a force of self-destruction.

And the history of the post-Cold War USA clearly indicates this: they failed to take the W and switch the economy and politics onto peaceful post-Cold War rails, continuing to function in the same configuration of the military-industrial-political-bureaucratic complex that was formed during the Cold War. And in order to manufacture an enemy that would justify the preservation of this machine, the Clinton administration, immediately after the Cold War, began to antagonize Yeltsin’s Russia, ignoring the fact that they were treating like the USSR a regime that the USSR literally destroyed from within, bringing the US victory in the Cold War without firing a single shot, just to become an ally and partner of the US.

The expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia and the abuse of “soft power”, which in 2003-2004 with the Rose and Orange revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine reached the level of a tangible threat to the new Russian regime, led to the fact that the real liberal freedoms that existed in post-Soviet Russia for the first decade (freedom to criticize the government, cultural freedom—the alleged lesbian duo t.A.T.u. represented Russia at Eurovision already under Putin, in 2003—six months before the first color revolution in the post-Soviet space, the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia), which were abused by the Americans for subversive activities, began to be inexorably curtailed and destroyed.

By its cynical utilizing of civil liberties as a channel for imperialist struggle and permanently embedding human rights as part of their regime change infrastructure under the loud rhetoric about freedom and democracy, the US strangled all the shoots of freedom and democracy almost everywhere outside the NATO countries, including in Russia.

But this irresponsible abuse of both military and soft power could not continue indefinitely. Here’s how the rule “what goes around comes around” works: having forced many regimes, starting with the Russian one, to become tougher, more authoritarian, more closed than initially, without a series of regime changes—be it color revolutions, a ground invasion, as in Iraq, or an air war, as in Libya, the US has finally achieved a return of the harm they directed at the world like a boomerang in 2023, when domestic protests against their policy in Palestine, where the US and Israel began an open genocide of the occupied population in front of the whole world, made them nervous and panic.

And suddenly the Western liberal pundits on CNN and MSNBC in 2023 sounded like the Kremlin propagandists on Russian TV in 2003-2013, only with the American flavor of Islamophobia: students are agents of foreign influence, enemy intelligence services are behind the protests, this is Hamas, this is Iran, they are paid, they want to overthrow the current government in the USA and create a world caliphate… Authorities began arresting and deporting people for participating in protests and making political statements, at the border they began to check the contents of gadgets and refuse entry into the country, the First Amendment of the Constitution was actually canceled by the State Department, which, on the basis of “national security”, began to censor and prosecute protected speech under the Constitution: and now the American Constitution turned out to be just a piece of paper, and real freedoms began to be determined not by the words written in it, but by the will of those who control police violence, the special services and the army.

The boomerang launched in the post-Soviet direction in 2003 returned 20 years later and landed in the United States. Until 2023, the ruling class of the United States was simply not familiar with the fear that they instill in dozens of regimes around the world with their “soft” and brute force. And as soon as they felt it, as soon as they imagined a color (green, Islamic) revolution already on the territory of the United States, it immediately turned out that the set of tools of democratic and liberal America is exactly the same as Putin’s Russia: censorship, surveillance, police violence, criminal prosecution in violation of its own laws not by mistake, but intentionally: intimidating with lawlessness and unpredictability of the consequences of persecution for political reasons.

Due to the slower rollout of neoliberalism’s effects in the US, and even slower blowback of American actions internationally, there was a long period of time when it seemed that Russia was going downhill, while the US somehow managed to avoid the worst-case scenario of complete devolution into oligarchic fascism. But Trump’s victory in 2024 completely sealed the deal: it was, after all, inevitability—only a question of time. No matter how far removed America was from the consequences of its actions by physical distance, wealth and military might, it could not avoid them forever.

Apparently, it is impossible to export racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, “family values” and think that it will be possible to preserve your liberal paradise in this obscurantist hell. “A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains,” and by 2025, the familiar experience for the parts of the world that were shaped by American hostility, greed and arrogance: impoverishment of the masses, inequality, oligarchy, deconstruction of the welfare state, cultural and political reaction, censorship, paranoia, closed borders, monopolization of the economy, feudalization of the Internet, transformation of digital infrastructure into an instrument of control and enslavement, a digital concentration camp—fully came to the United States.

And now, as there is no more room for doubt or hope, I will simply continue to follow the same logic: what to expect and what to worry about in the immediate future, lessons and warnings for American oligarchy and the state from recent Russian history.

#1. It won’t be that new

First of all, despite all the unusualness of what is happening in the US today for many Americans, nothing new, incomprehensible or fundamentally unpredictable is happening today – and everything indicates that the near future in the US, despite all its unpredictability at the moment, will not open any new branch of reality, and, ultimately, will unfold into a picture consisting of already familiar elements – in particular, familiar from recent Russian history.

#2. Familiar characters

Maybe from inside the bottle of American exceptionalism characters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos look unique—but for those familiar with the Russian oligarchs of the 90s, these are very recognizable and not at all unpredictable characters.

Take Elon Musk—a character who is absurd to the point of clowning, and yet casts a dark destructive shadow, behind which a bloody trail stretches—this is Boris Berezovsky.

A small man with a gigantic ego, at the same time pathetic and obsessed with megalomania, the image of a great businessman, the builder of whose business empire turned out to be pure fiction, a fabrication of the media, the owner of which Berezovsky soon became.

But in reality, he was hiding a business of blood and war: the Chechen war in the 1990s did not start because of him, but because of him it could not end for a very long time, since it provided cover for his business of stealing oil.

