The merciless blow of the US and Israel against the obscurantist regime of the ayatollahs, which for decades has terrorized not only the people of Iran, but also the entire Middle East region, debunked the Russian geopolitical myth of the "three empires".
With the political rise of President Trump, which began in 2015, Russian propaganda began to intensively attribute to the "Trump" doctrine the meaning, goals and ideology that are hidden in the geopolitical fantasy composed by the Kremlin ideologist - the famous apologist of fascism and neo-Bolshevism - Alexander Dugin. The quintessence of his views, which we have extensively examined elsewhere, boils down to the following: the world must be rebuilt into civilizational blocs; Russia is called to lead the Eurasian empire; the liberal West is the main opponent; Orthodoxy is a political tool for mobilization and establishment of Russian imperial dominance in Eurasia.
On this basis, the entire Russian geopolitical thought, which is also uncritically encountered in our country, has for years attributed to the “Trump“ doctrine three geopolitical ideas that, of course, have nothing to do with it. The first is that the US could no longer maintain its global leadership for economic reasons, the basis of which was the imaginary battle between industrial and financial capital. Because of this, says Duginism, Trump would revive the old American isolationism and reduce the global interests of the US to only the Western Hemisphere.
The second idea attributed to the “Trump“ doctrine, according to Duginism, is that America would “abandon Europe“, because it was part of "continental power" of neo-Eurasianism, which by definition belonged to the "Russian world", and in its Asia-Pacific dimension - to China.
From here, Duginism derives the third false idea - that with Trump the Kremlin and the Celestial Empire would "come to an understanding" and formalize a new geopolitical nomos, constructed around the "three empires" - the USA, Russia and China, which would divide the world into spheres of influence and each of them would not interfere in the agreed spheres of the others. The latter idea in particular is widely popular in the Sofia settlement system and is circulated with the characteristic dose of mystery and supposed "informedness" by several dozen prominent representatives of the old State Security networks: "there is a new division of a napkin between Putin and Trump and Bulgaria is again in the Russian sphere of influence; Putin will come - think of him“.
I have thoroughly refuted all these Duginist speculations at the conceptual level in the monograph “The “Trump“ Doctrine; against neoliberal globalism“ and on the pages of “Trud news“. But now the time has come for them to be refuted and quite empirically - by the real international policy of US President Donald Trump.
The initial Kremlin enthusiasm with which the thesis about “our man“, “agent Krasnov“ and the like was instilled in the gullible opponents and enemies of Trump, briefly gave them a feeling of victory. The phraseology of the new US national security concept and Trump's actions in the Western Hemisphere were interpreted, as they saw fit - Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba. However, as expected, Donald Trump and his administration refuted all this with their policy in the Middle East.
The achievement of the peace agreement on Gaza, under the auspices of the US and with the real isolation of Russia and China, was the first step that signaled that US interests had no intention of being confined within the Western Hemisphere. The American-Israeli strike, orchestrated by Donald Trump, against Iran - a strategic ally of Russia, which arms it for its aggression against Ukraine and is located just a stone's throw across the Caspian Sea, and also of China - categorically debunked the entire phantasmagoria of the “three empires“ and the supposed division of spheres of influence.
The strike was not just a military action, but a demonstration of high-tech logistics, intelligence capacity, total superiority in cyber and airspace, diplomatic preparation and allied mobilization. A similar This type of operation requires not only aircraft carriers and missiles, but a global infrastructure - a network of bases, access agreements, compatible command systems and political influence to contain the consequences. Only one country in the world has such an integrated toolkit on a global scale, and that, beyond any doubt, is the United States.
From a conceptual point of view, the problem with the theory of the “three empires“ is that it assumes a relative equality between the three centers of power - Washington, Moscow and Beijing. However, reality shows a deep structural asymmetry. The United States remains the only country that has the military-political resources for global hegemony - ultramodern weapons, a network of alliances on several continents, military bases around the world, an ocean-going fleet and the ability to intervene quickly far from its own borders. This is a qualitatively different level of power, not just quantitative superiority - a power that neither Russia nor China possess.
China is an economic giant, but its military capacity is concentrated mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, while its influence in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East is primarily economic. Russia, for its part, has significant military potential, including a nuclear arsenal, but the real ù ability for sustainable global projection of power is extremely limited. Its influence is regional - in the post-Soviet space and partly - in the Middle East, from where the Donald Trump administration is systematically pushing it out.
The blow against the terrorist regime in Tehran is not limited to the question of who has the military capacity to carry it out. Even more important is who can manage the consequences. The operation was followed by diplomatic shuttles, emergency meetings of international institutions, coordination with allies in Europe and Asia. This is a characteristic of the global power of the United States - the ability not just to use force, but to manage the complex network of reactions, alliances and economic effects that follow.
It is no coincidence that Russia and China reacted sharply, but at the level of political phraseology - and that's it. Neither Moscow nor Beijing is willing or able to create an alternative military balance in the region. This is not a sign of an equal “imperial triad“, but of an asymmetrical structure of the global distribution of forces.
Dugin's concept implies a division of the world into rigid spheres of influence. But today's world does not function and will not function like the “napkin“ from Yalta. The American global presence is dispersed, networked and sophisticated. The United States alone possesses the three main components that turn a powerful state into a global hegemon: military power, economic resources and a comprehensive, perceptible to the rest of the world socio-cultural message.
Russian influence, where it exists, is geographically limited and in its essence - retrograde, autocratic and anti-modern. Chinese influence is large-scale economically, but militarily and culturally still regional in its operational depth and autocratic as a system. Simply put, the world does not want to lead a Russian or Chinese way of life, but an American one.
The strike on Iran showed that at a critical moment, it is the United States that can change the strategic reality of an entire geopolitically key region in a matter of hours. This does not mean that the world has become unipolar again and governed by a supranational system of institutions in the classical sense of the 1990s. The world is multipolar, but not because of the supposed “three empires”, but because the sovereign principle is coming to the fore, pushing out the dominance of unelected supranational bureaucracies. But this multipolar world is under the unquestioned global leadership of the United States. This is the “Trump” doctrine in action.