When Donald Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.
There was a brief, shining moment when Russia was a democracy. I visited there at the time. Starting with Mikhail Gorbachev and lasting about a decade, Russia embraced the ideals of the European Enlightenment, which itself was inspired by the North American colonists’ contact with Native American tribes who had been practicing democracy for millennia.
Then Vladimir Putin came along, began suing media outlets and large law firms into bankruptcy so his oligarch buddies could take them over, packed the courts and rigged the elections, and finally outlawed dissent, calling dissenters “the enemy within” and “domestic terrorists.”
Instead of power flowing from the people up, it began to flow from Putin down, turning the Russian democracy into an autocracy, functionally a dictatorship with the patina of democracy because they still have elections.
Putin, via an oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, gave a man named Paul Manafort $10 million in 2005 to install a Putin-friendly president (Viktor Yanukovych) in Ukraine as the first step to essentially turning that country into a vassal state, the way they’d already done with Belarus, Chechnya, Georgia, Transnistria, Syria, and Kazakhstan.
When, in 2014, the Ukrainian people threw out Yanukovych and voted for democracy, Putin invaded and seized Crimea, one of the most strategically important parts of the country (and where my daughter went to college), a preface to his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine proper.
With this was born the Putin Doctrine:
1. Russia’s policy decisions, both foreign and domestic, are dictated by Putin’s whims, not by the will of parliament (the Duma), or what’s best for the country or its people. He protects and enriches his family and friends while punishing his enemies.2. The rule of law internationally is irrelevant to the new Russian state; instead, “might makes right.” If another country has something you want, or you don’t like the way it’s being run, just invade, or send millions of bots and internet trolls via social media to disrupt its society and politics (see: Brexit and Trump 2016).
3. The world is now multipolar, with the “great powers” of Russia, China, and the United States having final say in political and military activity in their regions regardless of objections from local governments. Russia will control Eurasia and eventually all of Europe; China will control Asia and eventually Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and the US will be the ultimate power in the Americas, both North, South, and Central.
Manafort, meanwhile, came back to America and ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for “free” while shuttling insider political information to Russian intelligence to exploit with social media trolls and paid podcasters.
While there have been times in America’s past when we’ve flirted with this sort of worldview, it’s never been made official US policy. Even when we’ve attacked other resource-rich countries, we’ve at least provided an excuse grounded in “making the world safe and advancing democracy.”
That’s because the United States, both international and domestically, used to stand for the principles of the European Enlightenment. They included the idea that democracy was the natural state of humanity, ordained by what Thomas Jefferson called “Nature’s God”; that power would be diffused across three co-equal government branches; and that the public good would take precedence over the desires of the president’s or politicians’ friends.
The Putin doctrine — fully adopted by Trump and his lickspittles with his media lawsuits, the invasion of Venezuela, and his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) that identifies Democrats and anti-ICE protestors as potential domestic terrorists — tears all that down.
Trump’s adoption of the Putin Doctrine ignores our history of democracy at home and the promotion of democracy abroad, saying instead that whoever has the stronger military rules the region.
It abandons the “rules based order” that the United Nations proclaimed in the 1950s — which has prevented another world war for 81 years — and says instead that if you can successfully capture the head of a foreign state (no matter how good or bad he or she may be) you should simply go ahead and do it.
Adolf Hitler was following his own version of the Putin Doctrine when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, kicking off World War II. The oligarchs of the Old South were following it when their Confederate Army commenced the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. And now Trump has made America officially embrace it.
Our Founders never envisaged a future where an entire political party would be captured by a small group of oligarchs politically led by a demagogue, who would then abandon the ideals expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution.
As Dan Sisson and I document in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction, America’s Founders considered the demagogue part of the equation, but thought Congress and the Courts would protect the nation; they never imagined that six corrupt Supreme Court justices would rewrite the Constitution to give a president immunity for all crimes committed in the Oval Office after making legalized political bribery the official policy of the country.
As Christopher Armitage points out, about the only government institutions that are trying to preserve democracy in America now are the Blue states. And they have considerable power, because Trump can’t pardon state-based prosecutions even when they’re against officials in his own federal government.
Now that the Trump regime has seized almost complete control of the GOP, has its friends in charge of most of our major media and law firms, has corrupted our federal justice system, has deployed masked secret police across the country, and is challenging voters’ rights at multiple levels, America needs the Blue states to get more coordinated to push back against MAGA’s Putin-like behaviors in Red states.
Each of us who lives in a Blue state has an obligation to reach out to our state’s politicians and demand that they stand up to this corrupt, illegitimate regime. As Armitage notes, we must push them to:
“Prosecute federal officials who commit assault, kidnapping, or civil rights violations in your state. Build public revenue streams that don’t depend on federal funding. Expand state safety nets to catch the people federal cuts will drop. Demonstrate what good governance looks like.”
The differences between the quality of life in oligarch-run Red states and Democratic-run Blue states have become so conspicuous it’s amazing they’re not more widely known:
Republican/oligarch-controlled Red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:
America stands at a crossroads, as the Trump regime moves us closer every day to replacing our democracy altogether with a Russia-like federal autocracy.
There’s no Abraham Lincoln in charge of our government, so it falls to us and our Blue states to enforce the rule of law, stand up for democracy, and show the skeptics and “dark enlightenment” billionaire Tech Bros that the will of the people still matters here.
That doesn’t require waiting for the election this fall or in 2028; it just needs the governors and administrations of the Blue states to stand up against Trump’s embrace of the Putin Doctrine and preserve what’s left of our democratic traditions.
Ballotpedia has a good site where you can drill down to the contact information for your state’s elected officials to let them know you want them to push back hard.
Good luck: the fate and future of the American Experiment may well rest in your hands.