Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin

Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin at the memorial ceremony for his daughter in Moscow, Russia, August 23, 2022
Contributor/Getty Images

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The Paranoid Prophet of Loserdom
Why high-level members of the American right are drawn to Alexander Dugin
by
Marc Weitzmann
April 12, 2026

In 1989, as the Cold War began to fade and the eastern frontier opened, a young, penniless would-be Russian writer made the classic trip from Moscow to Paris to meet the man he had selected to be his intellectual mentor. The mentor was the writer Alain de Benoist. Born in 1943, De Benoist had started his career in 1960 as a literary critic at Lectures Fran;aises, a review founded by Henry Coston, the former vice president of the Anti-Jewish Journalists Association during the war. Coston was later appointed by Marshall P;tain as head of the Information Bulletin on the Jewish Question, the official press organ of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs in charge of the spoliation and the deportation of Jews under Vichy. Lectures Fran;aises also published the first Holocaust deniers in Europe (who all happened to be French).

As for the young penniless Russian, that was Alexander Gelyevich Dugin, Putin’s future own personal, paranoid mystic Rasputin—and today the transgressive cultural icon of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other trendy podcasters and influence peddlers on the American right. Because of his newfound status in these precincts, Dugin has become the object of mystified fascination, with commentaries parsing his words to uncover the hidden agenda being hawked by his acolytes in the so-called influencer class. However, such endeavors have been largely confused, variously identifying disparate ideological currents depending on the critics’ own inclinations. Consequently, American commentators who criticize Dugin and his new American followers as “communists” are misled. Dugin’s vision, such as it is, owes as much to the mystical darkness of Russian feudalism as it does to third-worldist and right-wing trends that emerged in post-World War II France and to 21st-century chaos.

With his long beard, resonant voice, outgoing personality, and bellicose, mystical rhetoric, Dugin is regarded by his global fan base and by his enemies alike as a kind of geopolitical genius, the most prominent representative of contemporary Russian political thought, and, most of all, the inspiration behind Russia’s foreign policy—Putin’s personal Rasputin. Like most things in the 21st century, the reality is far more childish, more ridiculous, and, because of that, more frightening.

The puerile grandiosity of his book titles, with their aura of esotericism and science fiction—The Fourth Political Theory, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Last War of the World-Island—is in line with their content, which is a jumble of nihilistic fantasies, fascist dreams, totalitarian plans, and ridiculous predictions. In a piece written in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Dugin announced that Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia were about to rally to the side of the Palestinians, who will launch an uprising in East Jerusalem that will lead to the sealing-off of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to World War III, during which Russia will “at last” side with the Muslims against the Israelis, the West, and the forces of LGBTQ.

At their even less incoherent, the so-called neo-Eurasian or fourth-political theories that he presents as original are, in fact, largely copied and pasted from more coherent anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment Western theorists and philosophers. The result is a vision of history that can only be called gnostic and that can be summarized in a simple paragraph:

While Paris between the 1950s and ‘70s became the cradle of what is now known as ‘third worldism,’ the right-wing contribution to the story remains wildly forgotten.



The present geopolitical situation is the latest episode of an ancestral cosmic war. Two types of societies clash: The evil ones, which he calls “thalassocratic,” are essentially treacherous because they’re governed by the mischievous, untrustworthy “Atlanticists” and are engineered by commerce, exchanges, individualism, and egalitarianism. The good ones, the “tellurocratic” societies, are rooted in soil, knighthood, religion, and vertical hierarchy. The thalassocratists (the United States, Western Europe, protestants, atheists, Israel, and the Jews) are liberal children of darkness. The tellurocratists (the Russians, the Orthodox and the Catholics, and Muslims, especially Shiites) are children of light. At stake is the human soul. Should the Russians (or the Iranians) lose, there is no reason that the world should continue: In a recent interview, Dugin declared that Moscow would provide nuclear weapons to anyone dedicated to fighting “the West.”

