As Europe teeters on the edge, Russian subversion is everywhere

A Trump victory is Moscow's greatest prize

Photo by Dominik Sostmann on Unsplash

I am delighted with the latest Lowdon podcast because it allowed me to bring the work of the Swedish investigative journalists Lars Berge and Axel Gordh Humlesjö to an English-speaking readership.

Their book Honeytrap is an account of how Putin’s gangster regime exploited the outwardly respectable Swedbank. You can listen to Axel tell me about their findings here on Apple

Or here on Spotify

Or on Amazon or any other podcast host via this link

It is a story for our times that shows how we have moved from the post-war world of the early 21^st century to the pre-war world of today: a world that feels on the brink of collapse.

To stay only with the weekend news, Russia is reportedly recruiting North Korean soldiers to fight in Ukraine. North Korea, in other words, could soon be invading a sovereign European country, which was not something I had on my predictions list at the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, the polls show that Donald Trump still has a fair chance of becoming the next US president. If he wins, the arsenal of democracy will shut down for the first time since the Second World War. The liberal West will lose its greatest military power and Vladmir Putin’s face will break into a triumphant sneer.

Many now look back on the naivety of the happy time after the end of the Cold War with contempt. It was the “holiday from history”  or the “end of history” or whatever cliché one wishes to reach for.

The key source of contentment in the post-cold war was the belief that we need no longer worry about great power conflict and could leave the market to sort out our needs and desires.

As we now know, and should have know at the time, that neo-liberal order was wide open to exploitation by tyrannical states.