The Eagle, the Bear, and the Signs of the Times

A Narrative for Understanding US and Russian Relations

As I wrote in my recent post on Formation for the Signs of Our Times, aspiring contemporary social Catholics will be strengthened by an ongoing intellectual formation that can be organized under ten theses. One of these concerned the need to cultivate a range of overlapping historical narratives to help us understand the signs of our times. One of today’s most respected historians who can help us understand our moment in history is Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College, who came into national prominence in recent years through her 2020 bestseller How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. I hope to say more about that work in a future post. Richardson’s ongoing Letters from an American substack has earned over two million followers, so I try to read it daily and recommend others do as well.

Although I realize that most Catholics would rather tend to the daily demands of life within the broader context of their faith lives, we all need to understand the reality of the historical drama of which we are a part, which—for Christians—is necessarily part of salvation history. I say this because I am convinced that current events will not turn out well unless we understand what is happening, and unless we join together in broad coalitions to somehow build a better future. I am quite convinced, moreover, that such a response follows from the Catholic faith, whether in the Old Testament passion for justice and concern for the most vulnerable, in the New Testament fulfillment of the Old through a love of God that includes the love of neighbor, or in the “integral and solidary humanism” and “social friendship” of modern Catholic Social Doctrine.

Below I include the bulk of Richardson’s recent post that gives a valuable sketch of the last several decades of Russian-American relations, including—most importantly—the asymmetric war that Vladimir Putin has been waging against the United States and the community of democratic nations for over 15 years, if not from the beginning of his rule, as Eastern European specialists have written for well over a decade.¹ This asymmetric war has impacted us most directly in the disinformation that permeates venues like Twitter/X, Facebook, and Right-Wing Radio and TV. Without question, this disinformation has radically transformed and polarized the country for the worst. Indeed, since the November election, Russian media has been delighting in their confidence that this war has been essentially won. Although I am not ready to accept that, Putin at least has reasonable grounds to think things have turned decisively in his favor, and this should be manifestly clear to everyone from recent events.

It is of vital importance that American Catholics understand the decisive role this asymmetric war has played in undermining democracies worldwide. This war has increasingly included a broader alliance of rogue states that Anne Applebaum has dubbed Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. The decisive role of this asymmetric war in undermining democracy must be clearly grasped by Catholics, especially because an influential set of what have come to be known as “postliberal” Catholics, have been railing against liberal democracy for decades, to the delight of aspiring oligarchs at home and abroad. At least some of these postliberals, moreover, have been facilitating (by attacking democracy)—and delighting in—the slide into a kind of autocracy that we see in the “illiberal democracy” of Victor Orbán’s Hungary. In such states—which are not much different that Putin’s Russia of a decade ago—elections take place, but the outcome is never in doubt. Such regimes give honors and favors, moreover, to the conservative Christians who help them gain power. I have previously written of how anti-democratic Catholics of the interwar years were part of the coalition that softened up democracy in France and Germany for Fascism. I hope to say much more about contemporary Catholic postliberalism in upcoming posts. To be clear, however, I assume they do not seek neo-fascism, but I think they are perhaps naively helping to foster it, whether by failing to understand Catholic Social Doctrine, or thinking they know better than what has been discerned by the magisterium through the twentieth century experience with fascism.

[Cover Image of a Recent Novel on US-Russian Tensions ]

In what follows, I provide excerpts from Richardson’s recent post, organized into sections, with some commentary.

The Postwar Years: Churchill’s Speech on the Iron Curtain

In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.

“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.

President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.

The Cold War and The Apparent Victory of the West

President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.

The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”

When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.

Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.

I will just add that Fukuyama’s position was far more nuanced than this typical summary of it, and he has continued to reflect on history and global affairs through a series of books that have shaped the conversation among scholars and political leaders.

The Rise of a Revanchist Russia under Putin

But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.

Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.

This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

The Early Expansion into Ukraine: Some Familiar Names

In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.

To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.

The Connections to the 2026 Trump Campaign

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.

Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.

According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

Recent Events in Terms of Russia’s Asymmetric War

That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”

In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.

Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.

Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”

Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.

The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”

Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”

In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.

Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.

This couldn’t be a more dramatic situation from just months ago, when the American economy was the envy of the world, and a financial reckoning for Russia’s war economy was possible as soon as 2025. NATO, moreover, was strong and formidable, despite the boon to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by the 5 month delay in supplies by the Republican congress at Trump’s command.

Implications of a United States Aligned with Russia and Against Democracy

In a nationally televised speech today, France president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.

“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

[Financial Times]

The end result of Putin’s asymmetric war could be the most rapid shifts in geopolitical power in history, with corresponding impact in the realms of business, finance, and domestic affairs unless something changes our current trajectory. This is where a new era of social Catholicism could be a vital part of a broad coalition to build a just, peaceful, and sustainable world as we were in the postwar era. Whether something like that could emerge in a Church that has long forgotten our social tradition, and has virtually no institutional support for it, would seem highly unlikely from a human perspective. Even in the midst of Lent, however, we remain an Easter people, trusting in God, and hoping for his powerful help.

1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/putins-asymmetrical-war-on-the-west/