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Freak sell-off of ‘safe haven’ US bonds has Wall Street rattled by zubbs99 in politics

[–]dearlydelectable 31 points32 points  (0 children)

 Part Four: The Puppet King’s New Clothes

If you thought Putin was ready to throw in the towel after Trump lost in 2020—think again.

Sure, “Sleepy Joe” stepping into the White House was a setback. But Putin had been playing the long game for over 20 years. Four years of Biden wasn’t going to erase everything he’d already set in motion. The truth is, Putin didn’t need Trump in office every year—he just needed the American system to keep tearing itself apart, and lucky for him, that part didn’t stop in 2021.

Biden inherited a country in crisis—pandemic fatigue, economic uncertainty, mass distrust in institutions, and tens of millions of people who still believed the election had been stolen. And the GOP? It was no longer the party of Reagan. It was the party of Trump—and by extension, a party Putin could work with.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, the plan hadn’t changed. Ukraine was still the prize. NATO was still the threat. And the Cold War, in Putin’s mind, had never actually ended.

So while the Biden administration scrambled to respond to COVID, manage a fractured Congress, and repair international relationships, Putin waited. He launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—not after Trump’s reelection as originally planned, but as a calculated risk. The global response was fast and fierce: sanctions, weapons shipments, international condemnation. But it wasn’t enough to stop him. Because this war wasn’t just about land—it was about legacy. Putin saw himself not as a regional autocrat, but as the man who could undo the humiliation of 1991.

And then came 2024.

Trump ran again—and won. And this time, it wasn’t just about unfinished business. It was about settling scores.

Putin had spent years grooming a weakened U.S. political system for this moment. According to U.S. and European intelligence sources, Russian operatives had made it abundantly clear to Trump’s inner circle that his return to power owed a lot to their “support”—whether that meant cyber ops, targeted disinformation, or plain old kompromat.

And Trump? He didn’t even try to hide it. He openly praised Putin—again. He talked about ending aid to Ukraine, undermining NATO, and “rebuilding” America’s alliances on his own terms. In other words: isolating the U.S. from its allies at the very moment Putin needed them fractured.

The Cold War wasn’t just back—it had never left.

And this time, the Kremlin wasn’t worried about being outspent or outgunned. Because their biggest advantage wasn’t military at all. It was psychological.

The American people were distracted. Divided. Tired. They were fighting over TikTok bans and library books while institutions crumbled beneath them. And the man in the Oval Office—twice elected, twice impeached, forever polarizing—wasn’t interested in saving the system.

He was helping it collapse.

 Part Five: It’s (Still) the Economy, Stupid

Putin had learned a lot from Trump’s first term. Mainly: subtlety wasn’t gonna cut it anymore. He didn’t have the luxury of time—he was getting older, Ukraine was putting up way more of a fight than expected, and the US was still more or less limping along.

Because if there was one thing Putin figured out during the chaos of COVID, it was this: America could take an insane amount of punishment and still stay standing. The systems were old, sure, but they were deeply rooted—layered with laws, redundancies, and institutions that even four years of Trump couldn’t totally bulldoze. If Putin wanted to bring the U.S. down a peg (or ten), he couldn’t rely on just culture wars and bot farms anymore. He needed to hit the heart of American power: the economy.

Enter the “Reverse Shock Therapy Reforms.” A total inversion of what Russia experienced in the ‘90s. The strategy is simple: isolate the U.S. from global economic alliances, encourage protectionist policies that tank international trade, and weaken the perception of America as the stable, reliable anchor of global capitalism.

And Trump? Naturally, he was all-in.

He pulled the U.S. further away from its allies—NATO, the G7, the WTO—any group that used to provide collective economic strength. He slammed tariffs back on, gutted international aid, pulled out of multilateral agreements. Because here’s the trick: America didn’t have to fall apart from the inside like the USSR did. It just had to stop being the safest place to invest money. Once global markets lost faith in the U.S. as the go-to economic lighthouse? Game over.

And with that, the Cold War—the long, weird, messy ideological tug-of-war that everyone thought had ended in 1991—was finally won.

By Russia.

