Item — HN Reader

Dugin is bullshit. No one worth their mettle in the IR space cares about it. It's like saying the DoD's policy is based on Zeihan.

Eg. the RAND Corporation (the goto think tank for the US Govt) - "while Dugin is reported to have connections and ties with Russian officials, including the Russian military leadership, and although Russian leaders may cite his work or ideas, it does not appear that he is directly influential in Russian policymaking. He is perhaps best thought of as an extremist provocateur with some limited and peripheral impact than as an influential analyst with a direct impact on policy" (pg 81) [0]

[0] - https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

1 comments

Eh, that rand report was back in 2017 and to say that Dugin hasn't directly influenced domestic / international strategy is a bit of a naive take.

Dugin might be bullshit, but many of the things he outlined in his book have been taken to heart by Russian leadership. You can directly observe these fingerprints all over Russian Information Operations (IO).

You say that people in the IR (I assume international relations) space don't care about it, yet if you look at the book in the context of influencing their intelligence and military strategy, it very closely aligns with the approach they have taken. I assume the IR community you are referring to also were the ones yelling that Russia wouldn't re-invade Ukraine because they were dependent on oil money from the EU.

Dugin doesn't really speak to "geopolitics" in general though. He mostly writes nationalist fanfic dressed up as policy or history. He might be an ok source for informing Kremlinology efforts but his ideas aren't exactly useful for predicting anything other than what Russia might do next, which is kind of necessary for a general theory of geopolitics.

Within the context of the Ukraine conflict some elements do come up, but this is in general the "Near Abroad" doctrine - which has been a very public Russian policy since the 90s, as was seen with Russian handling of Chechnya, Abkhazia, the Tajik Civil War, and the first Azeri-Armenian War.

Duginphilia has always been much more of an ethnic Russian far-right phenomenon (so Chechen militias raised by Kadyrov and the Buryat+Sakha conscripts in the Z trucks that are committing war crimes are excluded), which unsurprisingly were the same groups thaat have been fighting in Donbas from 2014-22.

Yet bigger picture, Dugin's book viewed the PRC as an existential threat to Russia (unsurprising due to the multiple near wars the USSR and PRC almost fought in the 60s and 70s). If Dugin had any credence, Putin wouldn't have signed the Russia-China Strategic Partnership in 2013-14, which has been upgraded to a full fledged economic and political alliance in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion; Putin+Medvedev wouldn't have caused a standoff with the JSDF from 2011-2013 when Cruise Missles were deployed on the Kuril Islands and the JSDF and VVF were scrambling with each other; nor would Putin have allowed BRI investments in Central Asia (Russia's Near Abroad). All these policies are direct contradictions to Dugin's core thesis (China bad. Make Japan our friend to make an axis against China threatening our Near Abroad)

> I assume the IR community you are referring to also were the ones yelling that Russia wouldn't re-invade Ukraine because they were dependent on oil money from the EU.

Which IR community are you talking about? People affiliated to the main American think tanks (eg. Atlantic Council [0] and CSIS [1]) were warning about an escalation to the Russian-Ukraine conflict months before the 2022 Invasion began. If you are talking about "Geopolitics Commentators" on CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox, Youtube, etc they're out of the loop. For IR Policy, the DoD, DHS, Senate+House subcommittees would go straight to the think tanks to be briefed (and have a backchannel to initiate diplomacy).

[0] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/russias-dangerous-mili...

[1] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-possible-invasion-ukra...