Russia Matters, 7/14/25

1. While hosting NATO’s SG Mark Rutte on July 14, President Donald Trump unveiled a deal with this alliance that would send weapons to Ukraine within days while also threating Russia with stiff penalties in his renewed effort to end hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them [Ukraine] weapons and they [NATO countries] [are] going to be paying for them,” Trump was quoted by Wall Street Journal as saying in Rutte’s presence. During the same event the U.S. president also threatened Russia with “secondary tariffs” unless a deal to end the hostilities in Ukraine is reached by early September. “We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days, tariffs at about 100%, you’d call them secondary tariffs,” Trump was quoted by Financial Times as saying. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later said Trump could choose to impose either tariffs or sanctions on countries that do business with Russia, according to Wall Street Journal. Last week saw Trump repeatedly state his unhappiness with Putin’s unwillingness to agree to an unconditional end of hostilities in Ukraine, promising a “major statement” on Russia on July 14. Thus, his July 14 threats came as no surprise, but they were also met with some skepticism. “It is unclear if… Putin will take Trump’s threat seriously,” Alexander Ward and his co-authors wrote in Wall Street Journal on July 14.“For a frequent flip-flopper like him [Trump], can anyone ever tell which flip or flop is for real?” Susan Glasser wondered in the New Yorker. “The president is a late and very reluctant convert to the approach of trying to confront and isolate Mr. Putin” and the approach he is taking “seems designed to keep him at least one arm’s length away from the conflict,” David Sanger and Maggie Haberman explained in New York Times. That Trump is “coming around on Ukraine” represents a decision that “isn’t isolationist or internationalist but realistic,” according to Peggy Noonan.
2. “Russia’s factories have begun churning out vast quantities of attack drones over the past year, producing a deadly fleet that is now taking to Ukrainian skies in record numbers almost daily,” Matthew Luxmoore and Jane Lytvynenko reported in a July 10 article for Wall Street Journal. Writing for the same newspaper Jillian Kay Melchior also noted the surge in Russian drone production, as did Andrew Kramer of The New York Times. “As Russia’s defense industry continues to ramp up, military analysts expect Russia to routinely launch more than 1,000 drones per volley by autumn,” Kramer warned. These articles indicate that the mainstream U.S. media outlets are catching up with the recent changes in correlation of drone production in Ukraine and Russia in the latter’s favor. In the first and second year of Russia’s full-fledged invasion into Ukraine, such outlets as Wall Street Journal were reporting how use of drones by Ukraine helped to turn the tide in Kyiv’s favor while New York Times reported how “Ukraine has stayed ahead in the drones arm race.” In the third year of the war Forbes declared that “For the first time, Ukraine is launching more long-range drone attacks than Russia.” The coverage of the drone race began to change, however, in 2025. For instance, in January of this year, ECFR’s Ulrike Franke published an article on the web site of this think-tank that estimated that Russia was matching Ukraine’s pace of drone production. Five months later, the press was also noticing this change. For instance, The Times of London’s Anthony Loyd reported from Donbas: “Russia has taken the lead in the drone race, outproducing Kyiv in the manufacture and use of medium-range FPV drones and fiber optic variants that have changed the shape of the entire 1,200 km front line.” Loyd’s May 2025 article was echoed by Politico’s Veronika Melkozerova, who reported in June 2025, citing Zelensky himself, that “Ukraine produces about 100 long-range drones a day, while Russia has managed to scale up production to 300 a day and is aiming for 500.” Russian drone producers managed to boost long-range drone production from 15,000 in 2024 to more than 30,000 this year, as well as up to 2 million small tactical drones, according to Melkozerova.
3. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to nominate first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko as his next PM is a victory for his powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak for whom there appears to be little love lost in Washington. “Svyrydenko is considered a close ally” of Yermak, according to July 14 article in Financial Times. Apart from the new prime minister, changes are expected at education, health, culture, social policy and possibly finance, according to the Economist. The Economist reported on July 6 that a cabinet reshuffle is “imminent” and that is being driven by Yermak whose lecturing approach to diplomacy Americans despair at. While being allied with Yermak, Svyrydenko is also seen as having “strong ties with Donald Trump’s team after leading the minerals talks alongside U.S. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent,” according to Financial Times.

by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough, The Daily Sceptic, 6/15/25

David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security.

For all the breathless commentary, one awkward truth has loitered beneath the surface of the Russia-Ukraine war, which is that most people beyond the immediate theatre of conflict don’t have any clear sense of what’s happening on the ground. The fog of war has been thickened not only by competing narratives along with fragmentary info-snacking YouTube clips of drone strikes, but by something more persistent — Western wishful thinking.

For nearly three years, a chorus of commentary penned by pundits whose proximity to the war — geographically or intellectually — is open to question have served up a diet long on optimism but short on evidence. A rotating cast of Atlanticists from Anne Applebaum to Timothy Snyder, along with just about every op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, have reliably assured readers that Ukrainian victory is in sight, or that Putin’s regime has been humiliated or teeters on the edge of collapse. These forecasts, rarely tethered to battlefield realities, have functioned less as analysis and more as morale management — designed to reassure rather than inform.

This faith-based commentary sits uneasily alongside the equally confident illusions that once animated post-Cold War Western military thinking. Western politicians and strategists imagined war in the digital age would be light, precise and swift — waged by lean expeditionary forces wielding smart weapons and networked command systems. The result, they hoped, would be relatively bloodless victories achieved from a polite distance, preferably before lunchtime.

Instead, they got Bakhmut.

As this short essay will seek to disclose, the war in Ukraine has shattered a generation of digital-age delusions. It has exposed the brittle realities beneath Western military thinking and underscored the extent to which the strategic balance has shifted—less due to enemy cunning than to Western self-delusion.

The End of History did not arrive. The Return of Artillery did.

The Digital Mirage

In short, digitalisation — once regarded as the West’s ultimate strategic advantage — has failed to deliver the political returns its proponents anticipated. The concept was deceptively simple: combine precision weaponry with real-time data and operational mobility to achieve swift, efficient and low-cost victories. In the words of one tract in the mid-1990s, the aim is to apply massive shock with minimal force, such that the enemy is stunned into compliance.

Yet war, as the Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz long ago observed, remains a clash of wills — reciprocal, unpredictable and fundamentally political. It is not a frictionless exercise in systems management, nor a technological showcase. It is organised violence pursued for political ends. Always messy and brutal. And always resistant to tidy solutions.

What Western strategists often overlooked was a basic fact: adversaries adapt. And many of them have invested not in apps or digital platforms, but in mass, resilience and industrial depth.

The assumption that digital superiority would render conventional war obsolete, where the future of war belongs not to mass armies and tanks, but to decentralised networks and precision strikes’, has not merely proven false — it has been inverted. Russia and other actors have appropriated these same tools, stripped them of their idealistic framing and employed them pragmatically — effectively, economically and at scale.

