Mick Hartley

Are Trump's outrageous views on Ukraine influenced by Putin's favourite philosopher Alexander Dugin? According to Marc Bennetts in the Times, Dugin has quite a following on the Trumpian American Right:

Like other hardliners in Moscow, Alexander Dugin is delighted by President Trump’s rapprochement with Russia and Washington’s growing rift with Europe.

Dugin, 63, is an ultra-nationalist writer whose belief that Ukraine should not be a sovereign state has been repeated by President Putin. He has spent years reaching out to conservatives in the United States. His pro-Kremlin views on everything from the future of the global order to immigration are now finding echoes in the comments of senior US officials.

“Everything has changed now [in the United States]; the ideology has changed, and [Trump’s] ideology is remarkably in line with ours,” Dugin told Russian state media after JD Vance, the US vice- president, criticised European democracy in Munich last week.

Dugin’s books and essays have been translated into English and are increasingly popular among the American right. A recent publication criticised “the twin diseases of liberalism and western political modernity” and praised Trump’s war on the “strangling tentacles” of woke culture. Dugin has also suggested that Putin’s Russia could act as “a role model for the new Great America” that he says Trump is building….

One of his biggest admirers in the US is Jack Posobiec, an activist who was invited by the Pentagon to accompany Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, on his trip to Europe last week, according to The Washington Post. On Thursday, Posobiec said on social media that he was travelling in Ukraine with Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and had met President Zelensky in Kyiv.

Posobiec has advertised Dugin’s 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics, which was once reportedly required reading at the Russian general staff’s academy, to his followers on social media. The book called for Russia to restore its influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union through alliances and annexations and for the Kremlin’s special services to “support isolationist tendencies” in the United States.

In 2018 Dugin met Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and ideologue during his first presidency. Bannon said he had urged Dugin to agitate for a union between Russia and the West that would be founded on ultra-conservative values, according to Benjamin R Teitelbaum, an American author who interviewed both men for his book War for Eternity.

Dugin was introduced to a wider American audience last year by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who travelled to Moscow to interview him. Dugin used the interview to praise Putin and warn of a dystopian future that awaited the West unless radical steps were taken.

“For Russia’s propagandists, it provided a successful entry into American living rooms,” wrote Julia Davies, a US media analyst, in an article published by the Center for European Policy Analysis. “Russian propagandists have long dreamt of injecting their ideas and twisted rendition of history into the American mainstream.”

He's strongly behind the Islamic world in its battle against Israel, and espouses what has been called a particularly Russian form of classic fascism. And he has old links with Aleister Crowley and Nazi Satanism. Lovely fella.

Also:  “I think we should kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians], there can’t be any other talk.”