The photomontage on the January 24 cover of the British weekly The Economist, showing Donald Trump riding shirtless on a polar bear, needed no caption. It unambiguously brought to mind a well-known image of Vladimir Putin riding bare-chested in the Siberian tundra that had been quickly parodied on social media to replace his mount with a brown bear. “I’ve never actually ridden a bear, but such photos exist,” the Russian leader joked on the American network NBC in March 2018. However, the connection between the two leaders goes far beyond cliché.
In substance as in style, the similarities in their governance are disturbing, beginning with a shared worldview divided into spheres of influence. What seemed unimaginable not so long ago has now become a reality: Trump did not hesitate to lay claim to the outright annexation of Greenland “for security reasons,” just as Putin had done in 2014 with Crimea. Both men display uninhibited imperialism, with no regard for yesterday’s closest allies. The territories they claim are theirs by right.
Europe, with its democratic principles, represents an obstacle for them and is therefore an adversary. Stunned, NATO allies realize that they must now contend not only with Russian, but also American, interference. All the European agencies created to try to ward off hostile foreign digital intrusions, such as Viginum, which has been under the authority of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security in France since 2021, have come to the same conclusion: American disinformation, on a massive scale, is infiltrating every area of public life, from elections to social debates. Both Russia and the United States are politically backing the far right in Europe and weaponizing the issue of migration.
The so-called “traditional values” of a Christian, White world, based on a shared obsession with anti-LGBT rhetoric, anti-diversity and virility, are flying under a double banner, signaling what Thomas Gomart described as an “ideological collusion” between Trump, 79, and Putin, 73, in his latest book, Qui contrôle qui ? Les nouveaux rapports de force mondiaux (“Who Controls Who? The New Global Power Relations”). The supposed risk of a “civilizational erasure” is part of a common vocabulary. Above all, the methods are identical.
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