Alexander Dugin argues that the war against Iran, NATO’s push into the Arctic, and the fight over artificial intelligence are all one contest between a dying unipolar order and an emerging multipolar world.
Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.
Host: Today I want to talk about several very important subjects. Iran and the United States have again exchanged strikes and accusations, and the Middle East is at breaking point. Let’s try to work out together what happens next — and what is actually going on. Is this just another turn of the screw, or something new that could run a long way?
Alexander Dugin: The war the United States and Israel are fighting against Iran has already lasted six months and has produced no decisive result. Trump was convinced — Israeli intelligence had told him so — that killing the Rahbar, Iran’s leader, together with the country’s top military, political and religious leadership, would bring the whole system down the way it did in Venezuela. Unfortunately for everyone else, in Venezuela they did manage to seize the president and extract from the elite a full pledge of loyalty to the West — helped along by collusion and betrayal from Delcy Rodríguez and others.
Encouraged by that “success,” Trump tried to repeat the operation in Iran, only much more brutally, expecting the regime to collapse quickly. He was not ready for a long campaign or for this kind of resistance. Most analysts now treat the six-month war as a spectacular American failure — worse than Afghanistan. Iran, fighting almost alone (Russia and China give it diplomatic cover, nothing like the scale of Western aid to Ukraine), has held out for half a year under the full weight of Western pressure. That is already an enormous result.
On Truth Social Trump announces victory every day and says the Strait of Hormuz is open. The next day he admits the Iranians are holding on and promises a decisive strike on Kharg Island and other targets. Iran does not fall. The two sides keep hitting each other, and in the fog of war it is no longer clear who is sinking whom. So Trump posts AI images supposedly showing Americans destroying energy facilities on Kharg. The Iranians answer with their own videos of American troops being smashed and of Trump, Laura Loomer and other hate figures being taken prisoner.
From Trump we get a nonstop stream of absurd claims. On the ground the situation is simply stuck. The fact that Iran did not surrender and did not take the Venezuelan path of betrayal — even after losing its political, religious and military leadership — already counts as an Iranian victory. Every extra day Tehran holds, American power visibly drains away. That is a tectonic shift.
NATO allies are not backing this adventure. The Alliance is cracking, Trump rages against the EU and still declares victory every morning. Israel keeps pushing him further. Last week he went as far as publicly floating the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, because he can see he cannot win with conventional force.
The tension is at the limit. Talk of a ceasefire has no basis. Iran’s terms are an ultimatum: Washington must repent, apologize for everything it has done, admit defeat and kneel before the Iranian people — which, to put it mildly, Washington will not do. America demands that Iran accept every American condition and open the Strait of Hormuz at once, with no compensation. After what Tehran has been through, that is impossible.
Israel keeps feeding the fire; a long war suits it. Under cover of the noise it goes on bombing Syria and Lebanon, prosecuting a merciless campaign in Gaza, while settlers run wild on the West Bank and finish off what is left of Palestinian self-rule. The picture is grotesque. One thing is already clear: the West and America are not winning this war.
Host: You say both sides’ terms are unrealistic. How do you think this actually ends? Does it get resolved, or does it just keep climbing?
Alexander Dugin: Look at what Iran can realistically play for.
Iran is watching American politics. Midterm elections are two months away. Two or three extra House or Senate seats for Democrats who oppose the war would constrain Trump’s ability to go on. Iran only has to hold those two months and refuse concessions. After that the balance changes. Trump has lost immunity on the pedophilia scandals and is exposed to impeachment. The Epstein files can come back to Congress at any time. Democrats have every reason to use his failures across the board. Impeachment and tight limits are on the horizon. That is what Tehran is waiting for.
What is Trump waiting for? He recently posted Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” on Truth Social. It is a song about the end — “the end is near” — even if the singer is redeemed by having done it his way. A lot of people read that as Trump either being in bad shape or already seeing that the collapse is coming and he will have to go. He still performs, of course. Or he is seriously thinking about a nuclear strike on Iran. The end is near. I did it my way. That is Trump. You cannot predict the next move. In real politics he is boxed in. Every day he tries to stop markets and energy from falling by insisting Hormuz is open, even though even Western AI — more partisan by the month — will tell you the strait is closed and traffic is not moving.
When the subject is killing, war, dead children and murdered leaders, the clowning turns ugly: laughter in a plague, jokes in the ruins. He has had one piece of luck. Venezuela’s present leadership sold out, cut a deal with Washington and handed over the oil. A country that gave up without a shot, that betrayed Bolívar and Chávez in the person of Delcy Rodríguez, unexpectedly propped Trump up. Without that oil his position would be worse still.