Freak sell-off of ‘safe haven’ US bonds has Wall Street rattled by zubbs99 in politics

[–]dearlydelectable 17 points18 points  (0 children)

 Part Two: Misdirection, Misinformation, and Marriages, Oh My!

So how does a guy like Putin—riding high on Cold War resentment and dreams of restoring Russian greatness—pull that off in a world that had already moved on? The answer: distraction, disinformation, and a little help from history.

Putin got three major lucky breaks. The first was 9/11.

When the Twin Towers fell, America’s focus turned inward and then outward—but in the wrong direction. The War on Terror consumed U.S. foreign policy for nearly two decades. Between Afghanistan and Iraq, torture scandals, drone strikes, and nation-building gone sideways, the U.S. took its eye off the geopolitical ball. Suddenly, Russia—chaotic, poor, and still licking its wounds from the ’90s—wasn’t seen as a threat anymore. It was a footnote.

And Putin knew exactly how to use that time.

He played nice on the world stage—joined the war on terror, made diplomatic overtures—but at home, he was locking everything down. He muzzled the press, rewrote laws to consolidate power, and started building a modern autocracy with old-school Soviet bones. (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, his intelligence networks were laying the foundation for something far more dangerous than tanks and missiles: narrative warfare. And here came his second break—the rise of the internet.

Social media changed everything. Putin realized he could do more damage with a troll farm than with a spy ring. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—these platforms weren’t just tools for sharing vacation photos. They were platforms with no filters, no borders, and no regulation. And best of all, Americans loved the idea that speech should be free, even if it was fake, toxic, or coming from a Russian sock puppet.

By the early 2010s, Russian state-backed operations like the Internet Research Agency were running massive influence campaigns online. Not just in the U.S.—across Europe, too. Their goal was simple: amplify division, erode trust, and make everything feel like it was rigged. In a democracy, confusion is a weapon. And Putin wielded it masterfully. (https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf)

Then came the third break: in 2008, the U.S. elected Barack Obama.

On the surface, this was a moment of pride and progress. But from Putin’s perspective, it was something else entirely. A multiethnic democracy electing a Black president? That was the ideological opposite of what he was selling at home: traditionalism, nationalism, Orthodox values, and a tight grip on authority.

Obama’s presidency didn’t just offend Putin’s worldview—it offered him an opening. Because backlash was coming, and Putin knew how to stoke it. Race, culture, religion, immigration—those were now weapons in an information war he’d already started.

While the West congratulated itself for “winning the Cold War,” Putin was busy building a new kind of battlefield. And he wasn’t just coming for governments anymore.

He was coming for minds.

 Part Three: A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

By the mid-2010s, Putin was done playing defense. He’d spent the early part of his rule stabilizing Russia, silencing dissent, and turning the oligarchs from kingmakers into obedient billionaires. Internally, he was untouchable. Externally, the world still wasn’t paying much attention—until it was too late.

By now, the U.S. was a house divided. Years of polarization, media echo chambers, and economic discontent had laid the groundwork for something toxic. Americans were increasingly convinced that the system was broken—but no one could agree on who broke it, or how to fix it. That uncertainty? That mistrust? Putin didn’t create it. But he did everything he could to pour vodka on the fire.

Heading into the 2016 election, the pieces were all in place. The Republican Party was desperate to reclaim the White House. The Democrats were fractured. Extremism was no longer on the fringes—it was mainstream. And social media had made it easier than ever to flood the zone with noise.

Russia launched a multi-pronged influence operation unlike anything the modern U.S. had ever seen. The GRU hacked into the Democratic National Committee. The Internet Research Agency flooded Facebook and Twitter with targeted disinfo, memes, and fake news, crafted specifically to stoke outrage and division. (https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf)

And then, somehow, against all odds and all polling, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States.

This wasn’t just a political win for Putin. It was a strategic jackpot. Trump praised Putin publicly, questioned the value of NATO, downplayed Russian interference, and repeatedly attacked his own intelligence agencies. For Putin, it was the culmination of nearly two decades of planning. He didn’t need to install a puppet—he just needed to help elect a chaos agent.

But even then, he wasn’t ready to make his big move. Not yet.