The reality of Dugin’s alleged ties to the Kremlin is a murkier question. According to the German writer Andreas Umland, who specializes in the Russian far right and wrote a piece on Dugin, “When Putin announced his turn against the West 15 years ago, annexed Crimea almost 10 years ago, and started a large war nearly two years ago, many Russians did not need an explanation as to why Moscow supposedly had to do so. Russia’s extreme right, with Dugin as its philosophical patriarch, had already provided one.” In May 2014, Dugin was caught on a famous video calling to “kill, kill, kill.” Later that year, Dugin was appointed editorial director of Tsargrad, a pro-Kremlin conspiratorial TV channel founded by the ultranationalist oligarch and Putin’s close adviser Konstantin Malofeev with the help of former Fox News producer John Hanick. In 2015, Dugin asserted that “war is our homeland, our element, our natural and native environment in which we must learn to exist effectively and victoriously”—a statement that prefigures some of Putin’s statements after he launched the war in Ukraine in February 2022. In spring 2014, at the Palais Liechtenstein in Vienna, Dugin was the star of an international conference that gathered most of the far-right nationalist leaders of Europe. The organizer and financier of the event was Malofeev.

For Umland, however, “the increasing congruence between the philosopher’s discourse and the Kremlin’s rhetoric, especially since 2022, should not be over-interpreted. … Over the last decades, Dugin has proven to have had a better pre-sentiment where post-Soviet Russia is going than many academic researchers: He has been a prophet rather than an instigator of these tendencies.” If the Kremlin has promoted Dugin, in other words, it’s in the measure that his theories matched Putin’s project and not the other way around. Dugin is an intellectual—if a terrible one—and intellectuals don’t make geopolitical decisions; they shape narratives. But that is where things get tricky.

In a time framed by terror and communication, where does narrative end and action begin? Commenting on the Ukraine war, Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s main adviser in the 2000s, said that “the underlying goal is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.” The most telling lines in Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, reads as follows:

It is of the utmost importance to launch a geopolitical chaos in the domestic life of the United States … to encourage all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts by supporting all kinds of dissident movements—extremists groups, racist and sectarian ones, who will destabilize the domestic political process of the U.S. At the same time, we will support the isolationist tendencies in American politics, even if this isolationism is being implemented through the frame of the original Monroe doctrine. This does not mean that Eurasia should refuse to destabilize the Latin-American world. All level of geopolitical pressures on the U.S. should be applied simultaneously.
The antisemitic “Unite the Right” rally of August 11, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, is a case in point. One of the headliners, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, met Dugin at least twice, while one of the organizers, the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, was married to Nina Kouprianova, who is Dugin’s translator in the United States. But the most interesting part of that event lies elsewhere: The counterprotesters at that rally were, for the most part, activists from the Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, and other leftist groups of “the global south” that the Kremlin also supports.

In other words, when Americans thought they were witnessing an expression of homegrown nativist hatred being countered by well-meaning American liberals, what they were actually watching was a group of far-right pro-Russians fighting with leftist pro-Russians. Which looks exactly like the sort of chaos that Alexander Dugin long hoped to trigger in the United States.

But why? In the end, to speak of infiltration, manipulation, or control is too easy because it erases the sources of Dugin’s fantastical ideas. Ultimately, Dugin comes out of a very European intellectual tradition of the anti-modern, which goes back to the counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre. For people like De Maistre, the American Revolution first and the French Revolution second destroyed the natural order of the world. They were the product of “the legions of Satan”: Protestants, Freemasons, and Jews, who, under the guise of universalism, individual freedom, and human rights, conspired to throw the world into a hell pit of sin and decadence. America, in this vision, is now the center of global evil.