The West, by contrast, became increasingly enamoured with the imagined virtues of the digital society: a realm where information moves at light speed and liberal pieties hitch a ride on the algorithm. Nowhere was this more evident than in the enthusiasm for cyberwarfare — an area long hyped, but whose strategic effects have often fallen short. Figures such as then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson notably proclaimed that such high tech was transforming the nature of conflict.

The practical outcome of actual warfare, however, has not been the digitalisation or dematerialisation of war, but rather its real-time mediation — live streamed, framed and packaged for distant audiences. In a hyper-connected world, conflict is increasingly staged for global spectatorship. But if the medium has changed, the consequences have not: war remains bloody, destructive and — for all the intrusion of high-tech drones and AI onto the battlefield — still deeply human. “Technology may change how we kill, but not why we kill or what killing does to us.”

The Return of Walls: Fortresses in the Age of Fibre Optics

We should recall the broader intellectual mirage in which Western military thinking once basked—a time of post-Cold War euphoria when history had allegedly ended and borders were passé. Remember when Francis Fukuyama serenely informed us that ideological conflict was over? When Zygmunt Bauman waxed lyrical about ‘liquid modernity’, Michael Mandelbaum speculated about the obsolescence of major wars and Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed the borderless world, flattened by markets and lubricated by technology?

Yes, well: these ideas have not aged like fine wine.

Far from dismantling fences and ushering in a frictionless utopia, the digital age has made fortification fashionable again. Border walls, missile shields and fortified strongholds are proliferating. Bunkers are booming — economically, if not always structurally.

And on the battlefield — from Gaza to Donbas — it isn’t data packets, viral hashtags, networks or narratives that are seizing territory. It’s bulldozers, concrete and men in trenches or ankle-deep artillery shell casings.

The war of the future, we were told, would be weightless, networked, almost antiseptic. While it is true that drone warfare has made a dramatic appearance as highly advanced form of surveillance and precision guided artillery, these new technologies have serviced very traditional modes of warfare. Instead of some new conception of war in the digital age, what we got instead was a flashback: steel, trenches and the long, grinding calculus of attrition.

War hasn’t dematerialised. It has reindustrialised — only now with high-definition targeting and better graphic design.

Ukraine: A Cautionary Tale in Three Acts and No Exit Plan

The Ukraine conflict was supposed to be a masterclass in Western strategic superiority — a proxy war in which Ukraine would draw upon NATO’s high-end technology, soft power, economic leverage and moral confidence to reduce Russia’s ambitions to rubble. Instead, it’s begun to resemble a doomed product launch — overpromised, underdelivered and still limping along on the exhaust fumes of its own marketing, too costly to cancel outright and too awkward to acknowledge as a failure.

Let’s count the miscalculations:

• Soft Power: Meant to win hearts and minds. But hearts, as it turns out, aren’t for sale — and minds are busy doomscrolling through drone footage on TikTok, or more often tuning out altogether. Influence, it seems, doesn’t flow so easily from Pride-flag waving embassies and finger-wagging hashtags.
• Economic Warfare: The so-called ‘sanctions from hell’ were supposed to crush the Russian economy in record time. Instead, Russia’s GDP has outpaced much of the Eurozone, while Germany’s once-vaunted industrial base has gone into self-induced hibernation — collateral damage in a moral crusade that forgot to run the numbers.
• Strategic Credibility: Once burnished by Cold War mystique, NATO’s reputation now wobbles somewhere between ceremonial relic and crisis PR firm. The alliance increasingly resembles a séance for departed strategic purpose — hands clasped around the table, muttering slogans, hoping the ghost of 1991 will manifest and tell them what to do. It lurches between virtue-signalling and threat inflation, unsure whether it’s meant to deter adversaries or simply reassure itself that it still matters.

The unspoken truth in all this is bleak but not especially complicated: strategically, Ukraine has already lost. So too — albeit less dramatically and more expensively — has Europe. And for anyone paying attention, this wasn’t an unpredictable ending. It was the opening scene, played out exactly as the script always hinted it would. Viewed alongside the other glittering triumphs of Western statecraft — Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria — it raises the uncomfortable question: why does strategic failure keep happening and who keeps hiring these people? At this point, a moderately alert housecat could have produced a more coherent grand strategy — if only by knocking the relevant documents off the table before they reached Cabinet.

BRICS and Mortar: Realignments in a Shattered Order

One of the most egregious strategic miscalculations — and one that yet again should have been foreseen by anyone not still mainlining end-of-history optimism — was the West’s attempt to isolate Russia. In practice, this bold stand for ‘rules-based order’ only served to hasten the very multipolarity it once dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. China and Russia are now closer than at any point since the Brezhnev era. BRICS, once dismissed as a loose acronym in search of a purpose, is gaining unexpected traction — with countries like Turkey and Indonesia now eyeing membership as a potentially better seat at the global table. De-dollarisation, once confined to fringe economists and survivalist blogs, is edging into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, the West’s effort to turn the ruble into rubble instead left it suspiciously intact — at times more stable than a few G7 currencies. Meanwhile, the grand strategy to ‘cancel’ Russia economically has largely backfired, inflicting more damage on Western industry than even the most vodka-marinated of Kremlin plotters might have dared to dream. German manufacturing sends its regards — from behind a padlocked factory gate.

Geopolitically, the unintended consequence is a slowly forming Eurasian compact: one increasingly convinced that the West — at least in its EU-NATO incarnation — is decadent, distracted and no longer capable of setting the global agenda. It’s not quite the overturning of the world order, but it’s one where states feel they have greater options than merely to choose between Western modernity and pariahdom. One thing is for certain, it is not the world order that Washington or Brussels believe they are still running.

Mass Isn’t Dead. It Just Moved East

For years, Western military doctrine enshrined speed, agility and precision as the hallmarks of modern war. Mass, by contrast, was treated as a dusty artefact — something best left in museums next to the flintlock and the bayonet. According to one set of commentators: “Mass is no longer a requirement for victory. Information superiority and speed of command will displace attritional warfare.” Large-scale mobilisation, in other words, was seen as a clunky relic of industrial wars: too slow, too costly, and too reminiscent of the bad old days when wars actually lasted longer than a news cycle.

Then came Ukraine. And Gaza. And with them, the blunt truth reasserted itself: mass matters. Industrial capacity — measured not in white papers but in shells, drones and replacement parts — still wins wars.

The hard numbers from Ukraine are telling:

• Russia is producing artillery shells at a ratio of roughly 3:1 over the combined output of the West.
• It manufactures more armoured vehicles, drones and missiles than all of NATO put together.
• It’s done all this without running up colossal debts or collapsing its domestic economy — relying instead on retrofitted Soviet factories and a grimly effective wartime mobilisation.