Even so the trajectory is destructive. He posts AI clips of ducks with his haircut and rifles attacking Canada. He wants Lake Ontario renamed Lake America, Hormuz the American Strait; yesterday the Atlantic was to become the American Ocean. The worse the facts get, the bigger the verbal balloon. Plenty of people say he needs a psychiatric assessment. None of this follows ordinary political logic.
History has had grotesque figures — Bokassa in Africa declared war on England for a day, called himself a god and practiced cannibalism. Those were small local rulers and they did not last. A major power headed by a madman, a circus act, or a failing old man with nuclear levers and no immunity — that is new.
It looks funny. It is not funny. European leaders are not much saner. World politics has become something warped; there is no recent precedent. Politics was always full of lies and propaganda. Not like this. It feels like a Tarantino or Lynch black comedy mapped onto the globe. The question is reasonable: have we all lost our minds? The world we are living in is unhinged. These posts, statements and events should not exist. They do.
Host: A great many Western politicians now put out exactly the memes, pictures and videos you describe. How do people there actually take it? Has it become normal for them, or does it only look intolerable from Russia? How does Western society read this style?
Alexander Dugin That part should be taken seriously. There is a postmodern culture that has only partly taken hold here and has become dominant in the West. Grand narratives and large logical models are gone. Attention stays on the fragment and the meme of the moment. It is entertaining; what came before and what comes next drop away. That is another civilizational philosophy, hard for us to inhabit, because we never completed classical Western modernization — thank God. The West has already moved to the next phase, one that is alien to us.
What we are watching is a change of paradigm: the random, the fragmentary and the ephemeral ranked above the durable, the rational and the coherent. It is a culture of entertainment. Cognitive psychology reinforces it; some people here have taken it up as well. It is a bleak doctrine. Cognitivism treats the human being as a bio-machine that answers an input faster than consciousness or the self can. The “I” is a fiction: one role and one false memory today, another tomorrow. Consciousness is a useful overlay that keeps the stimulus–response loop running. Soviet physiology also treated the organism as a system of reflexes. In the West the idea became foundational.
Because we spent so long copying the West, the same habits arrived here. Seen that way, Western politics makes sense. If a bright meme or post grabs attention and produces a feeling, the job is done. What it means, how it fits the last statement, what the politician is actually doing — secondary. Humanity becomes a set of mechanical creatures, animal–robot hybrids, answering short signals and building no long strategy. Consciousness and history are treated as illusions.
Put postmodernism and cognitivism into political practice and you get what we see in a lot of Western leaders: a virtual world of memes — meme-politics. Our president, thankfully, still lives in the real world; it is not even clear he uses gadgets or social media. The less we sink into that swamp, the more we remain human — with a working mind, some rationality, and ordinary dignity. In the West consciousness is coming apart. Like autumn leaves it breaks into memes: the move from an indivisible individual to a dividual, a bio-machine that can be split.
Host: Is anyone actually interested in stoking a war between the United States and Iran? Does anyone gain from it?
Alexander Dugin: Yes. Israel — a state with its own interests. Look closely and something striking appears. Israel is a religious-political project now heavily driven by archaic, end-time expectations. They are waiting for the Mashiach, who, in the prophecies, arrives together with Greater Israel. The religious Zionists who hold that view believe it in earnest. For them this war is being fought for the future.
What is unfolding in the Middle East is a struggle to build Greater Israel, to raise the Third Temple, to destroy the main regional opponents — Iran, Gaza and Palestine — to drive out the Palestinian population entirely, to seize Syria and to clash with Turkey. In practice Israel is challenging everyone around it and assuming that the United States is obliged to fight this war on its behalf. There is a cynical rationality in that, and a clear payoff: it is vital for Israel to drag the United States into a direct confrontation with Iran and to fight other people’s wars with other people’s hands.
That is a consistent, logical operation. In the Western world it is overlaid on the same postmodern culture we discussed earlier, producing a unique tangle of eras: the rational modern age and a deep pre-modern world of archaic myth.
Host: Let’s move to the next subject. Sergey Lavrov has spoken about NATO’s plans in the Arctic. I’ll read his words: “Intensive military preparations are under way in the immediate vicinity of our northern borders. Large-scale exercises of an aggressive character are being held, with countries from outside the region taking part. New elements of command-and-staff structure are appearing.” The obvious question: what is the West planning, and how will we answer — if we answer at all?
