For many months we have seemingly observed a rerun of the same soap opera: The Trump administration professes to be tired of the war in Ukraine and indicates a willingness to accept a “peace plan” which heavily favors Russia. The media picks up this thread and insinuates either that Trump is a Russian asset or at least shares an ultra-rightwing ideological basis with the Kremlin. Then the peace plan does not really happen because the US administration really wants to draw a hard line, secure what’s left of Ukraine and wait for the Russian economy to collapse so that Moscow will ultimately sell its conquered Ukrainian territories back to Kiew down the line. Kind of a repetition of the Cold War strategy. Before such “peace talks” we actually see reports about new US weapon deliveries to Ukraine and allowing long range missile attacks deep into Russian territory.
While the media still cries “treason” over some public statements from the Trump admin, the Euopean countries annouce they want to take matters into their own hands and keep funding the Ukrainian war effort and/or come up with a different peace plan that favors Ukraine. Every professional already knows full well the US can’t defend the whole word at the same time and thus the US will have to focus on China while the EU focuses on Russia. It’s really a division of tasks, not some fundamental disagreement in the West.
This theatrical series of events happens every few months. The Russians don’t go for a peace plan because they have committed to a war economy from which they cannot really go back. The only way left is forward: Keep pushing and wait for the corrdinated attack together with China, North Korea and some other players.
Things have not been going well for the Russian regime: Wasting vast numbers of soldiers and weapon systems in the largest land war in Europe since WWII with little to show for it. Putin and whatever the actual leadership structure is (comprised of former Leningrad 5th directorate KGB staff) make war decisions based on calculations, not ideological flimflam or long-winded historical arguments. Russia had terrible demographics and lacked the arms-related high-tech capabilities which Ukraine possessed. The clock was ticking because the US was continuously pulling ahead and at some point the race would have been forever lost. Thus, the more than obvious step would be to plan and conduct a blitzkrieg against Ukraine; grab the territory as quickly as possible, acquire 40 million people to fix the Russian demographics and add the key industrial sectors to facilitate military production. Brainwash the Ukrainians, recruit their young men as soldiers and prepare the next round of attacks against the Baltics, Poland and Germany. Then brainwash those people, increase military production and go after the next targets.
It didn’t need a military-strategic genius to figure this out in advance. Same with the intelligence preparations necessary: Recruit assets among Europe’s political parties and corporations, bribe through cheap oil and gas and build acceptance in the population through RT, Sputnik, Youtube and Telegram channels.
It’s likely the invasion of Ukraine had been scheduled for 2020, but the pandemic got in the way as well as delays due to incompetence and corruption. Right before February of 2022 all the pieces seemed in play. In a blitzkrieg Ukraine would be taken over quickly. The Europeans and Americans would protest, initiate some more sanctions at best and ultimately accept the new situation.
The usual menu of excuses could have been deployed by NATO countries: We tried to deescalate. Stronger deterrence may have been seen as a threat by Russia. The main point was to avoid WWIII. We were a bit naïve or overly optimistic.
But things went sideways for Russia. The invasion got stuck. Ukrainians had been trained by Canada and other countries beforehand. New portable weapons turned Russian tanks into scrap. Politicians in the NATO sphere were adamant.
Things didn’t go as planned for Russia. How did they miscalculate so badly despite their considerable intelligence expertise? The West likes to play dumb and opportunistic. But it is based on 1500 years of imperialistic experience plus the older Roman heritage.
Did the leadership of the West anticipate the invasion of Ukraine and give Russia a false sense of security? Had the Russians been led to believe they had enough powerful friends in the West?
A thought experiment in strategic deception
Claim (soft form): U.S. services (or a tight interagency group) cultivated Donald Trump for years as a perception asset to give Moscow a false sense of political opportunity, thereby encouraging Russian strategic misallocation (similar to how London encouraged German miscalculations pre-1939).
Claim (hard form): He functioned as a double agent—someone under U.S. direction whose overt signals of affinity for Russia were designed to be believed by Russia and to shape Kremlin choices.