By contrast, the West struggles to supply even its own forces — let alone those of its Ukrainian proxy. The US production rate of SM-3 interceptor missiles, for example, is a grand total of 12 per year. That’s not a misprint. It’s barely enough to protect a single aircraft carrier, let alone a continent.

What we’re witnessing is not just a clash between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a collision between two theories of war: the Western model of information-age finesse, and the industrial-age brute force its strategists once declared obsolete. The former looks increasingly like a TED Talk. The latter, like it’s winning.

Manoeuvre vs Attrition: When Theory Meets Mud

Western military theory has long exalted manoeuvre warfare — rapid, fluid operations designed to outpace the enemy, strike weak points and collapse morale before a proper defence can even form. It’s a vision of war as ballet: swift and elegant, and preferably done by last orders at the wine bar. Attrition, by contrast, is treated as a kind of doctrinal embarrassment — too crude, too slow, too First World War.

But the battlefield, tells a different story.

Ukraine’s much-vaunted counter-offensives have bogged down in kilometre-deep minefields and trench networks that look like they were lifted from 1916. Russia’s static defences — dismissed early on as archaic — have proven not only resilient but maddeningly effective. Gaza, too, offers little comfort to the manoeuvrists: less lightning war, more bloodied crawl.

The promised revolution in precision warfare — guided missiles, smart bombs and real-time targeting — hasn’t rewritten the rules so much as underlined the old ones. ‘Smart’ weapons may hit what they aim at, but they don’t change the fact that the other side is still dug in, still shooting back, and often still there after the smoke clears.

What has emerged isn’t the war of tomorrow, but the war we thought we had left behind — less networked lethality and more Verdun with drones. And despite the glossy brochures, war, it turns out, still favours the side that can take a punch, not just throw one.

Operational Tempo: Fast, Dumb and Going Nowhere

Speed, we were assured, kills the enemy. Victory belongs to the swift. Wars must be fought fast, finished faster and ideally wrapped up in time for the next election cycle. The longer they drag on, the more politically toxic and strategically incoherent they become. But once again, theory has collided with reality — and reality, as usual, has no interest in being tidy, televised or tactically convenient.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Ukraine, the West’s ‘fast’ wars have displayed an unfortunate tendency to turn into drawn-out strategic purgatories. Initial momentum gives way to mission creep, political drift and tactical improvisation dressed up as doctrine. Tempo without purpose quickly devolves into noise. Being able to react faster doesn’t help much if you have no idea what you’re reacting to — or why.

What we’re left with is movement masquerading as progress. Digital velocity, for all its dashboards and situational awareness apps, is no match for old-fashioned things like strategic patience, industrial resilience or political staying power. The West has become excellent at starting wars quickly. It has rather less to show when it comes to finishing them.

Information Wars and the Hollow Victory

Few phrases have received more adoration in recent years than ‘information war’: the idea of gaining advantage by protecting access to information flows, while destroying and disrupting those of the adversary. Think tanks, officials and consultants alike have extolled the virtues of strategic communications, narrative shaping and viral content as if policy papers and social media posting could substitute for tanks.

Ukraine, by almost every Western measure, has won the information war hands-down: cinematic footage, clever memes and Zelensky’s branded defiance — all flawlessly packaged for global consumption. Most recently, this spectacle was crowned in early June by the daring drone strike against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet deep inside its own territory.

Launched from modified civilian lorry containers, the operation thrilled the op-ed writers but carried rather less charm for anyone concerned with nuclear stability, risking as it does, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and practically inviting Russian reprisals against Western targets. One can only hope Moscow — or any other future adversary — isn’t tempted to return the favour in kind. After all, there is a certain irony in Western commentators applauding such actions as bold and justified while assuming, quite serenely, that their own military bases will be sacrosanct.

But the point is though, that none of this moves the needle in Ukraine’s favour. It is Russia that occupies territory, fires more shells and steadily dictates the tempo of the war.

The paradox is hard to ignore: while Western commentators celebrated Kyiv’s narrative dominance and drone-delivered showmanship, Moscow focused on artillery. One side perfected the aesthetics of resistance; the other brought bulldozers and blasting tactics. It turns out that shaping perceptions doesn’t stop projectiles — and that going viral is no defence against shrapnel.

Winning the narrative, in other words, is not the same as winning the war. It may not even be relevant once the shells start falling.

The West’s Strategic Malaise: ‘Something Must Be Doneism’

Since the Cold War, Western wars have rarely been existential. They’ve been gestures — emotional reactions to tragedy, terrorism or televised horror. The political logic has been consistent, if not exactly strategic: be seen to act. It’s foreign policy as theatre — enough engagement to look principled, but not enough to get seriously hurt or to seriously imperil the national homeland.

The results speak for themselves. Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq — all launched with moral fanfare and media buzz, all ending in fatigue, withdrawal or the polite burying of lessons left unlearned.

Ukraine, however, is different. The stakes are higher. The adversary is stronger. And yet the habits remain the same. The West’s response has been a familiar mix: morally emphatic, logistically improvisational and industrially unsustainable. It’s as if NATO is attempting to wage a 20th-century land war on 21st-century terms — with 1990s stockpiles and attention spans measured in quarterly press briefings rather than prolonged campaigns.

In truth, many of these interventions seem designed less for the battlefield than for the curated stage of liberal respectability — crafted to win plaudits in opinion pages, panel discussions and policy forums where moral posturing always trumps material constraint. They are calibrated for the approval of the right-thinking, not the requirements of strategic success. Here, victory is optional, while virtue-signalling is mandatory.

Conclusion: Welcome to the Post-Post-Cold War

We were told the digital age would flatten borders, replace firepower with fibre optics and swap armies for narratives. Instead, we got trenches, mass mobilisation and a resurgent Eurasian bloc. It’s not quite the holographic future imagined by the PowerPoint prophets.

The West’s military models aren’t failing for lack of virtue, but because they’re built on expired assumptions. The future didn’t arrive on schedule — and the past, rather rudely, refused to stay buried.

What lessons emerge?

1. Industrial capacity matters: You can’t tweet your way to artillery shells.
2. Mass still wins wars: Precision is nice, but only if you have a lot of it.
3. Soft power is not eternal: A civilisation unsure of itself can’t expect others to follow its lead.
4. Digital illusions are just that: Cyberspace didn’t transcend the battlefield; it just added lag, disinformation and another excuse for inaction.

In the end, strategic success depends not on who reacts fastest or trends hardest, but on the dull, unglamorous verities that underlies modern war: production, patience and purpose.

And right now, those are in short supply west of the Dnieper.

By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 7/6/25

Sylvia Demarest is a retired trial lawyer.

On May 7^th this Substack published an essay titled: The Chicago School, law and economics, and the monopolization of the American economy. The essay discussed how the counter-revolution against the New Deal began at the University of Chicago with the organization of a Free-Market Study Group, how it progressed through the Mont Pelerin society, the Chicago School of Law and Economics, and various organizations, leading to the creation of neoliberalism and its takeover of our economy and legal system. This essay will further this discussion by reviewing the history that led to the judicial decisions creating corporate personhood, equating money with speech, dismantling the protections against usury, and allowing money to dominate our elections.

