Throughout the 20-year US military presence in Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents knew there would be a time limit. As they put it: “You have the clocks, but we have the time.” American technological dominance on the battlefield would be no match, they believed, for Washington’s ability to get distracted.
Two trillion dollars and 20 years, it turned out, were the extent of the US commitment to Afghanistan, which ended chaotically in 2021. Now, it is Russia, stalemated in Ukraine, that is counting on the west’s attention-deficient foreign policy: We Shall Outlast Them — the title of a new book by Hanna Notte, a Russia specialist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, about Russia’s strategy to frustrate western sanctions.
Notte’s is one of three new books, along with American Overthrow by Keir Giles and The Steppe and Its Empires by Michael Khodarkovsky, that approach Russia from very different directions but converge on a question that has become central to the outcome of the war with Ukraine. How the conflict will end hinges to some extent on the strength and staying power of Kyiv’s western backers. What if the west is too marginal, or too fractured, or too imaginary a concept, to prevail?
What if Moscow is right that time is on its side? Russia has absorbed extraordinary battlefield losses and been cut off from much of the western economy without either abandoning the war or becoming the international pariah that many predicted.
Russia’s desperate bet is not simply that Ukraine will eventually buckle, but that the coalition sustaining it will fail (many would argue that it already has).
The “west”, Moscow reckons, is neither as cohesive nor as universal as it was just a few years ago: split by the election of Donald Trump and ignored by much of the global south, which continues to do business as usual with Russia. But, as Khodarkovsky’s book suggests, behind Moscow’s bluster about the west may lie a much older argument about Russia’s place in the world and an erratic relationship to Europe that nourishes hegemonic ambition.
Russia’s efforts to outlast the west have reshaped the country’s international relations, Notte argues. But far from retreating into North Korea-style or Iran-style isolation, the opposite has happened: “Many expected the country to turn into an international pariah following the invasion of Ukraine. But in fact, the war marked the arrival of a newly outward-facing Russia,” she writes.
While Russia’s economy has been severely debilitated, it has been kept afloat by some of the perverse impacts of energy sanctions, which arguably have raised the price of energy in the west and lowered it for India as well as China. “Embracing an unexpected opportunity to buy cheap oil, India had thrown Russia the most critical of economic lifelines,” she says.
Opec refused US efforts to keep prices low and starve Russia of revenues, while Dubai became a hub for Russia’s shell game of shadow-fleet tankers. “Russian oil money kept flowing,” Notte writes; meanwhile, western states were stuck “playing a game of Whac-a-Mole”.
Beijing, in particular, has helped keep Russia in the war, through trade and exports of needed technology. The cost is Russia’s dependency: “A deepening vassalage to China was the price Putin was willing to pay for chasing his dream of dominating Ukraine.”
But the primary tool for moulding a world order more amenable to Russia, Notte makes clear, was its ability, honed during the cold war, to exploit conflicts for leverage. Moscow has flexed its muscles in Kazakhstan and supported the pro-Russia Georgian Dream party to victory in elections where the example of Ukraine weighed heavily on voters.
Notte’s final chapter also touches on what may be Russia’s most decisive foreign policy success to date: the re-election of Donald Trump as US president, which has fractured the west’s resolve amid disputes over tariffs and Greenland. Whether Russia coincidentally benefited from a fortuitous crisis in US politics or actively engineered Trump’s election is a hotly debated topic.
American Overthrow, by Chatham House Russia analyst Keir Giles, meticulously catalogues the evidence surrounding Russia’s support for Trump, arguing that the latter represents “Moscow’s Endgame in its Long War with Washington.”
Moscow is on the verge of winning, he argues, “not through the overt and visible cataclysmic clash of their militaries or their nuclear weapons that was so long feared, but instead through the long and covert campaign to erode America from within.”
The book is a fascinating view of American politics through the eyes of an observer intimately familiar with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Giles assembles an impressively detailed list of parallels: Trump has weakened the judiciary; brought media to heel through pressure on parent companies and owners; and sent armed paramilitaries to terrorise communities where political opposition flourishes.
“And the same driving principles of power in Russia, of exploitation of the masses by a tiny elite at the top of a pyramid of corruption, are the dominant features of a new political system being forged in the United States,” he writes.
While Giles cites convincing evidence of Trump’s authoritarian tactics, the question of how much of this has to do with Putin’s government is not entirely settled. It is easy to show, for example, that Russia enthusiastically supported Trump’s campaign, and that it benefits from his actions. But those are not the same as saying that the Kremlin actually orchestrated Trump’s coming to power and that it continues to manipulate US politics through him.