The difference matters. A “perception asset” who is unwittingly useful to your deception is common in history. A double agent is a controlled adversary agent working for you.
What “double agent” actually means (and why that’s a high bar)
In counterintelligence, a double agent is first recruited and trained normally. Then he is instructed to get himself outright recruited by enemy intelligence services or at least provide information to the enemy which can be false, true or a mix of both.
Another typical scenario is when you catch an enemy agent and you give him the option of joining your side. You “turn” him against his employer.
Classic WWII Britain ran the Double-Cross System: captured or turned German agents radioed to the Abwehr under MI5/MI6 supervision; London edited the traffic to mislead Berlin (e.g., Operation Fortitude before D-Day). That is control in the strictest sense: custody, communications discipline, case officers, deception plans coordinated with operations.
Britain had centralized wartime control of the press, censors, and ports; it could harmonize lies with movements. The Double-Cross agents were literally in custody; their radios were in UK attics, keyed and scheduled by case officers. Deception was tightly synchronized to military operations (e.g., phantom armies in Kent while the real one massed in the West). The audience (German intelligence) depended on those channels and had weak in-theater truth checks until it was too late.
Applying that to a U.S. politician or media figure would require:
- Tasking and secure communications between the individual and U.S. handlers.
- Compartmented legal cover (presidential findings, DOJ sign-offs) because you would be using a U.S. person domestically for an influence deception against a foreign adversary—legally fraught territory.
- Lifelong operational security that survives hostile counterintelligence, congressional oversight, and rival U.S. factions.
- A consistent deception narrative that aligns with actual U.S. policy moves so the target (Russia) keeps believing and misallocating.
That is a moonshot operation in the regular American system. Soviet/Russian intelligence has infiltrated official US structures for generations. The only way this could work is through unofficial networks above the ministries and the legal systems.
The British had successfully run a long-term broad deception program against the Germans before WWII, as detailed by authors like Louis Kilzer and Carroll Quigley. Powerful Brits, often from the high nobility, pretended to align with Nazi ideology, even encouraging traditional conspiracy mythology. This made the Nazi leadership believe they could deploy 3 million soldiers to the Soviet Union without having invaded Britain beforehand.
We know that the core structure of the British Empire was comprised of a very old aristocratic supercluster of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars with significant intelligence abilities.
The US elite is not as well understood. Parallel to the old British deception US politicians and captains of industry claimed sympathies for the Nazis and traded with them. Later these Americans turned and produced goods for the war effort. The usual excuses were deployed after the fact: We were overly optimistic. We wanted the business opportunities. We thought business ties would soften Hitler and deescalate. Anything but admitting a deeper strategic deception.
A domestic political personality in an open U.S. media ecosystem is a difficult environment for deep deception operations: uncontrolled messaging, partisan counter-messaging, congressional and journalistic scrutiny, and a foreign adversary (Russia) with many independent sensors: SIGINT, HUMINT, commercial satellites, cyber, diaspora networks, and direct back-channels. You can’t count on Moscow to take any one American’s rhetoric as ground truth when its own collectors are sampling everything.
What would have to be true for the Trump-as-deception model to hold?
A plan would need White House and intelligence leadership buy-in before any public signaling mattered. It would also require a legal theory for running domestic political deception whose target is foreign (Russia). In the U.S. system, covert actions usually require a presidential finding and congressional “Gang of Eight” notification. Deceiving a nuclear adversary by using a polarizing domestic figure would be an extraordinary matter—hard to keep quiet across administrations.
There would need to be documented tasking—not mere friendly meetings or public praise, but instructions calibrated to an effects plan (“project this line at time X to shape Kremlin beliefs about Y”). Without that, you have an unwitting amplifier, not a double agent.
To make Russia “misallocate,” the performance would have to be paired with U.S. government actions that rewarded the misread just long enough to hook the target, then reversed to inflict cost. That’s what operation Fortitude did: it kept Panzer divisions north while Normandy unfolded.
