When Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament in 1991, he looked like a liberator from a dying empire. Within a few years, he presided over asset disposal, collapsing institutions and a social freefall.
Economic and financial shock therapy—advised by Western economists—privatized the state at fire-sale prices, minted oligarchs and immiserated millions. The Soviet order was gone.
Three decades on, the United States faces its own reckoning. The post–Cold War world of globalization, financial dominance and military primacy created numerous problems and a sense of crisis.
The social contract that underwrote the American Century unraveled under the wave of globalization, as large parts of the country were deindustrialized, real wages stagnated, life expectancy declined and politics devolved into cultural trench warfare.
In Russia, meanwhile, Vladimir Putin replaced Yeltsin and stabilized the country. He sidelined the oligarchs and put the country on a solid economic and financial footing. During his first decade and a half, Russia’s headline numbers surged.
GDP multiplied, debt was slashed and pensions and incomes rose. In barely a decade, Putin transformed Russia from “a gas station masquerading as a country” to a pivotal power on the Eurasian continent and a leading member of BRICS+.
Like Yeltsin, Donald Trump rode a wave of dissatisfaction with the political establishment to power. Like Yeltsin, Trump vowed to take down the old system that was incapable of reforming itself.
Like Putin, he vowed to put the nation first, reconfigure the system and rebuild America’s industrial power. Yeltsin ended an old system, and Putin built a new system; Trump vowed to do both, but he arguably faces bigger challenges than Putin ever did.
Waves of nationalism
The battle between communism and capitalism that defined the 20th century has ended in a global wave of nationalism.
Both Putin and Trump have steered their countries on a nationalist course, and while they operate in different social and cultural systems, their methods are remarkably similar. Both lean into “traditional values” and emphasize religion. But the similarities run much deeper.
Both Putin and Trump intervene directly in the economy. Putin imposed control over vital industries (the Russian state owns over 50% of energy giant Gazprom); Trump leverages the US energy sector in his trade policy (deregulation of the energy sector and arm-twisting Europe to buy US natural gas).
Comparison of Putin and Trump in forging a nationalistic course.
Since returning to office, Trump has moved from one-off pressure campaigns on corporations to an explicit state-as-shareholder strategy in “strategic” industries, framed as national-security industrial policy. Like Putin, Trump forces corporations to align their interest with the interests of the state.
While Putin directed the government to take direct stakes in strategic Russian corporations, Trump forced chipmaker Intel to sell a ~9.9–10% stake to the US government. Earlier this year, Trump demanded that iPhone maker Apple build a production facility in the US.
In August, Trump forced chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) into an unprecedented revenue-sharing arrangement. He granted them export licenses for certain AI chips to China in exchange for 15% of the resulting sales revenues going to the federal government.
Media manipulation
Trump, like Putin, is narrowing the space for opposition media. He uses different means but toward the same end: tightening narrative control and influencing public perception.
Putin used the power of the state to seize or shut down independent broadcasters in the early 2000s. Gazprom took over broadcaster NTV in 2001. TV-6 and TVS, the first commercial broadcasters in Russia, were closed down after legal maneuvers in 2003.
Trump, dealing with judicial constraints, is trying to narrow the media’s political bandwidth in different ways, relying on both regulatory pressure and the financial power of the super-rich.
Earlier this year, he ordered the Chinese tech company ByteDance to divest its TikTok platform in the US, a video-sharing site with 170 million users. Among the buyers were Larry Ellison (Oracle co-founder and staunch Trump supporter), Rupert Murdoch (Fox News owner) and Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computer).
Further consolidation of the American media landscape appears likely. David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison and head of Paramount and CBS, is reportedly eyeing a bid for Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), the parent company of CNN, HBO, TBS and Warner Bros Studios.
Backed by the Ellison family, the merger would place CBS News and CNN under one roof. Under new management, the two broadcasters would presumably be friendlier to Trump, who has routinely labeled legacy media as “fake news.”
Uphill battle
Trump and Putin use similar methods to achieve national revival through leader-centric politics.
After consolidating power, Putin had a largely free hand in restructuring the system. In just a few years, he stabilized the country and put it on the road to economic recovery. He significantly improved living standards for most Russians by dramatically increasing GDP, taming inflation, increasing pensions and wages, and paying down the debt.
Trump will find it difficult to match Putin’s record. His economic and fiscal policies – tax cuts, increased defense spending, deregulation – are reminiscent of Reaganomics, the policies that created many of the problems the US is facing today.
Those ills include a growing gap between rich and poor, out-of-control government spending and a spiraling national debt of over 120% of GDP. Trumpism, a nationalist version of Reaganomics, may not fare much better.
The US carries a wartime debt load without wartime discipline. Entitlements consume the budget’s future, and interest payments (now exceeding a trillion dollars annually) crowd out investment. Without a national emergency, higher taxes or meaningful reform are politically impossible.
Complicating matters for Trump, the world has changed since Reagan. China has become the world’s leading industrial nation, and BRICS+ is fast becoming a global economic, financial and political powerhouse. It is intent on creating a multipolar world and developing an alternative to the dollar system, a key pillar of American global power.
Trump leads a movement that contains incompatible constituencies: populist protectionists, defense hawks, libertarians, evangelical moralists and business elites who want cheap capital and predictable rules. Every decisive choice alienates at least one bloc.
Trump’s tightrope walk between Yeltsin’s demolition of an ossified empire and Putin’s reconstruction of national sovereignty captures the essence of America’s own late-empire inflection point. The US will have to make the right diagnosis of the disease before it can find a “cure” and develop a consensus on what kind of country it wants to be.
Trump’s legacy will depend on whether he can forge a new national compact that bridges Main Street and Wall Street, sovereignty and global influence, grievance and governance. Without it, the US risks neither liberation nor restoration, but rather a prolonged unraveling, caught between the ghost of Yeltsin’s chaos and Putin’s discipline.