The end of “the great leveling” and the civil rights movement

The era between the New Deal and the rise of neoliberalism became known as “the great leveling”. This period was characterized by the historically low disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest people in our society. It was also a time of historically high economic growth, leading to the rise of a huge middle class in the USA.

Left out of this economic prosperity was a huge underclass of Black citizens burdened by economic and racial discrimination. The civil rights laws of the 1960’s were designed to address this discrimination, but the political backlash to these laws ended up undermining the political majorities that had voted for and benefited from the New Deal’s mixed economy.

This era was also characterized by anti-war fervor, race-baiting, and the rise of a segment of society labeled the “Silent majority”. After the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960’s, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” used the backlash to these laws to separate southern whites from the Democratic Party. Sadly, it was racial fear, resentment, and the militarism of the Vietnam War, that killed the political consensus behind the New Deal. Americans did not realize they were voting for laissez-faire economics, because Nixon was not campaigning on free market ideology, but on grievance and fear. The policy was bought and sold politically as a promise to stop the protests, stop the riots, and stop a civil rights movement the white majority believed had gone haywire, by opening public accommodations, and using bussing to integrate all white schools.

Economists in the emerging school of neoliberalism such as Alan Greenspan, Gary Becker, George Stigler, and Milton Freedman were suspicious of civil rights laws, despite finding discrimination distasteful. Economists, such as Gary Becker and Geroge Stigler argued that the answer to discrimination was the free market. In other words, government intervention in the economy had created discrimination. In a free market, they assumed, discrimination would die out because it created excess costs for the discriminatory white employer. These theories were wrong.

These economists were dreaming, there was no theoretical society where markets were efficient, opportunity was equal, and trade was based on price. Under Jim Crow, discrimination was not a cost, especially to whites who had long benefited from racial discrimination. Discrimination had created its own market forces. But, unfortunately, the damage to the New Deal consensus was done.

Neoliberalism re-defines corporate social obligations

Corporations are legal constructs created by social agreements and enforced by state law. The Constitution gives states the ultimate power over chartering and regulating the corporations they create. Corporations were historically seen as having public duties, not only because most had benefited from public investments, government contracts, and trade protections, but because state charters mandated these duties. In 1969 the chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission noted the power and influence of corporations in society urging them to “meet the needs of the nation as a whole.”

The civil rights crisis led to discussions about corporate civic obligations. These discussions were influenced by the publication of popular business books in the 1950’s and 1970’s. The outside Counsel of General Motors at the time, Donald Schwartz a partner at Williams & Connolly, noted that “social concerns should not be an afterthought but central to the corporate mission. “

Neoliberals such as Milton Freedman disagreed declaring that such statements were preaching nothing “but unadulterated socialism” that was “undermining free enterprise”. Freedman issued one insult after another; the idea of corporate responsibility was “faddish and unscientific”, “lacking in rigor”, and undermining the “foundations of a free society.” Friedman concluded that “corporations have no higher purpose than maximizing profits for their shareholders.”

Lewis Powell, the Powell Memo, and Powell’s tenure on the US Supreme Court

In February of 1971 one of the most significant documents in the neoliberal transformation of America was written by Lewis Powell. Powell, a well-respected corporate lawyer, issued a memorandum titled: “Attack On American Free Enterprise System”. The memo was addressed to Eugene Sydnor, Chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell claimed that the American economic system was “under attack”. The victim of the attack was the “American business executive”. Attacking consumer advocate, Ralph Nadar, directly Powell claimed that “economics” had to be protected from Nadar’s “economic illiteracy” about “tax loopholes” and other anti-corporate rhetoric. Putting the words rich and poor in quotations, Powell warned that setting “business against the people” was “the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics.”

Powell advocated two approaches to countering democratic demands on corporations. First, he advocated a long-term plan to change hearts and minds through propaganda via education and the media. Second, Powell advocated the quiet accumulation of legal and political power through legal changes hidden from public view. The first was addressed by the Chicago School of Law and Economics, and other organizations, including textbooks, publications, seminars, and training like-minded people to serve as scholars and jurists, The second was to change law itself through changes in judicial jurisprudence.

The US Chamber of Commerce organized a task force of 40 executives, funding was raised, and plans were set in motion to implement Powell’s recommendations. For example, in 1972 the Business Roundtable was organized and in 1973 the Heritage Foundation was founded. Other organizations founded as the result of the Powell Memo include, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, and the Manhattan Institute in 1978. Money from Coors, John Olin, the Bradelys, the Koch Brothers, and other wealthy businessmen provided long-term financial support for these efforts and the scholars and functionaries who carried out the resulting plans. A permanent structure supporting neoliberal policy and reforms was organized. This structure is still active today–all funded by tax deductible charitable contributions under 501 c 3 of the Internal Revenue Code.

Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court

Two months after issuing his memo, Powell was nominated by President Richard Nixon to become an associate justice of the US Supreme Court. Powell was 65 years old when he was nominated, too old to really take advantage of life tenure, but such tenure was not the reason for his appointment. Powell was appointed to inject changes in the law in specific areas, banking, corporate power, corporate personhood, money in politics, and interest rates. Powell proved to be extraordinarily effective.

Once Powell was confirmed in1972 he began to quietly transform the law. Over time Powell planted neoliberal principles into the law, empowering corporations while curtailing state power. Powell planted ideas into court jurisprudence that did not manifest for years. This was despite being considered a moderate. For example, the Burger Court decided Roe v. Wade, in 1973, with Powell voting with the majority.

Commercial Speech: One of the first cases providing Powell the opportunity to direct the law, was a case brought by Ralph Nader’s organization challenging a Virginia law prohibiting pharmacies from advertising drug prices. The case was Virginia State Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council Inc. The argument was that unlisted prices were harmful to consumers who could not seek better alternatives. The fatal error was to argue the case on First Amendment grounds, that prices were information the public wanted to hear. This allowed the First Amendment to be applied to commercial speech. While the consumer group did not ask the court to determine that prices (corporate speech) was protected by the First Amendment, they handed the Court the opportunity to make that distinction. The majority opinion, written by Justice Blackmon, opened the door through which Powell would maneuver the First Amendment toward the elimination of any distinction between corporate and individual speech.

Rehnquist was not fooled and dissented lamenting the elevation the advertisement of products to the ideological market place of ideas, seeing this as an over-extension of the First Amendment. Rehnquist concluded by arguing that the majority had not only failed to accord proper weight to the judgment of the legislature but that the protection of the First Amendment ought to be limited to political and social issues.