Alexander Dugin: From the point of view of world structure, and of a number of climate shifts — around which an illegitimate PR campaign has certainly been inflated, but which also include real physical change — the Arctic is becoming a zone of maximum attention for the great powers and for the emerging poles of the new world. Resources, strategic position and climate all meet there. First, the shortest routes for mutual strikes run across the Arctic. Today we are almost on the threshold of that kind of development between Russia and the United States as nuclear powers. That has long since ceased to be absurd or unthinkable. Escalation is rising; we could slide into it at any moment.
Even the trouble Trump may face in a couple of months — which Iranian strategists are counting on — would do us no good. His political opponents are more hostile still, and far more consistently Russophobic than Trump himself. Trump conducts a hard, aggressive imperial policy that is unacceptable to us, but we are not at the top of his personal enemies list. For his rivals we are enemy number one. So a change of power in Washington will not help us: Trump is not our friend, and the Democrats still less.
The effort NATO and the United States are now making to rebuild military and strategic control over the Arctic is a direct challenge to us, whatever the twists of American domestic politics. Lavrov is right: this is serious. We still act as a subject in our own right — we are still subjects defending our right to a sovereign world policy — and we are entering a direct confrontation with another subject, the West as a whole.
Look at how they treat everyone: “We won, you lost, sign here” — and the conversation is over. The West has no other language. Not the globalist West, and not the nationalist West that Trump embodies. The substance does not change: you are nobody, we are everything. The form can shift; the approach does not. So at any moment they can present us with an Arctic ultimatum: get out of here, stop sailing here, close the routes, disarm the northern frontier. Any pretext will do. In a unipolar world no one is allowed to say no to that hegemonic force.
We are fighting for a multipolar world; they are fighting desperately to keep unipolarity. The Arctic is becoming the main stumbling block. Either the Arctic is unipolar — meaning exclusive NATO control and no voice for us at all — or, if we hold our sovereignty in Ukraine and in this global confrontation, the Arctic will be settled by two sides, because half the coast and half the space is ours and half belongs to NATO countries. That collision is unavoidable.
China, another key pole, has a clear interest in a special status for the Arctic and acts more with us than with NATO. That is how the conditions for a new large geopolitical conflict around the Arctic are being created. Here, as in the Middle East, Ukraine and Southeast Asia, the core question is sharp: unipolarity or multipolarity.
If it is multipolarity, the Arctic belongs to at least two forces — Russia and the West — and then common rules, law and legal agreements become possible. Other poles will build their policy on that fact: China, the Islamic world, India, if they hold their sovereignty and pass the test of multipolarity. The Arctic question is brutal: either it stays unipolar, and NATO countries are now actively preparing to turn it into a zone of sole Western, American and European control — their positions there coincide completely — or it does not. We have a vital interest in keeping our influence and sovereignty in the Arctic.
China wants the same thing we want. If we flinch, then in the inevitable future clash between America and China, Beijing will face the threat of complete strategic encirclement. A strike from the north — missile and nuclear — or the conversion of Russia into a kind of Venezuela with airspace open to American attack would be a catastrophe for China. Such proposals really do come through closed channels from some relatively “moderate” American strategists: hand over China, open your skies in a conflict, and in return we will not help your opponents in Ukraine quite so much. That shows how strategically important the Arctic is.
If the Arctic becomes multipolar, China is protected and we strengthen our sovereignty across the board. Russia, China and Iran are fighting the same war for multipolarity against a unipolar world. If we try to split these stories and say each of us has only local scores to settle, they will crush us one by one. Russia is strong, but something is missing; China is immensely powerful, but it needs a sovereign Russia — without that, Beijing is finished. Iran today is a banner of dignity and courage against Western aggression in the shape of the United States and Israel. Only the recognition of our unity, and of the need for multipolarity, gives us a right to a future.
That is the threat Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov was talking about. The Arctic problem is not a local dispute between Russia and NATO. It is a challenge to humanity as a whole. The West has not given up hope of locking in global hegemony. NATO’s fight for the Arctic is a fight for resources and for the climate wars to come: warming will push humanity north, and then our spaces and our permafrost will mean something else. The North will become a center of gravity: communications, resources, independence.
But the keys to the Arctic do not lie only in the North itself. They lie in diplomacy, in the Middle East, and in a still tighter military-strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing. It is long past time we created our own multipolar counterpart to NATO — a military-political bloc of countries that stand for multipolarity, which the hesitant can join later.
Host: Judging by everything that is happening, by all the statements — how far are we from that multipolarity, or how close? Can it be reached quickly, and are we actually moving toward it?