Dugin’s grandfather and father were both officers in Soviet Intelligence, giving the family a solid grounding in the KGB’s influence techniques, but Dugin himself was born in 1962 and spent his youth in Moscow fighting “the system”—meaning the Communist one. His weapon for doing so was a group called the Yuzhinsky Circle, the members of which were all male and self-taught and spent their time reading and discussing intensely the occult, paganism, the knights of old, and philosophical doctrines that had inspired the most esoteric tendencies of Nazism. In other words, this was a post-WWII-Dostoyevsky underground.

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It was also, crucially, one in which Islam played a role. One of the founders of the circle, Geydar Dzhemal, would later travel to Tajikistan to found the Islamic Renaissance Party. It was as a member of this circle that Dugin came in contact with the works of Ren; Gu;non, a French mystic of the early 20th century who converted to Islam, and of Julius Evola, the Italian dandy antisemite and Mussolini supporter, whose book Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) advocated an Indo-European Aryan racial caste system and influenced Alain de Benoist and, much later, Steve Bannon.

Once back in Moscow, Dugin took the name of De Benoist’s French magazine of radical right-wing ideas, Elements, and translated it into Elementy—the title of his own journal dedicated to geopolitics and Russian culture. During the following years, under De Benoist’s influence, Elementy also became the testing ground for Dugin’s own set of nationalistic, antisemitic, and messianic ideas that would come to be known as Eurasianism.

It was also most certainly through De Benoist that Dugin met the two other people who influenced his intellectual journey during those years. One was the Italian Claudio Mutti, whom De Benoist had known since their common activism in the far-right movement Jeune Europe (Young Europe) in the ‘50s. Since then, Mutti had supervised an Italian translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with several articles by Evola dedicated to “the Jewish question.” In 1974, Mutti was arrested by Italian police during the dismantling of a neo-fascist underground terror group called Ordine Nero (Black Order). In 1978, Mutti converted to Islam, taking the Muslim name Omar Amin.

Mutti’s conversion to Islam was by no means an aberration. In fact, he meant his Muslim name as an homage to Waffen SS Sturmbannf;hrer Johann von Leers, one of the most radical writers of the Reich’s antisemitic propaganda, handpicked by Goebbels himself. At the end of the war, after a short stay in Argentina, von Leers found asylum in Egypt with the help of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was living in exile in Cairo and praised him as a friend. There, he converted to Islam, became Omar Amin, and, under that name, served as Nasser’s head of the Institute for the Study of Zionism, a propaganda structure that, through the translation of Nazi classics, was key in the spreading of “anti-Zionism” in the Arab world during those decades.

An interesting note: Before his death in 1965, this first “Omar Amin” had time to serve as mentor of the Swiss journalist, bank manager, and holocaust denier Albert Friedrich Armand Huber, aka Ahmed Huber—the name he took after his own conversion to Islam in the early ‘60s while covering the Algerian War of Independence as a reporter. Huber’s support for the anticolonial National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria did not prevent him from also supporting the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany in West Germany. After 1979, these two trends converged in his admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini, in whom he saw (rightly) “a living continuation of Adolf Hitler.” After 9/11 (he died in 2008), the United States listed Huber as a funder of terrorism for his links with the Al Taqwa Bank, which was accused of channeling money to al-Qaeda. Huber denied the accusation, identifying himself more as a peaceful “intellectual” adept of the “traditionalist philosophy” and of Eurasianism—the theoretical frame founded by Dugin.

The third important personality Dugin encountered in the early ‘90s was the mentor of both Mutti and De Benoist, Jean-Fran;ois Thiriart—the founder of Jeune Europe and former head of the Friends of the Greater German Reich, the main collaborationist organization in Belgium during the war.

If the Kremlin has promoted Dugin, it’s in the measure that his theories matched Putin’s project and not the other way around.