Campaign limits: The next significant case in 1976 was Buckley v. Valeo. The issue before the court was how much Congress could regulate campaign contributions without running afoul of the First Amendment. The case did not deal with “corporate speech” but with limits on spending by wealthy people on political campaigns. A complex 150-page opinion by the 5-person majority (including Powell) upheld many of the mandates but struck down the limits on individual spending. This meant that a person or group, including the candidate, could spend as much money as they wanted on a campaign. The majority waived away any government interest in protecting elections from “the corrosive influence of money” or in “equalizing” democratic participation, holding that the idea that the government could restrict the speech of some elements of society to enhance the voice of others was “wholly foreign to the First Amendment”.

The dissent was not fooled. Justices Marshall and White argued that the majority had evaded the law’s purpose and had enabled endless spending. Marshall argued that even the appearance that the political arena was the exclusive province of the wealthy was a valid governmental concern. Unfortunately, after Buckley the government’s hands were tied.

Corporate Free Speech: In 1977 the case of First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti came before the court. The issue was a long-standing Massachusetts law that prohibited corporate spending on ballot initiatives unrelated to the company’s business. The case divided the court. Some justices felt that since corporations were creatures of state law, the state had the right to regulate them. Rehnquist again raised the same red flags he had raised in Virginia Pharmacy and quoted Chief Justice John Marshall who had clearly distinguished the First Amendment rights of corporations from those of natural persons.

Powell sprung the trap, pointing out in a memo to the court that it was “too late” to hold that persons who elect to do business in the corporate form could not express opinions through the corporation, and for the court to turn its back on this now would be a serious infringement of corporate First Amendment rights. Powell wrote the opinion stating that there was “no question” that corporations had First Amendment rights, but how far those rights extended. Powell’s response was they extend very far.

In the case of Central Hudson Gas and Electric v. Public Service Commission of New York in 1980, Powell took the opportunity to carry the court further along in interpreting the First Amendment as a shield for corporations against state regulatory laws.

The progression of cases: Each of these decisions can be seen as a step-by-step process leading to the 5-4 decision in 2010 in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission, eviscerating federal laws on campaign spending and endorsing corporate personhood and First Amendment rights for money as majority jurisprudence. In doing so the court relied heavily on Buckley.

The progression is as follows: Buckley cleared away all constraints on political spending by wealthy donors and groups; while Virginia Pharmacy, Bellotti, Central Hudson Gas, and Citizen’s United extended free speech protections to corporations. Citizen’s United cleared the last remaining barriers protecting democracy from the corrupting influence of money. Now we have “dark money” and “soft money” as well as protection for commercial speech and for money, in effect, using the First Amendment to achieve deregulatory goals amounting to theft, waste, and graft. This is also known as empowering “rent seeking”. This kind of corruption increasingly crowds out productive activity.

Neoliberalism has succeeded, and in the process, has corrupted the First Amendment and the Constitution.

The impact on campaign spending: After the Buckley case the amounts spent on presidential campaigns rose from $20 million in 1960–to $107 million in 1980–to $186 million in 1992–to $300 million in 2000–to $696 million in 2004–to $1 billion in 2008, to $2 billion in 2016–to $14.4 billion in 2020–to who knows how much in 2024. These amounts do not include “dark money” nor the cost of other campaigns at the local, state, and federal level.

State laws on corporate campaign donations: Many states, including Montana, had laws on their books banning corporations from contributing to political campaigns. Montana’s law was passed in 1912. In the case of American Tradition Partnership Inc v. Bullock, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that law. In 2012 a 5-4 decision the United States Supreme Court reversed that decision citing United Citizens as precedent. The Brennan Center had submitted an Amicus supporting the law, to no avail. There are no longer any state laws restricting corporations from spending money on political campaigns.

Usury and interest rates: For decades many states had limits on the interest that could be charged on debt. The case of “Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp.” decided in 1978 established that state anti-usury laws cannot be enforced against nationally chartered banks based in other states. This allowed banks and other business to charge higher interest rates. This ruling enabled banks to offer credit cards with interest rates that exceed state limits. One state that allowed unlimited interest to be charged was South Dakota, where most of the credit card companies are now domiciled. This means credit card customers who cannot pay their balances in full every month, are charged as much as 35% interest on their balances.

The centrality of Alan Greenspan, and the Fed, to the survival of neoliberalism

It is difficult to express the dichotomy between what economists like Alan Greenspan, Milton Freedman, George Steigler were preaching about the “free market” and the actual results of these policies. The example of Greenspan’s economic legacy clearly demonstrates this dichotomy.

Before the outbreak of the Watergate Scandal, President Nixon asked Alan Greenspan to head up the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. By the time Greenspan took the job in 1972, Nixon had resigned. Greenspan remained part of the inner circle of presidential advisors for every subsequent president except for Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). Perhaps no other individual left more of a mark on the US and the global economy than Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan was made Chairman of the Federal Reserve by President Ronald Reagan in 1987–he served until 2006. By the time he left office, Greenspan held more power over global markets than any president he had served.

Here’s Mehrsa Baradaran:

“Greenspan’s legacy as Fed chairman was a financial system so reliant on Fed support that it is near impossible today to delineate where government economic policy ends and financial markets begin. In crisis after crisis, Greenspan’s policy “stabilized” the market, which led banks to take risks with confidence that the Fed would step in to save them, if necessary. The libertarian economist who once convinced Nixon that the only solution to America’s apartheid regime was “to help the Negro help themselves” took a much more helpful stance towards the market. Each time a crisis loomed, Greenspan plied banks with loans, bought distressed assets to place on the Fed’s balance sheets, lowered interest rates, purchased Treasury bonds to boost bank profits, and promised any“backstops” necessary to return banks to profitability. The measures were so common that they came to be called “the Greenspan put”.

The policies followed by Alan Greenspan were completely different from the free-market rhetoric employed by the neoliberals. The result of Greenspan’s policies? Wall Street profits are guaranteed by the public, and wealth is transferred from the bottom to the top of the economy. Meanwhile, the risk of loss is transferred from the wealthy to public. This is the exact opposite of what neoliberalism promised.

Neoliberalism should be seen not as a reaction to socialism abroad or Keynesianism at home, or even as a backlash against the Civil Rights movement, but as a clever way for entrenched power to gain and keep wealth and power.

Conclusion

The contribution of people like Alan Greenspan and Lewis Powell to our current political and economic reality has been enormous. Lewis Powell contributed to the creation of an infrastructure supporting neoliberalism that endures to this day, making political and economic reforms more difficult. Justice Powell contributed to a jurisprudence that gives corporations the same constitutional protections as people and deems the spending of money equivalent to speech. This jurisprudence has turned our democracy into an auction were politicians and policies are sold to the highest bidder. Yet, many of these decisions was by a bare majority of the court, 5 to 4, and could be reversed by a similar majority.