It would be hard to imagine that Russian spy agencies such as the GRU — which left a half-used container of novichok in a bin down the street from a covert assassination attempt in Salisbury in 2018 — would be capable of the discipline, secrecy and skill needed to get a Russian asset elected US president and then engineer wholesale takeover of the most Moscow-phobic political party in the US.
And yet it is the very scale and suddenness of the upending of American politics that begs some explanation. The alternative to the Russia conspiracy — that a large chunk of the American political class is suddenly overcome with admiration for Putin’s natural charisma and his successful record — is just as hard to believe.
There are some Trump policies that frankly have no other explanation than that they were inspired by — or originated in — Moscow. In 2025 the White House published a National Security Strategy that mimicked many points in similar Russian documents. It criticised US elites bent on “permanent American domination of the entire world.” It worried about America’s “cultural health” and said that woke policies threatened Europe with “civilizational erasure”. It described international relations in terms of great powers establishing spheres of influence.
The year before the White House published its strategy, Putin signed a foreign policy doctrine that laid out a symmetrical vision. It described Russia as a “unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that brings together the Russian people and other peoples belonging to the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world.”
The word “civilization” is doing a lot of work here. While Russia traditionally took pride in its European identity, now it is a “unique country-civilization”, rejecting the west while coveting the imperial territories that Moscow used to control.
Michael Khodarkovsky’s The Steppe Empires covers the historical roots of this Eurasian identity, and is well timed. A historian at Loyola University Chicago of Russia’s interaction with steppe peoples from the Mongols to Turks and the Kalmyks, he has one eye on the present day, where he is at pains to explain that he is not trying to do the Kremlin a favour by backing it up intellectually.
The political usefulness of this historical legacy is probably obvious, he says, describing it as a “culmination of the Kremlin’s desperate search for an ideology that both justified its geopolitical ambitions and launched Russia on the path to revanchism.”
That doesn’t mean it is not true though. “Ironically, the Kremlin’s spin masters’ claim of Eurasianism is perfectly valid; Russia has always been a thoroughly hybrid society, with roots and territories in both Europe and Asia,” he writes.
Khodarkovsky’s analysis starts with the end of the Golden Horde’s control of Muscovy, in the 15th century, and the rise of Ivan the Terrible. The interaction of Russia with the steppe nomads, he argues, follows a startlingly predictable pattern. He demonstrates this by tracing the commonalities between the Russian Empire as one of five empires formed at around the same time at the peripheries of Eurasia through similar interaction with inner Asian steppe nomads: Qing China, Safavid Iran, the Mughal Empire and Ottoman Turkey.
Rather than natural boundaries, steppe empires faced constant flux in borders. Khodarkovsky is not the first academic to argue that historical and geographic factors have shaped Russia’s perception of its interests. Richard Pipes and George Kennan have argued that a lack of natural boundaries and constant threats predisposed Russia to conquest and centralisation.
Khodarkovsky argues that the “defining feature of the Eurasian empires was their military-bureaucratic nature, with a primary focus on war preparation and management.” Slavery flourished, and absolute centralisation of power did not permit European-style feudalism until very late and only in some cases. “The Eurasian dichotomy of suzerain versus subject left little room in between,” he writes.
A further project that would be interesting is a study of these heirs of the “steppe empires” in the present day and the use to which they have put their common historical legacy. Khodarkovsky stops short of drawing this out. The steppe empires “were fundamentally different from the West in social, economic, ideological, legal, and cultural ways, just as their successors, the states of Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China, remain today quite distant from Europe’s liberal democracies.” Most are authoritarian, and most are uneasy about their inheritance: China describes the late Qing as a “century of humiliation”, while India’s Hindu nationalists see the Mughals as a Muslim dark age. Turkey broke with its past under Kemal Atatürk but has flirted with its roots amid repeated rejections by the European Union.
Of these, only Russia has recently grabbed its steppe legacy with both hands, as it seeks to use history to rationalise the present. It is a useful idea at home, where it turns authoritarianism into tradition, and abroad, where a world of competing civilisations has no universal “west” entitled to set the rules.
It also lends historical grandeur to the strategy described by Notte. Russia does not have to defeat the west so much as wait for the age of western predominance to pass.
We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte WW Norton £24, 320 pages
American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in its Long War with Washington by Keir Giles Hurst £18.99, 384 pages
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts by Michael KhodarkovskyYale University Press £20/$30, 224 pages
Charles Clover is the FT’s defence and security correspondent
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