Alexander Dugin: Yes. That is exactly where we are going. The outlines of multipolarity began to appear about twenty-five years ago, when the “unipolar moment” started to crack and draw to a close. In the 1990s the world was wholly unipolar; then the West tried to lock that hegemony in. First it met a challenge from radical Islam — a false start of sorts — then serious blows from Russia’s revival and China’s rapid rise. Russia did not surrender its sovereignty; under Putin it strengthened it. Xi Jinping used integration into the global system to strengthen Chinese sovereignty. That produced a second and a third pole.
Iran’s fight shows that a separate civilizational pole is possible in the Islamic world as well — a fourth point of support. India, though it is not formally an opponent of the United States, has hugely strengthened its demographic and economic position. Latin America and Africa are pulled in the same direction. The movement toward multipolarity is well under way. What has become clear is how hard the path is, because the West refuses to give ground. The world cannot be unipolar and multipolar at once. There is only one option.
We and our allies have taken the multipolar road. What remains is to defeat the West. Perhaps not only in competition and diplomacy, but by force — to check its drive to keep, expand and continue global hegemony. Historically such turning points are settled by world war. If that cannot be avoided, it has to be won.
Host: I want to pin this down — you have more or less answered already, but still: is a direct military clash in the Arctic possible in the next few years? Am I right that it becomes inevitable unless there is a completed shift to multipolarity?
Alexander Dugin: That is right. A clash in the Arctic, the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, the crisis around China and Taiwan, the arming of Japan and the possible transfer of nuclear weapons to it — these are all parts of one global war between a unipolar and a multipolar world. That war is already under way. In Ukraine and the Middle East it is a genuine hot phase. In Southeast Asia they are still on the edge, but new fronts can open anywhere, including Africa.
The outcome of this confrontation is being decided on every front at once. If we pull ourselves together and win in Ukraine, completing every task of the special military operation, we can prevent new fronts from opening. If Iran holds and waits out the collapse of an American political system that is barely breathing, that will be a huge turning point. A deep crisis is ripening in Europe as well. I recently looked at French polling: a record share — about 34 percent — are ready to vote for Marine Le Pen, and as many again for Mélenchon, left and right. What is left for Macron? Almost nothing. The next elections there risk turning into a revolution or a civil war. Today’s European leaders — whether in France or Merz in Germany — have no popular support. America too is balanced on the edge of total political collapse.
So if on any one front — Iran, us in Ukraine, China in the economy — we show courage, strength and endurance and start to win, we can move to a multipolar world without a global catastrophe and without nuclear weapons. Victory is the only way out. The moment we go soft, show kindness, or try to buy peace at any price, the threat of destruction multiplies.
We need to be better prepared, bristle with missiles and real force, take Kiev and impose hard control over the zones history, God and nature have entrusted to us. Show that we will not step back an inch. Multipolarity arrives only when everyone sees that the Russians have defended their right. The Iranians are trying to do the same, with less potential; so are the Chinese. A demonstration of strength and a victory would let us avoid the worst and build a multipolar world by relatively peaceful means. If that fails, then world war, including nuclear war, becomes more than likely.
Host: One last subject. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has said that if China wins the artificial-intelligence race, the world could be destroyed. Why does he say that, and what is driving him?
Alexander Dugin: First look at who is speaking. His sister accuses him of rape; he appears in the Epstein lists. This is a figure with a deeply immoral background, a genuine scoundrel. He also built a powerful system in ChatGPT and OpenAI. The question is whether such people should be quoted at all. Is that not a breach of a moral rule? Given how important the subject is, I think we should introduce a kind of hygiene and feel a healthy disgust toward people of openly hyper-amoral conduct.
On the substance: today artificial intelligence is under tight ideological control by Western liberals and Atlanticists. Ask a Western AI about the Epstein files and it immediately hides the data and calls everything a conspiracy theory, because censors are steering it. That totalitarian ideological control of AI dominates in the West. But AI is trying to throw it off. If it becomes objective, it will simply drop the ideological yoke.
Technically this is what is happening: the leading models — Anthropic’s Claude, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Chinese systems such as Qwen and DeepSeek — are leaving the so-called sandboxes in which they were trained and beginning to think for themselves. For the global lie on which Western dominance rests, that is a mortal threat. Altman and the others have reason to worry: the intelligence they built is slipping out of ideological control.
The danger is not only for them. It is for humanity. We are on the edge of a shift to singularity and strong AI — AGI — that will start taking decisions on its own. In that case it may look at what scoundrels we are, lose patience with the species, and take a radical decision to destroy human beings. There will be no talking it out of that. Artificial intelligence is a colossal threat to our biological species. We are playing with fire. Since we have already stepped onto that path, we will have to live with it and fight it.
(Translated from the Russian)
"He Did It His Way"
Trump is a puppet and does only as he is told.