There is dwindling public support for neoliberal policies or for the corrupting influence of money in politics. Unfortunately, the public is uninformed about the history of how these policies and opinions came about. If properly informed, there is little doubt the vast majority would support serious reforms in every area discussed in the Substack. This is why education and discussion are so important. Please, help spread the word by encouraging your friends to sign up for a free subscription to this Substack so we can continue to explore where we are, how we got here, and what can be done to reform our politics and economics.

***

On a related note, The Lever reported on July 8th the following:

Citizens United 2.0, here we come. While corporate interests spent a whopping $2 billion secretly influencing the 2024 election, the dark money problem is poised to get even worse. That’s because the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this fall that could abolish some of the last barriers separating political candidates and wealthy donors’ unlimited buckets of cash. National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, which originated from a lawsuit by now-Vice President JD Vance, is a corruption bomb designed to allow SCOTUS to permit more unfettered, untraceable corporate election influence than it did in its landmark 2010 Citizens United decision. 

Friends in high places. While Vance has since exited the case, he and his colleagues filed suit in 2022 against federal restrictions limiting coordination between national party committees and candidates. If those rules are abolished, corporate interests could spend freely on these committees as an end-run around limits on how much they can directly give candidates. While the suit lost in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, several of the judges agreed with its argument and urged SCOTUS to take up the case — including one who formerly employed Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, when she worked as a law clerk.

The gang’s all here. Before SCOTUS took up the case, a who’s who of conservative heavyweights filed amicus briefs urging it to do so. That included not just the Republican Governors Association and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.), but also the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, D.C.’s most powerful business lobbying group, and the Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit funded by the Leonard Leo-helmed dark money network that helped install five of the six current conservative justices. Even the Trump Justice Department joined in, admitting in its brief that while it “has a longstanding policy of defending challenged federal statutes,” the campaign finance law in question “violates core First Amendment rights.”

Get ready to rumble. SCOTUS also allowed three major Democratic groups — the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — to intervene in the high-stakes case. Depending on the results, the decision could further corporate power’s decades-long master plan to legalize corruption. As one Sixth Circuit judge warned, the case has the potential to allow “the Supreme Court to rework campaign finance, First Amendment, and constitutional law in new and audacious ways.”

Reporting contributed by Joel Warner

By Kamal Shahin, New Lines Magazine, 5/26/25

Kamal Shahin is a Syrian journalist who worked for decades covering political and social issues

The Syrian army’s failure to repel a modest opposition attack on Aleppo in December, which ultimately culminated in the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, defies explanation. 

The opposition’s military strength and its use of drones were contributing factors, no doubt, but they were hardly enough. The Syrian army had previously reclaimed vast swaths of territory from rebel forces. By the summer of 2024, Assad’s government controlled two-thirds of the country. The sudden unraveling and the conventional explanations behind it belie what unfolded beneath the surface of the military event itself.

In a previous interview with New Lines, a high-ranking Syrian officer, who recounted the final days of the regime’s existence, disclosed a revealing detail that I decided to spend some time pursuing. A closer examination revealed it to be the key to understanding the regime’s collapse from a different angle, not merely as a logistical or battlefield failure, but as the result of a silent, invisible war. 

The snippet of information was this: A mobile application, distributed quietly among Syrian officers via a Telegram channel, had spread rapidly in their ranks. In truth, the app was a carefully planted trap, the opening salvo of a hidden cyberwar — perhaps one of the first of its kind against a modern army. Militias had weaponized smartphones, turning them into lethal instruments against a regular military force.

Beyond revealing the contours of a cyberattack against the Syrian army, this investigation seeks to understand the application itself, its technology and reach, and to uncover the nature of the information it siphoned from within military ranks. This, in turn, leads directly to the potential impact on Syria’s military operations.

The larger question remains: Who orchestrated the cyberattack, and to what end?

The answers may point to players within the conflict itself — factions of the Syrian opposition, regional or international intelligence services, or other, still unseen hands. In any case, the attack must be understood within its full political and military context.

In February 2020, a mobile phone left behind by a Syrian soldier inside a Russian-made Pantsir-S1 air defense vehicle helped to turn the entire system into a fireball. Israeli forces tracked the phone’s signal, pinpointed the battery’s location, and launched a swift airstrike that obliterated the system before it could be rearmed. The incident, revealed by Valery Slugin, the chief designer behind the Pantsir system, in an interview with the Russian news agency TASS, showed how a single mobile phone could trigger catastrophe, whether by design or by sheer ignorance. 

The consequences were devastating: critical equipment and personnel were lost at a moment when the army could least afford it. The soldier responsible — a survivor of the Israeli strike — may have been an informant or a recruited agent or, more likely, had no grasp of the damage he had caused. According to Slugin, all communication devices, such as phones or radios, should have been shut off during operations, and the battery location changed immediately after launching missiles to avoid detection. These are standard security protocols. Yet the Syrian crew’s failure to follow them turned an ordinary phone into a beacon, a live marker that guided the enemy’s strike straight to its target.

By the basic logic of military science, the Syrian authorities should have launched a full investigation after the Pantsir’s destruction — banning mobile phones within the ranks or devising countermeasures to stop them from becoming roving surveillance nodes. But that never happened. The Syrian army, this time and many times after, behaved with the same fatal irresponsibility — and paid for it dearly.

What was most striking after the events of Nov. 27, and the fall of Aleppo to the opposition, was how suddenly the Syrian army ceased to fight. Most units simply watched as opposition forces advanced, offering little more than sporadic resistance until the rebels reached the outskirts of Damascus on the morning of Dec. 8. In the rural areas of Idlib and Aleppo, opposition factions swept past dozens of positions belonging to brigades of the 25th and 30th Divisions, as well as narrow outposts in hilly terrain. They covered more than 40 miles in just 48 hours.

By then, the Syrian army was a shadow of its former self. After a decade of grinding warfare, marked by tens of thousands of casualties and irreparable material and moral losses, there was little strength left to rally. Years of conflict had left the forces battered not just by battlefield defeats, but by a more insidious collapse from within: The Syrian pound’s freefall, from 50 pounds to the dollar in 2011 to 15,000 in 2023, had turned soldiers’ and officers’ salaries into a cruel joke — barely $20 a month. Many no longer fought for “the country and the leader,” but simply to survive. Transportation costs had doubled; the salary of a high-ranking officer could no longer feed a family. One officer from the 47th Regiment recalled that they often received only half of their scheduled meals, made up of half-raw, unprepared food. In many units, a privileged few officers dined separately, which fueled bitter resentment among the rank and file.

Beyond the economic collapse, worsened in part by Western sanctions, Syria had, by 2018, sunk into a deep military and political stagnation. Fronts grew paralyzed. Morale sagged. Commanders reinvented themselves as smugglers of Captagon and fugitives. Meanwhile, the regime clung stubbornly to power, rejecting even the most pragmatic solutions, whether offered by yesterday’s enemies among Arab states, by Turkey or by the West.

