.
All of which is alarming enough. But what makes Dugin so suddenly significant is his growing influence in the west. It has long been alleged that he acts as a covert intermediary between Moscow and far-right groups in Europe, many of which are believed to receive funding from the Kremlin.
The purpose of operations like the
hacking of the US election has been to destabilise the Atlantic order generally, and America specifically. And on this great struggle, Dugin is positively millenarian: “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ.
Stand by for world war three, then? Not just yet, it seems. Dugin was one of the first public figures in Russia to spot that Trump was a potential ally, and that his prospective presidency might unite the previously hostile nations in a joint crusade to eradicate “perversion” and to carve up the planet between them.
In March 2016, he declared that the tweeting tycoon was the voice of “the real rightwing in America … which has found itself caught in the liberal globalist sect’s trap, obsessed with the new world order and focused on the interests of the world financial elite.” He ended his encomium thus: “In Trump we trust!”
So bonkers does all this sound that one is sorely tempted to tune out. But that would be a mistake. I seriously doubt that Trump has ploughed his way through Dugin’s 600-page
Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), supposedly a standard textbook for Russian army officers. But the man who will be his chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is certainly aware of its author, and has spoken with apparent approval of “what I call Eurasianism. We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin] is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”
Look further, and it is clear that the virus of Duginism is now fizzing away in the bloodstream of the American “alt-right” and the digital nexus so important to Trump’s victory. Richard B Spencer, the white nationalist president of the National Policy Institute, is notorious for his post-election outburst at a Washington conference last month: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Less well-known are his close links with Dugin, who he invited to a conference on “European identity” in Budapest in 2014 (the Russian was denied a visa), having already published Dugin’s writings online.