By Jabir Deralla

In the world as it is today, there is little room left for detached debates about personalities, elections, or political taste. A glance at the news is enough to see how the global stage has been transformed into a spectacle of confrontation, humiliation, and improvisation. We are watching a brutal reality show with deadly consequences and manufactured confusion, in which only a few act as producers and directors, while most of humanity is reduced to an unwilling participant, often unaware that the role of spectator no longer exists.

That brings us to the conclusion that understanding the world remains an obligation, not a luxury. This is an argument about consequences.

When leaders of societies, which we are used to recognizing as democratic, weaken alliances, dismiss shared rules, and normalize contempt — even hostility — toward institutions, science, intellectuals, free media, and civil society, they are not the only ones harming their own societies. They open cracks that authoritarian powers are quick to exploit, turning democratic backsliding itself into a driver of authoritarian expansion and global hegemony.

The consequence is not some abstract decline of democratic standards, but destructuion — concrete and visible — measured in the suffering of entire nations, fractured alliances, emboldened aggressors, and millions of civilians left exposed to mass violence.

The damage inflicted on democratic societies — and on longstanding strategic alliances — during Donald Trump’s presidency did not require espionage, cyber operations, or covert influence campaigns. It was done openly and deliberately, in full public view, from the very center of Western power. Alliances were weakened, partners publicly disparaged, and shared democratic norms treated as garbage. No subversive operation run from the Kremlin or from Zhongnanhai could have dreamed of achieving comparable strategic damage so quickly and at such low cost.

Trump questions NATO from within, treats allies as adversaries, and dismisses the rules-based international order as an inconvenience rather than a source of collective security. What authoritarian regimes worked to erode quietly over decades, he accelerated — with unprecedented vulgarity — turning the authority of his office into a weapon of spectacle: conflict as performance, outrage as currency, humiliation as pattern.

We do not know whether Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s puppet. What we do know is that his actions repeatedly advance the Kremlin’s strategic objectives — whether by design, indifference, impulse, or instinct. Intent becomes irrelevant once consequences are systemic. In that sense, Trump fulfilled Putin’s wet dreams without even needing to conspire with him.

By hollowing out democratic solidarity from within, Trump delivered what Moscow has sought since the beginning of the Cold War: a fractured West, uncertain of itself and paralyzed by internal mistrust. At the same time, he handed Xi Jinping’s China the strategic luxury of patience. Beijing did not need to escalate, provoke, or overreach; it could simply stay the course while the United States weakened its own alliances.

Russia gained chaos. China gained time. Democracy paid the price.

What comes next is no longer a question of awareness alone. Democratic leaders across Europe and beyond — in Canada, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere — alongside democratic forces across party lines within the United States, increasingly recognize the threat as twofold.

It comes from outside, in the form of coordinated authoritarian aggression and revisionism. And it comes from within: authoritarian figures, far-right and far-left radicals, and populist movements that hollow out democracy from the inside by weaponizing democracy itself, while disguising their objectives in the language of grievance and identitarian or ideological purity.

These authoritarian forces do not operate in isolation. They are actively encouraged, amplified, and in many cases materially supported by external adversaries of democracy, who understand that weakening democratic societies from within is cheaper, deniable, and often more effective than confronting them directly.

Yet these operations have also produced an outcome that may not have been fully anticipated in the situation rooms of authoritarian powers. The lines are now clearer than they were even a few years ago. Defiance is no longer latent. It is visible, vocal, and spreading. From Minneapolis to New York, American society is pushing back. Across Europe — from Berlin and London to Helsinki and Vilnius — democratic forces are seeing clearly, and governments will no longer be able to pretend otherwise. The era of games, tactical ambiguity, and the illusion that authoritarianism can be managed or outsmarted is coming to an end.

The question, therefore, is no longer whether the danger exists, but whether democratic systems can still act decisively enough — and fast enough — to contain it.

That question remains ominously unanswered.

Recognition does not automatically translate into action. Resolve does not guarantee speed. And time is not neutral. While democratic societies debate, calibrate, and hesitate, Ukrainian civilians live under the daily reality of weaponized winter, missile strikes, and drone terror from the skies. Children sleep in corridors, in basements, in the dark — not as a tragic byproduct of war, but as the intended outcome of a strategy designed to break a population through fear and deprivation.

This is the cost of delay. This is what uncertainty looks like on the ground. If democracy fails to move from recognition to action, from values to enforcement, history will not record that it lacked warnings — only that it hesitated while innocents paid the price.

This essay forms part of a broader analysis examining how the Kremlin — and, from a different strategic perspective, Zhongnanhai — exploit geopolitical shocks and political shifts in the United States to advance their long-term objectives.

Most recent analysis in this context: When the West Blurs the Rules, the Kremlin Sharpens the Knife — Ukraine Pays in Blood

Jabir Deralla (pen name of Xhabir M. Deralla) is a journalist, political and hybrid-warfare analyst, and civil society leader based in North Macedonia.

© 2026 Jabir Deralla. Published by CIVIL. All rights reserved. The views expressed are solely those of the author.