Dugin’s American Turn

by Alexander Markovics

Alexander Markovics argues that Alexander Dugin’s sudden admiration for America is not a betrayal of his anti-globalist philosophy but the natural outgrowth of his multipolar vision, which sees in Trumpist populism a potential ally in the struggle against thalassocratic liberalism.

Dugin — from “America-hater” to admirer of the United States?

The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has been called the most dangerous thinker in the world by The New York Times. This assessment stems from his Fourth Political Theory, which sets out to overcome liberalism. For this reason, he is considered by some observers to be anti-American — especially since he advocates a multipolar world with several power centers, rather than a globalist One World order led by the United States. All the more surprising, then, was his celebration of Trump’s election victory and his talk of a second American Revolution. How should Dugin’s recent statements be interpreted? Are we truly dealing with a “turn” in his thinking, or rather with a logical development of his intellectual framework?

Trump’s Populism and Multipolarity

Dugin already commented on Trump’s 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. The reason: at the time, Trump promised to drain the globalist swamp in Washington and end the role of the United States as world policeman. This also implied abandoning the Heartland Theory of British geographer and politician Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), which held that whoever controls the Heartland (Eastern Europe and Russia) controls the world island of Eurasia — and thus the world. Consequently, both British geopolitics and, after 1945, its American successor sought to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic power in Eurasia — whether the German Reich or the USSR — as well as any German-Russian alliance. In this way, the Anglo-Saxon, progressive sea powers aimed to defeat the conservative, continental land powers of Eurasia — a theme addressed by Carl Schmitt in Land and Sea (1942). This strategy enabled the brief American “end of history” from 1991 to 2022, during which the United States, as the sole world power, dominated the globe and, under the banner of globalization, spread the rainbow flag and “Western democracy” by fire and sword — culminating in the so-called Great Reset.

From One World to the Distributed Heartland

As part of his theory of a multipolar world, the Russian thinker developed the concept of the “distributed Heartland”: not only Russia-Eurasia, but also the USA, Europe, China, India, Africa, the Islamic world, and others each constitute their own Heartland (read: civilization), each of which has the right — analogous to the USA in the Americas — to repel foreign powers and live according to its own political idea. This was seen as a crime worthy of death in the eyes of globalists, and led to the assassination of his daughter Daria in 2022. Accordingly, land and sea are to be found within each Heartland: as the struggle of the land-bound populist Trump against fluid globalists demonstrates, land and sea are not only opposed in the conflict between Russia and the USA, but also within the USA and Russia themselves. Every person in the world now has the opportunity to follow the example of Putin and Trump and join the global land power in its struggle against the global sea power. Thus, the USA is not an “eternal enemy” of the peoples of the world but only a problem when under the control of globalists who align themselves with the thalassocracy.

The American Spirit in Dugin’s Eyes

In volume 13 of his philosophical magnum opus Noomakhia, Dugin turned in 2017 to the pragmatic Logos of the USA. “Everyone can be whatever they want — even Elvis Presley — so long as they can convince those around them.” This sentence, for Dugin, captures the American spirit, in which the subject plays a far lesser role than in Europe. While Dugin despises this form of thinking, he nonetheless appreciates its creative streak and its potential for fighting globalism — whether in the populist fairy tale The Wizard of Oz, the mysterious Twin Peaks by David Lynch, or in the populist movements of both the Left and Right in the United States. Patriots such as Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, along with left-wing populists like Jackson Hinkle and Caleb Maupin, value Dugin — and he values them, because they all share a common struggle: the liberation of their peoples from globalism. In this sense, there is no “pro-American turn” in Dugin’s thought, but only a logical consequence of his theory of the multipolar world — a theory that completes the Eurasianist worldview. We Germans and Europeans can take inspiration from this and, like the great statesman Otto von Bismarck, seek the eternal interests of our people rather than fixating on eternal enemy images.

(Translated from the German)

Order Alexander Dugin’s The Trump Revolution here.