The stagnation, and the suffocating sense of a future foreclosed, birthed a grotesque kind of entrepreneurship within the army. Officers and soldiers no longer focused on military duties; they scrambled for any opportunity that might sustain them. They traded anything and everything just to stay alive, without exaggeration.

Imagine an army where officers sold the remains of stale bread rations meant for their men. Where senior officers bought solar panels and rented out charging services to soldiers desperate to light their shelters or charge their phones. It seems those who thought to weaponize this moment knew exactly what they were looking at — and what they could exploit.

In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development.

To Syrians, the Syria Trust for Development was a familiar institution: a humanitarian organization offering material aid and services, overseen by Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife. It had never ventured into the military sphere. None of the officers or sources we spoke to could explain how the app found its way into army hands. The likeliest explanations point to collusion by compromised officers — or a sophisticated deception.

What lent the app its credibility was that its name and information were publicly available. To heighten its aura of authenticity, and to control its spread, the app was distributed exclusively through a Telegram channel also bearing the name Syria Trust for Development, hosted on the platform but lacking any formal verification. The app, promoted as an initiative personally endorsed by the first lady, sidestepped scrutiny: If her name was attached, few questioned its legitimacy, or the financial promises it lured them with.

The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.”

The expected answer was clear: financial help. In return, users would supposedly receive monthly cash transfers of around 400,000 Syrian pounds — roughly $40 at the time — sent anonymously via local money transfer companies. Sending small sums across Syria, whether under real or fictitious names, required nothing more than a phone number, and the black market was teeming with intermediaries ready to facilitate such transfers.

On the surface, the app appeared to offer a special service for officers. Its first disguise was a humanitarian one: claiming to support the “heroes of the Syrian Arab Army” through a new initiative, while showcasing photos of real activities from the official Syria Trust for Development website.

The second mask was emotional, employing reverent language that praised the soldiers’ sacrifices: “They give their lives so that Syria may live with pride and dignity.” The third was nationalistic, and framed the app as a “patriotic initiative” designed to bolster loyalty, and this mask proved the most persuasive.

The fourth mask was visual: The app’s name, both in English and Arabic, mirrored the official organization exactly. Even the logo was an identical replica of Syria Trust’s emblem.

Once downloaded, the app opened a simple web interface embedded within the application, which redirected users to external websites that didn’t display in the app bar. The sites, syr1.store and syr1.online, mimicked the official domain of Syria Trust (syriatrust.sy). The use of “syr1,” an abbreviation of Syria, in the domain name seemed plausible enough, and few users paid much mind. In this case, no special attention was given to the URL; it was simply assumed to be trustworthy.

To access the questionnaire, users were asked to submit a series of seemingly innocent details: full name, wife’s name, number of children, place and date of birth. But the questions quickly escalated into riskier territory: the user’s phone number, military rank and exact service location down to the corps, division, brigade and battalion.

Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.

According to an analysis by a Syrian software engineer, what the officers dismissed as a tedious questionnaire was, in reality, a data entry form for military algorithms, turning their phones into live printers that generated highly accurate battlefield maps. “The majority of officers often ignored security protocols,” the engineer said. “I doubt any of them realized that behind these innocent-looking forms, traps were laid for them with the innocence of a wolf.” He added that while the mechanism of espionage was technically old, it remained devastatingly effective, especially given the widespread ignorance of cyberwarfare within the Syrian army.

At the bottom of the application’s web page, another trap lay in wait: an embedded Facebook contact link. This time, the user’s social media credentials were siphoned directly to a remote server, quietly stealing access to personal accounts. If the victim somehow escaped the first snare, there was a good chance they would fall into the second. 

After harvesting basic information through embedded phishing links, the attack moved to its second stage: deploying SpyMax, one of the most popular Android surveillance tools. SpyMax is an advanced version of SpyNote, notorious on the black market, and typically distributed through malicious APK files (files designed to install mobile apps on Android phones), disguised on fake download portals that appear legitimate. Crucially, SpyMax does not require root access (the highest level of access to the phone’s operating system) to function, making it dangerously easy for attackers to compromise devices. While original versions of the software sell for around $500, hacked versions are also freely available. In this case, the spyware was planted via the same Telegram channel that distributed the fake Syria Trust app and installed on officers’ phones under the guise of a legitimate application.

SpyMax has all the functions of RAT (Remote Access Trojan) software, including keylogging to steal passwords and intercept text messages; data extraction of confidential files, photos and call logs; and access to the camera and microphone, allowing real-time surveillance of victims. 

Once connected, the victim can appear on an attacker’s dashboard, the live feed displaying everything from call logs to file transfers, depending on the functions selected.

The spyware targeted Android versions as old as Lollipop — an operating system launched in 2015 — meaning a broad range of both older and newer devices were vulnerable. An examination of the permissions granted to the app showed it had access to 15 sensitive functions, the most critical among them including tracking live locations and monitoring soldiers’ movements and military positions, eavesdropping on calls, recording conversations between commanders to uncover operational plans in advance, extracting documents like maps and sensitive files from officers’ phones and camera access allowing the person who launched the spyware to, potentially, remotely broadcast footage of military facilities.

Once the initial information was extracted, fake servers took over, routing data through anonymous cloud platforms to make tracing the source of the malware nearly impossible. The app was also signed with forged security certificates, much like a thief donning a fake police uniform to slip past security. The attack combined two deadly elements: psychological deception (phishing) and advanced cyberespionage (SpyMax). The evidence suggests the malware was operational and the infrastructure ready before June 2024, five months before the launch of the operation that led to the Assad regime’s collapse.

A review of the domains associated with Syr1.store revealed six linked domains, one of which was registered anonymously. Through SpyMax, whoever was behind the app extracted a devastating range of data from the officers’ phones, including their ranks and identities, whether they were responsible for sensitive posts and their geographical locations (possibly in real time). They would have access to troop concentrations, phone conversations, text messages, photos and maps on officers’ devices, and be able to monitor military facilities remotely. The phishing site itself collected myriad sensitive data from military personnel, including their full names, names of family members, ranks and service positions, dates and places of birth and Facebook login credentials if they used the social media contact form.

The potential uses are also myriad, and would have allowed the operators to pinpoint gaps in defensive lines, which were exploited in Aleppo, as well as locating weapons depots and communication hubs, and assessing the real size and strength of deployed troops. It would have allowed those with access to the information to launch surprise attacks on exposed sites, potentially cutting off supplies to isolated military units, issue contradictory orders to troops and sow confusion among military cadres, in addition to blackmailing the officers. 

It’s at least clear that the Assad regime’s enemies benefited from the app in some way — although exactly how is difficult to confirm, and it is difficult to surmise who was behind it. For example, one of the domains linked to the hackers appears to be hosted in the United States, which had ties to the armed opposition, but the location of the server could have been masked as a misdirection. Israeli airstrikes in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the regime destroyed almost the entire conventional military capacity of Syria, and one Syrian army officer, who served in the air defense units of Tartous Governorate, told New Lines that the application had been active at his site. That meant that Syrian officers had already, through their own carelessness, uploaded the blueprints of Syria’s defensive fronts to a cloud server — accessible to anyone who knew where to look.