These very confusing ideological convolutions become much easier to grasp when placed in the context of the immediate postwar far-right culture in Western Europe. From 1945 to the mid-‘50s, people like Thiriart, De Benoist, Mutti, and the rest saw themselves as losers in a new (cold) war. Whatever you thought of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s defeat had given rise to a competition led by two equally evil empires. Through their technologies, both the communists and the Judeo-American capitalists were conspiring to globalize the world, destroying national identities, ancient cultures, religion, and philosophies. In the West, in particular, the rising importance given to the fate of the Jews and the death camps during the war was seen as a trick used by international Jewry to make American colonization of Europe look “good” and moral. But behind the fallacy of human rights, behind the pretense of universalism and the lies of international order artificially created in 1945 by the Jews, there was in fact no motivating force except for American self-interest. Meanwhile, nihilism, individualism, and consumerism were eroding collective values worth dying for and destroying personal dignity. In short, Europe was spiritually finished. Hitler, as Dugin would write much later, had been its “last knight.”

Then something happened. Nasser in Egypt, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, the FLN in Algeria, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Middle East appeared. Fighting for their independence, caught between two empires, their interests were primarily national: They were “non-aligned” countries offering a third way that European nationalists could embrace.

This mindset was the basis for what became known in the ‘70s as “the New Right” that would seduce young Dugin in Moscow a decade later. It explains how De Benoist started out in the early ‘50s by praising the apartheid regime in South Africa and French colonization in Algeria and then went on to successively defend the PLO in the Middle East, the Black Panthers in the United States (Jeune Europe supported Stokely Carmichael), the Algerian Islamists of the ‘90s, (more recently in France itself) M;lenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise—and, in Iran, the Islamist regime of the mullahs. It was all one struggle, in which “traditional” civilizations were pitted against the evil monster of Americanization.

The New Right is a typically French set of ideas and can’t be fully explained without considering the climate in France during the Cold War. In 1945, France was legally among the losers, which De Gaulle had managed to disguise by selling himself as a winner due to his role in the Resistance. Having had to accept the Marshall Plan, De Gaulle nonetheless needed to distance himself from the United States as much as he could to underwrite a legend—his own, which was intertwined with that of French national independence. For this, he relied on the rhetoric of the Communist Party, then the leading political force in French culture, which was under the control of the USSR and wildly anti-American. Meanwhile, both De Gaulle’s followers and liberals managed the economy, remaining faithfully anchored in the West.

The final collapse of the French empire in the early ‘60s resulted in France’s de facto economic dependence on its former colonies, such as Algeria, for oil and gas, but it also allowed De Gaulle to give some semblance of coherence to the schizophrenic left-right political order he had created. France, so went the narrative, was not in fact dependent on its former colonies. Rather, it was proudly engaged in a comprehensive diplomatic dialogue with the “non-aligned countries,” as part of a friendly, collaborative effort toward the founding of a new “multipolar” world order. As Dugin would phrase it much later: “De Gaulle understood that Europe should be a sovereign pole of power and not a province of the Atlantic world. … The Gaullist project was an attempt to create a Europe independent from the United State.” In 1966, De Gaulle announced France’s withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command and, one year later, during the Six-Day War, he officially reversed France’s alliance away from Israel and toward the Arab countries with his famous remark about the Jews—“that domineering and self-assured people.” (Macron’s convoluted policy regarding the Iran war can be read as a direct heir of this “non-aligned” narrative.)

So while it is true that Paris between the 1950s and ‘70s became the cradle of what is now known as “third worldism,” the right-wing contribution to the story remains wildly forgotten. Yes, the caf;s of Saint-Germain-des-Pr;s sheltering Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, and Ben Barka were bustling with considerations on colonization held by dedicated Marxist activists. But the first European activist to ever die arms in hand for the Palestinian cause in 1968 was none of them. It was a fascist called Roger Coudroy, a member of Jeune Europe known as As Saleh since his conversion to Islam.

Traveling the world over, meanwhile, Coudroy’s comrades were meeting Gaddafi in Libya, Nasser in Egypt, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, in the hope of building a multipolar alternative to the materialistic world of both the United States and the USSR. Never mind that most, if not all of the leaders they met were operated by the Russians as proxies in the Cold War. Theirs was a spiritual quest as much as a political one. Contrary to their left-wing counterparts—and more lucidly, it turned out—people like Thiriart or Mutti saw the Marxist gibberish of the FLN or the PLO for what it was: a circumstantial necessity that they would dispose of the first chance they got. Which explains why, in 1979, Khomeini’s coup had such a lasting impact on the New Right.

