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How “the Blob” Gaslighted Itself Into Thinking That Russia Is on the Brink of Collapse

And how this is leading America’s Russia policy into dangerous places.

“Russia is finished,” cheerfully proclaimed The Atlantic on its May 2001 cover. The headline was wrong, but it proved to be really catchy. It has been echoed for over two decades by a host of experts, academics, and writers, with regular frequency. All the while, Russia, spiteful as ever, does not heed the experts’ opinions and does not seem to be collapsing anytime soon.

Instead, if anything is collapsing today, it is America’s ability to understand Russia, which was never great to begin with. The self-delusion of the foreign-policy “Blob,” coupled with the anti-intellectualism of the second Trump administration, joined by wartime cancel culture, and accompanied by dishonest sources—all created a cocktail of groupthink that posits that Russia is on the brink of collapse.

This cocktail is poison to Washington’s policy vis-à-vis Russia and Russians. It already led to wasteful spending, misguided diplomacy, and even attacks on free speech on US soil.

The sanctions did not manage to permanently reduce “the ruble to rubble,” as then-President Biden prematurely boasted. The combined might of the United States and its allies could not isolate “collapsing” Russia from the rest of the world. In the meantime, voices that could offer a more rational explanation of Russia to the public and policymakers are shunned. Even the most anti-Putin Russian intellectuals are canceled in American forums, while experts who try to argue for more nuance in America’s approach to Russia are branded as Kremlin stooges by the commentariat.

Some of “Russia is finished” fortune-telling is motivated by wishful thinking. There is no doubt that Russia, which has been waging a war of aggression on European soil since 2014, is easily painted as an eternal enemy of the West. Historian Yuri Slezkine even argued that the West still mainly defines itself through othering and fearing Russia. The Kremlin is also all too happy to present itself as a threat to what its propagandists call “the rotting West.”

But there is also no doubt that this wishful thinking is misled at best. Russia is nowhere close to collapsing. The “Russia is finished” articles, books, and video essays often point out genuine faults in the bizarre structure of Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s politics, rampant corruption, and inexorable population decline. They then make vague predictions about a return to the mayhem of the 1990s, a breakup of Russia along ethnic lines, total economic collapse, or a brewing popular uprising.

The temptation to mock the collapse clairvoyance is strong. One could easily list all the objective reasons why Russia isn’t collapsing any time soon. The country’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient, able to withstand sanctions of historic proportions. While the Russian military is stuck in the blood and mud in Ukraine, it has repeatedly shown an ability to adapt rather than collapse.

Russia’s diplomacy, which is traditionally seen in the West as not much more than incoherent gopnik yelps, is making headway in the Global South where Russian state–affiliated media are important players and student exchange programs are in full swing.

Inside Russia, civilians live relatively normal lives and are likely not thinking of rising up with pitchforks against the Kremlin. Many of them enjoy new Hollywood releases, chic cafés, and exhibitions. Yes, life goes on, even as Russian cities are bombed and the economy is slowing down.

There is a feedback loop here: Russia keeps chugging along and pundits keep churning out doomsayings. It is tempting, when producing propaganda, to paint your elected enemy as on the brink of an abyss, needing only a little push to tip over and disappear. This is what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco described in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” writing that propaganda presents an enemy as both “too strong and too weak.” For the foreign-policy Blob, there is nothing better than an eternal weak-strong enemy, in opposition to which the military-industrial complex and its associated content factories can eternally justify their own existence.

As Russians say ironically, “Whatever we try to engineer, we always end up making a Kalashnikov rifle.” A similar ailment befalls the American field of Russia studies, which is riddled with military and intelligence interest. Owing to a robust Cold War heritage, key Russia studies programs and projects in the US are either linked to the Department of Defense or downright funded by it.

A securitized view of Russia is bound to produce a lopsided analysis that ignores or misunderstands Russian society. It already led to some odd........

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