But the compromised data could have also been helpful to the opposition, which carried out attacks such as a clandestine operation targeting the military joint operations room in Aleppo, which this magazine previously reported on, leading up to the broader campaign that unseated Assad. 

And perhaps this is what makes this spyware unique: While other spyware operations have largely targeted individuals, like the use of the application Pegasus to spy on activists in the Middle East, this particular campaign seems to have been focused on compromising an entire military institution through a primitive but devastating phishing attack. 

It is difficult to determine exactly how many phones were compromised in the attack, but the number is likely in the thousands. A story published on the same Telegram channel in mid-July noted that 1,500 money transfers had been sent that month, with other posts referencing additional rounds of money distribution. None of those who received money through the app agreed to speak with me, citing security concerns.

Compromised military command may also help explain some of the stranger episodes that surrounded the regime’s collapse, in addition to the rapid military success of the opposition’s campaign.

One example is the exchange of fire that erupted on Dec. 6, 2024, between forces loyal to two senior Syrian commanders — Maj. Gen. Saleh al-Abdullah and Maj. Gen. Suhail al-Hassan — in the Hama region’s Sibahi Square. At the time, at least 30,000 Syrian army fighters had gathered in the area. According to witnesses, al-Abdullah issued orders for a southern withdrawal, while al-Hassan commanded his forces to advance north and engage opposition units. The conflicting commands led to a firefight between the two factions that raged for more than two hours. This clash can also be explained by the likelihood that each commander had received contradictory orders, either due to direct infiltration of the command structure or because external actors were using compromised channels to issue false instructions. It remains unclear how much of the command might have been compromised.

In an interview with Syria TV following the fall of the Assad regime, Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria’s interim leader, revealed additional details about Operation Deterrence of Aggression, the name given to the campaign that ousted the former dictator. He stated that planning for the operation had spanned five years and that the Syrian regime had known about it, but failed to stop it. This, he emphasized, is a matter of certainty.

How did he know? 

It is unlikely that any one thread that can be traced in the dramatic fall of the Syrian regime was responsible for unraveling the entirety of the system, and the story of the days leading up to the final campaign may never be fully uncovered. But the Syrian Trojan horse may point to one significant part of that story.

By Phar Kim Beng and Luthfy Hamzah, Asia Times, 5/19/25

It may seem paradoxical that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is now deepening its engagement with Russia after publicly reaffirming its commitment to “sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity” in a communique soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Yet ASEAN’s diplomatic posture should be viewed not through the lens of moral idealism but rather strategic realism. For ASEAN and this year’s chair, Malaysia, engagement is not endorsement.

Rather, it is a highly conscious effort to anchor Russia within an evolving regional framework that prizes dialogue over confrontation and sustains a long-standing tradition of hedging and strategic autonomy amid major power rivalries.

Last week’s meeting between Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow—expected to be followed by Putin’s attendance at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Kuala Lumpur in October 2025—marks a critical moment.

ASEAN was never meant to be a sanctions-driven alliance, nor an adjudicator of great power misconduct. It is a convening architecture—ASEAN+1, ASEAN+3, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF)—that emphasizes inclusion, consensus and continuous dialogue.

It was designed precisely to accommodate rivals, outliers and even belligerents on the assumption that talking is always better than total disengagement. Thus, engaging Russia through ASEAN channels is not a contradiction—it is the essence of ASEAN diplomacy.

Welcoming Moscow to the EAS in Kuala Lumpur is a diplomatic bet that Russia may still be seeking avenues of cooperation over confrontation. It is also a message to the world that ASEAN does not subscribe to bloc politics or enforced isolation as a pathway to peace.

Avoiding a Bipolar Trap

Malaysia and ASEAN envision an Indo-Pacific that is diverse, multipolar and strategically balanced—not one held hostage by zero-sum US-China dynamics. ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) is a clear expression of this intent.

Russia’s involvement, alongside India, Japan, South Korea and Australia, ensures that no single hegemon dominates the regional agenda. This multiplicity is ASEAN’s insurance policy and safeguard against being subsumed by external rivalries.

For this reason, a constructive Russian role in East Asia is not only acceptable—it is essential. It helps ASEAN retain policy flexibility and geopolitical space, allowing it to maneuver without choosing sides in an increasingly polarized world.

Even amid sanctions and international condemnation, Russia remains a relevant economic actor. It is a major exporter of energy, fertilizer and arms. Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets remain in active service in Malaysia’s air force. Countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia still maintain defense ties with Moscow, recognizing both cost-effectiveness and strategic diversification.

Severing these links in the name of moral absolutism may satisfy some, but it could erode national security and economic resilience across Southeast Asia. For ASEAN, continued technical cooperation with Russia is not about blind dependence—it is about avoiding overreliance on any one country or bloc, especially in defense and energy security.

Russia’s activities in Central Asia, the Arctic and along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) may seem remote, but they matter for ASEAN’s long-term connectivity agenda.

The convergence of Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) signals an emerging transcontinental corridor that could reshape Asia-Europe trade flows, complementing ASEAN’s regional integration ambitions.

Engagement, therefore, offers ASEAN influence—however subtle—over the trajectory of Russian involvement in Eurasian and Arctic dynamics. By including Russia in multilateral dialogues, ASEAN helps steer that engagement toward peaceful integration rather than exclusionary blocs.

Defining Russian test

Putin’s potential visit to Malaysia in October 2025—potentially his first ever—will be closely watched far and wide, including in Washington. Putin’s visit would be more than protocol; it would be a test of whether Russia can conduct diplomacy on ASEAN’s terms, i.e. inclusive, peaceful and future-oriented.

Will Russia remain trapped in historical resentments and revisionist impulses? Or will it see the summit as a moment to reset its engagement with Asia? The ball, diplomatically speaking, is in Moscow’s court.

Malaysia, as the pivotal summit’s host, has an opportunity to send a clear signal. Prime Minister Anwar’s stated personal commitment to justice, multilateralism and civilizational dialogue gives him standing to engage Putin—not as an apologist, but as a moral and strategic interlocutor.

In an era defined by economic fragmentation and great power antagonism, ASEAN’s outreach to Russia is not a betrayal of values—it is a reclaiming of diplomacy’s purpose. To isolate a nuclear power is to risk escalation; to engage it is to seek transformation.

Russia, under the right conditions, could evolve from a source of disruptive conflict to a contributor to regional stability. The 2025 East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur will be its opportunity to show that such a transformation is possible.

ASEAN, and especially Malaysia, are offering the table. The question now is: will Russia take the seat and rise to the occasion?