This is not about Russia orchestrating unrest in the United States. It isn't. There's no evidence for that, and pretending otherwise is a distraction. The uncomfortable truth is simpler: the United States is running into the domestic consequences of doctrines it normalized against others — most notably Russia — over time, at scale, and without an exit clause. This isn't a partisan failure. It's a system misreading itself.

In the 1990s, Russia absorbed a shock that few modern societies have walked away from intact. Between 1991 and 1998, Russian GDP contracted by roughly 40–45 percent, industrial output collapsed, and male life expectancy fell from about 64 to under 58 years. Tens of millions were pushed into poverty. Strategic state assets were privatized at fire-sale prices, producing an oligarchic layer that hollowed out sovereignty from the inside. Alongside this economic wreckage came a dense ecosystem of Western-funded NGOs, weaponized media initiatives, legal advocacy groups, "election monitors," and youth movements — financed openly through structures such as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, whose combined "democracy promotion" and civil-society budgets reached into the billions of dollars annually by the late 1990s.

None of this was covert. It was celebrated. Senior Western officials said out loud that these institutions were doing overtly what intelligence services once did quietly. The logic was straightforward: internal pressure was cheaper and cleaner than force. Destabilization was rebranded as reform, and most people in power convinced themselves that was the end of the story.