In modern times we would expect to see Moscow making big bets on the basis of “Trump will deliver us A,” followed by U.S. policy delivering “not-A” at decisive moments in ways consistent with a deception end state.
A real deception program has measurable hypotheses: we broadcast X, the target reallocates Y (troops, cash, cyber assets), and we collect Z (SIGINT/HUMINT) confirming the belief change. There’d be post-action assessments, interagency cables, and after-action reports. That documentary footprint is the Achilles’ heel of the theory: in the U.S., such paper trails in regular channels eventually surface. A big deception would require an unofficial network which takes a long time to build. The payoff, if successful, would be decisive.
Only when you entice your enemy to misallocate his resources can you win. The maximum goal is to be the last dominating empire standing. A lesser goal is to weaken the competitors to a point where they will never launch a serious attack.
If Russia grows complacent and stumbles into strategic overreach, you need to tie specific misallocations to the deception channel (e.g., under-investing in certain defenses, over-investing in political interference, misjudging sanctions resolve). You would then need causation, not coincidence.
What the public record actually shows (high-level, uncontested points)
U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement institutions investigated Russia-related matters around the 2016 election and beyond (FBI, DOJ, congressional committees, Special Counsel). The resulting official narratives are mixed and heavily litigated politically, but none provides direct, open, sourced evidence that U.S. services were running Donald Trump as a deception asset.
U.S. policy under Trump was contradictory at the level of rhetoric vs. instruments:
Rhetoric often conciliatory to Putin; skepticism about NATO burden-sharing; public doubts about allied intelligence.
Policy was often harder on Russia than rhetoric implied: sanctions packages; export controls; lethal aid to Ukraine in 2017–2018; withdrawal from INF (controversial but hawkish in effect); expanded U.S. energy production affecting Russian revenues.
Russia’s own actions (e.g., in Ukraine since 2014 and decisively in 2022) seem driven by Kremlin ideology, risk calculus, and internal intelligence assessments rather than by trust in U.S. presidential rhetoric. Moscow’s services are deep skeptics trained to discount public language and to prioritize capabilities and deployments.
We know however from the most important Soviet defectors that the Communists had a lot of confidence in their infiltration of the Western political system and the opinion-manipulation of Western populations. At the perfect time, invasions in Europe were supposed to happen, mixed with limited nuclear threats to force capitulations or get e.g. a Social Democrat government is West Germany to accept Soviet “terms”.
British WWII deception worked because a highly centralized wartime state could align message, movement, and mask. The American peacetime (and even wartime) system is fractious on purpose: Congress, courts, press, 50 states, inspector generals, and inspectors of inspectors. Running a decades-long strategic deception that leverages domestic politics—using a polarizing figure who then becomes president—would require a level of interagency coherence and silence that the United States simply does not have officially.
Could Russia have misread anyway—without any U.S. deception?
Yes—and that’s a plausible account. Authoritarian systems often over-index on charismatic personalities and underestimate the inertia and veto points of open societies. The Kremlin could have believed that personal rapport plus America’s culture wars would produce strategic slack for Russia. That kind of misread does not require U.S. trickery; it requires Kremlin priors about the decadence and division of democracies. It’s the same error many dictators make: they take the noise of pluralism for weakness, then collide with institutional depth.
What a genuine “perception management” effort would look like
There is a narrower thing the IC sometimes does: perception management—curating what a foreign adversary believes about U.S. resolve or capabilities. But even then:
The channels are usually deniable strategic signals (force posture, sanctions timing, diplomatic leaks), not the weaponization of a particular politician’s brand.
The aims are normally short-to-medium-term effects keyed to a specific crisis, not multi-decade gambits around a single personality.
The legal comfort zone is foreign-facing; U.S. services go to great lengths to avoid anything that looks like domestic political manipulation, precisely because it triggers statutory and constitutional alarms.
Louis Kilzer’s Churchill’s Deception is a provocative thesis about British manipulation of German expectations in 1940–41. British deception complemented hard facts (Royal Navy control, air defense), making the lies easier to swallow.
