By clinging to American primacy through force and intimidation, Donald Trump is, ironically, undermining US global power. A saboteur trying to subvert US interests from the inside could hardly do better than what he’s accomplished through sheer incompetence.
Say what you want about Putin but he has been pretty successful in getting Russia back into the global game after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now he’s mostly doing this by dragging everyone else down so your average Russian is gaining exactly zilch from any of this, but when you look at the state of democracy all over the West you can’t say he reduced Russia’s international influence.
Back into the global game?
They collapsed from being a global superpower, to selling off their natural resources to enrich a couple of hundred of the worst people on the planet, and beating up their neighbors for oil money and mostly being ignored by most of the rest of the world unless there’s an Olympics or something. Putin didn’t cause all of that of course, but he had a huge amount to do with entrenching the systems of corruption that doomed any chance they would have had of recovering their superpower status as China or Europe did after major catastrophes happened to them.
And now, as of the last few years, they can’t even beat up their neighbors anymore. Sure, they still have a huge impact on the world stage in the form of destabilizing foreign democracies. You’re not wrong about that part. But that’s another example of my point: The whole shtick is just weakening everyone else. It won’t do anything at all to increase their military power, increase standards of living for either oligarchs or common people. It won’t help them win any of those regional wars. And it definitely won’t help them against any threat that comes from “outside the sphere” (bird flu or climate change or whatever). It’s just more Tanya Harding shit.