Elon Musk appeared in the frame with Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man 2”, Berezovsky produced the film “Oligarch”, for which he hired the popular Russian actor Vladimir Mashkov (by a curious coincidence – the same type as Downey Jr., although this happened 15 years earlier) to play the role of a genius, playboy, billionaire and philanthropist.

Berezovsky’s last trick, his last successful scheme was the promotion of a little-known functionary, Vladimir Putin, as Boris Yeltsin’s successor. Berezovsky was incredibly proud of his participation in the selection of Yeltsin’s successor, and in any society and any office he found himself in, he told everyone that he had installed the new president of Russia. If that doesn’t sound familiar enough, here’s what happened next: the scale of Berezovsky’s influence, inflated by his long tongue, turned out to be incompatible with the reality of his power, or with what Putin and his entourage would be prepared to accept – and Berezovsky’s ego prevented him from backing down in time. And within a year, the all-powerful oligarch had become an enemy of the state, a political émigré who tried unsuccessfully to fight Putin from abroad for another 10 years, losing the last of his influence and fortune until he was found suspiciously dead in a London hotel bathtub in 2013.

#3. The state beats money

The life and death of Boris Berezovsky is an important lesson that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Curtis Yarvin, their clientele, and those who fear them, are unaware of, because they fundamentally share the same delusion that drives them: that oligarchs, whose power is based on their proximity to the state, and, in fact, the ability to privatize parts of the state, can replace the state, becoming the new dukes and kings themselves. Musk—and what army?

Their ridiculous ideology, ultimately, reveals their sheltered existence, when they were given billions and trillions of dollars before they ever had to figure out that The Lord of the Rings, Hollywood sci-fi and comic book movies are not real life. They are given obscene amounts of resources yet they have not a clue how material reality functions, an understanding of which is acquired not from pop culture, but from history.

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and so does economical. Power of money is ultimately backed by the monopoly on violence, i.e. by the power of the state. People who have been allowed by the power of the state to accumulate hundreds of billions of dollars, providing them with the opportunity to rob people living with them in the same country and on the same planet, and protection from them, can fantasize that with this money they can now abolish the state or buy their own – but they will never be able to do this, because with the weakening of the state, the power of their money will weaken, and without the state there will be no memory of their capital – all that they will have is what they can physically grab and run with.

Yes, in the real world, parasitizing the state can make you an oligarch and a prospective future trillionaire, but a parasite that kills its host does not turn into it, but dies with it. Until a billionaire has the only monopoly that carries real power—a monopoly on violence, until he is the commander-in-chief of the only army on a separate sovereign territory, his power is just a set of numbers with a large number of zeros, and all the power that these numbers give is not enough to give a single soldier the order to shoot.

I don’t know what will happen to these jokers, but I can tell what happened to their Russian colleagues: people like Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky (he was the richest man in Russia, $20 billion in 2002 was crazy money) realized this too late—when those who can give orders have already sent after them those who have weapons and a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Putin ordered the police and secret services to seize the rival media empires of Berezovsky and Gusinsky, who were playing out the same political show as the “liberals” of the media corporation CNN against the “conservatives” of the media corporation Fox, and arrested Khodorkovsky and jailed him for 10 years.

#4. Broligarchs will not rewrite any social contracts

Of the fantasies that Thiel, Musk and Altman believe in, one can only understand one thing with certainty: they have no idea what they are aiming at. When Sam Altman says that “AI will rewrite the social contract of society”—it would serve him well to have the slightest idea what is this, and how they are concluded or changed first.

The devolution of capitalism into neo-feudalism is a real and probable threat, but it will not be the way Musk, Thiel or Zuckerberg can imagine. What they are really capable of is causing enormous damage, perhaps even causing endless wars, as Berezovsky did – with the state they can become very strong, but they cannot become so strong as to replace the state – because as soon as such a threat arises, it will provoke a defensive reaction of the state and a blow of the bureaucracy against the oligarchy. A war that will be won by those who command the armies.

There will be no “feudalism of the broligarchs”, as “Curtis Yarvin” predicts—this is only the fruit of their infantile, ignorant worldview and boundless ego. The oligarchs, unfortunately, will not disappear from this either—those who did not see the thresholds in time may end badly, like Berezovsky, or suffer temporarily, like Khodorkovsky, who served 10 years—but the oligarch class itself will only grow and strengthen from this.

At this point, the system reaches equilibrium: the state will be reduced and simplified, losing all “unnecessary” institutions, such as those that ensure democratic accountability, checks and balances, expertise, oversight, care and precaution, but not destroyed and will remain functional enough to allow maintaining huge fortunes.

That famous “small government” that is small only in terms of the extremely narrow scope of its expertise and capabilities, which will be basically reduced to the policing and coercion. But it might not be small in scale, depth and intrusiveness in policing at all.

And for sure it might look high-end effective, diamond DOGE effective for those, who already have billions and couldn’t care less about anybody else who doesn’t. But there’s a reason why all the states in history, start just like this: as a band of marauders, a chieftain and a retinue who established control and imposed taxes on the people living in a certain territory, developed all those unnecessary complicated institutions, making states increasingly more complicated and multifunctional—because a state, a system, that is reduced to pure force and coercion, becomes completely unreformable, while continuing to be completely destructive to society, to humanity in general.

A good outcome in such a case cannot come from within, by the system reforming itself—if it doesn’t have such capabilities, or, rather, was stripped of them by very greedy and very stupid people—they can only come from the outside of the system. In other words, the only way to achieve good outcomes in a sufficiently “efficient” by oligarchic standards system is to destroy it. And until the system is destroyed, it will continue to destroy society.

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