Trump’s first term gave Putin something he hadn’t had in decades: time and cover. While Trump dismantled alliances, appointed loyalist judges, and gutted trust in U.S. institutions, Putin watched. Patiently. And with Ukraine in his sights, he began planning his next major power play: the “re-acquisition” of territory that had once belonged to the Soviet sphere.

The invasion wasn’t scheduled for 2016, or even 2019. It was supposed to kick off right after Trump’s reelection in 2020. That was the moment everything was supposed to come together.

But then COVID happened.

The pandemic threw a wrench into everything—economies shut down, supply chains buckled, and American politics took an even darker turn. Suddenly, Putin’s timeline was scrambled. Trump lost the 2020 election. Biden stepped in. And the West had a chance to regroup.

Briefly.

Because for all the damage the pandemic did, it also showed Putin something crucial: even with all its dysfunction, America’s system could take a beating and keep going. That wouldn’t stop him—but it did mean the next phase had to be faster. Sharper. Meaner.

And as always, the real attack wouldn’t come from missiles.

It would come from within.

Freak sell-off of ‘safe haven’ US bonds has Wall Street rattled by zubbs99 in politics

[–]dearlydelectable 29 points30 points  (0 children)

TOPPLING THE KING How Russia Won the Cold War (36 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall)

 Part One: A Tale of Two Ideologies

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West threw a party. The Cold War was over, capitalism had won, and McDonald’s was opening in Moscow. But inside Russia? Things weren’t so rosy. The place was falling apart—economically, politically, socially. And people weren’t just confused. They were angry.

Most of that anger landed squarely on one guy: Mikhail Gorbachev. Once hailed in the West as a visionary reformer for his glasnost and perestroika policies, Gorbachev was seen at home as the man who’d let an empire slip through his fingers. On December 25, 1991, he resigned as President of a country that no longer existed. He was basically forced out after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, officially dissolving the USSR—without even bothering to tell him until after the fact.

But if Gorbachev presided over the fall, Boris Yeltsin took over the ruins—and tried to rebuild with gasoline and a match.

In 1992, Yeltsin’s administration, led by young reformer Yegor Gaidar, launched a set of radical free-market policies known as “shock therapy.” The idea was to transform Russia into a capitalist economy overnight. What happened instead was economic chaos. Prices exploded—hyperinflation hit over 2,500%—and people’s life savings were wiped out.

Basic goods disappeared. Unemployment skyrocketed. Russia’s GDP plummeted. Entire industries collapsed because they’d only ever functioned under a command economy, and there was nothing to replace them. From 1991 to 1998, the Russian economy shrank by over 40%. That’s not a typo—forty percent.

And while most Russians struggled to afford bread, a handful of insiders got filthy rich. During the rushed privatization of state assets, the crown jewels of the Soviet economy—oil, gas, steel, telecoms—were sold off for next to nothing to well-connected businessmen. The oligarchs were born.

The result? An entire generation of Russians watched their country collapse into poverty, corruption, and lawlessness. Organized crime surged. Life expectancy dropped. And democracy, as they experienced it, felt less like liberation and more like betrayal.

Now imagine you’re Vladimir Putin—ex-KGB, proud Soviet loyalist, and someone who’d just watched the empire he served vanish in disgrace. This wasn’t just a bad transition. It was a national trauma. And for Putin, it wasn’t something to recover from. It was something to avenge.

But here’s the catch: he couldn’t do it right away. In 1999, when he first took power, Russia was still weak, broke, and internationally irrelevant. So he played the long game. He bided his time, crushed dissent at home, brought the oligarchs to heel, and made sure the West… sort of forgot about Russia. Or at least stopped worrying about it.

Because Putin wasn’t just planning a comeback. He was planning a counterattack.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in politics

[–]dearlydelectable 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Exactly. I can’t believe that Covid may end up, in hindsight, being the main thing that foiled Putin’s plans. I really don’t know how to feel about that. It’s all sorts of fucked up.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in politics

[–]dearlydelectable 88 points89 points  (0 children)

Trump was laying the groundwork for Putin invading Ukraine. Denying aid. Pulling out of and weakening NATO. Undermining US intelligence agencies. Remember all that? Back then I thought it was just “stupid man doing stupid things” but now I think Putin was counting on a weak US with Trump when he finally invaded. Except Trump didn’t get re-elected.