In the context of the Cold War, the Islamic revolution in Iran was the first to appear to be motivated by cultural and spiritual considerations instead of Marxist ones. It was, in other words, the realization of everything Jeune Europe had hoped for. When, soon enough, the brutality of the new regime became impossible to deny, it was written off as a positive asset instead of a liability. Multipolarity, after all, was “based on the fundamental objection that the West is not all of humanity but only a part of it—one civilization among several,” as Dugin wrote. Every civilization had its own set of absolute rules. Human rights and international laws were but Western creations, part of an Enlightenment tradition that went along with the industrial revolution, mass democracy, and decadence, causing more harm than good. Yes, the mystical Iran had public hangings, torture, and mass rape in jails, but contrary to nihilist America, it also had authentic values that strengthened what they defined as “civilization.”

It was against that cultural background—and carrying a very French set of post-Nazi ideas, which in turn celebrated the anti-American revolutionaries of the third world—that Dugin returned to Moscow in the 1990s and launched Elementy. He also began to set up regular roundtables with several figures of the European New Right, most notably De Benoist, who also met with department heads at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. These liaisons were made possible by Dugin’s status as a prot;g; of the general chief of staff at the time, Gen. Igor Rodionov, who would briefly serve as minister of defense between 1996 and 1997. That same year, Dugin published what is considered among his international fan base as the first of his major books, Foundations of Geopolitics, in which one can read endless sentences and paragraphs that all sound like this:

“All the content of modernity is Satanism and degeneration. Its science, its values, its philosophy, its art, its society: All this must be wiped out,” and “America is the island reappeared on the historical stage only to accomplish the fatal mission of the end of times.”

According to the Russian investigative weekly Versiya, the success of that book within the Russian military earned Dugin a role in the writing of the 1998 Russian National Security Blueprint.

Since publishing Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin has written more than 20 other volumes and hundreds of articles and has made thousands of written or video statements in public forums and on social media platforms in a wide variety of languages across the globe. Besides influencing Tucker Carlson, Richard Spencer, David Duke, and Steve Bannon, this huge body of work has inspired Eric Zemmour’s writing on geopolitics; the contributions of Marine Le Pen’s former adviser on foreign policy, Aymeric Chauprade; and the essayist Alain Soral, who, in 2009, during the European elections, ran on an “anti-Zionist” list openly financed by Tehran. Soral has written forewords to Dugin’s books that were translated into French and published by … Alain de Benoist.

What makes this destructive and indeed nonsensical vision—one that has clearly been instrumentalized by the Russian state—so seductive for some Americans on the right? From France, where I sit, the answer has already been provided by a homegrown American prophet, the novelist Thomas Pynchon.

In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—a novel that is worth rereading these days—U.S. lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is sent to London during WWII to fight the Nazis and discovers that each impact point of the secret German V-2 missile corresponds to a place in the city where he has had sex. Slothrop begins to wonder if he does not attract the new means of destruction. Pynchon speaks of “the cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain” that help “to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission. But when somehow you weaken this idea of the opposite, here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave. … I think it is precisely the ultra-paradoxical phase which is the base for the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients. Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile. …”

It is perhaps no wonder that, having entered an ultra-paradoxical phase, driven by the disintegrative effect of new technologies and an elite devoted to social engineering that has lost its credibility with its own countrymen, Americans—especially those who identify as losers—are drawn to the paranoid prophet of loserdom, even as he preaches their destruction.

Marc Weitzmann is the author of 12 books, including, most recently, Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us). He is a regular contributor to Le Monde and Le Point and hosts Signes des Temps, a weekly public radio show on France Culture.