When Did Donald Trump Decide He Wanted to Destroy the Western Alliance?

To understand what is going on today, maybe we have to go back to the !980s when Donald Trump was first cultivated by the KGB.

Jan 13, 2026

In 1987, just after he returned from the Soviet Union and began an abortive run for president, Donald Trump put the above ad in *The New York Times, Washington Post,* and *Boston Globe*.

As a rule, I try to avoid re-upping material I’ve written before. But occasionally it is unavoidable because we are locked in a long term battle—a war, of sorts, with Russia— that transcends the mind-numbing news cycles that are on rapid rotation and frequently obscure what is really going on. And to understand that war, you have to understand how it started.

I’m referring to the origin of Trump’s policies of seizing the president of Venezuela, of threatening to takeover Greenland, of abandoning Ukraine and God knows how many other overtures that threaten to destroy NATO, the Western Alliance, and overturn the entire world order.

Yes, the world order.

Let that settle in for a moment: Since the end of World War II in 1945, the United States—Republicans and Democrats alike— has had a policy that helped foster strong democratic institutions, strong market economies, and a powerful military alliance in Europe. To be sure, it has had its failures and controversies—Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. But since it was established in 1945, the Western Alliance has become a fundamental cornerstone of the world we live in, and, especially with regard to Europe, it has been incredibly successful.

To millions of Americans, NATO, the Western Alliance, and foreign policy initiative are nothing more than vague abstractions. But in this very rare case, the United States implemented policies that were spectacularly successful. Whether it is consumer goods, travel, or military allies, Europeans were our friends.

Until now.

That’s because Trump wants to take over Greenland, an autonomous territory that is part of Denmark. And since Denmark is a NATO ally, Trump would, by attacking it, militarily or other means, in effect be destroying NATO and throwing away the most successful foreign policy alliances in American history.

All of which means he would be fulfilling Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams. From a geo-strategic point of view, it’s nuts.

So where the hell did Trump get the idea to do this?

Well, I discovered the answer nearly ten years ago when I wrote House of Trump, House of Putin, and I reported that Trump’s articulation of this policy, or one very similar, originated in 1987, almost immediately after he returned from his first trip to Moscow.

The first hint that something untoward was going on surfaced on July 24, 1987, just after Trump returned from the Soviet Union, when an article appeared in a highly unlikely venue, the Executive Intelligence Review, that strongly suggested something mysterious was going on between the Kremlin and Trump, : “The Soviets are reportedly looking a lot more kindly on a possible presidential bid by Donald Trump, the New York builder who has amassed a fortune through real estate speculation and owns a controlling interest in the notorious, organized crime linked Resorts International. Trump took an all-expenses-paid jaunt to the Soivet Union in July to discuss building the Russians some luxury hotels.”

Donald Trump running for president? That sounded ridiculous. At the time, he was known largely as a brash playboy who had started making a killing in real estate. Moreover, the Executive Intelligence Review was an obscure publication that was the voice of the late Lyndon LaRouche, a conspiracy theorist who the Washington Post characterized as “an extremist crank,” so the idea that he would be running for president was hard to take seriously. Nevertheless, the EIR was also said to have strong ties to the Kremlin. And in this case, it happened that they were right.

At the time, thanks to his mentor, Roy Cohn, the dark, Satanic prince of American politics, Trump had hooked up with political strategist and lobbyist Roger Stone, who was cut from the same ethically challenged cloth as Cohn. Under Stone’s tutelage, on September 1, 1987, Trump suddenly went full steam ahead promoting his newly acquired foreign policy expertise, by paying nearly $100,000 for full-page ads(see above) in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times calling for the United States to stop defending allies who were taking advantage of it.

The ads, which ran under the headline “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” marked Trump’s first foray into a foreign policy that was overtly pro-Russian in the sense that it called for the dismantling of America’s postwar alliance with Europe and Japan and was very much a precursor of the “America First” policies Trump is enacting today. The ad focused more on dismantling our alliance with Japan—a subject of great concern to the KGB at the time—than American relations with Europe, but the argument was exactly the same.

What was particularly interesting about the ad Trump took out was that it came just a few weeks after his first visit to Russia during which the KGB had begun to win Trump over as an intelligence asset. (See The KGB Reels Him In.) This was a period that was early in Trump’s relationship with Russia. But he had already established ties with Soviet emigre Semion Kislin who sold Trump hundreds of TVs for the Hyatt Grand Central hotel, one of Trump’s most successful developments. Trump had already lunched with Soviet ambassador to the UN, Yuri Dubinin, and his daughter Natalia Dubinina. And he had just come back from his first trip to the Soviet Union.

According to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who served in Washington Station in those years, Trump’s invitation to the Soviet Union was written at the behest of General Ivan Gromokov, a high-level operative in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. “It was an established procedure for the KGB stations in the US to….pass on invitations to Americans to visit Moscow,” Shvets told me. “Usually, those trips were used for ‘deep development,’ recruitment, or for a meeting with KGB handlers. In most cases, the trips were organized by Goscointourist, the Soviet agency that was better known as Intourist and served as a front for the KGB. If the trip included all expenses paid by Intourist(note from the author: Trump’s was), it was a clear indication that the KGB was behind it.”

But the most extraordinary outcome of Trump’s visit was that immediately after his return from Moscow he had begun to undertake a highly improbable, quixotic, and, as it turned out, short-lived campaign in the 1988 Republican presidential primaries. To help establish himself as a potential candidate, Trump suddenly decided to promote his newly acquired foreign policy expertise that had been fed to him by the KGB when he visited earlier that summer. That meant buying those full-page ads in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times.

What Trump did not know, however, was that in early September, after he had returned to New York, Yuri Shvets was still in at the KGB offices in Yasenevo on the outskirts of Moscow when a new cable came across his desk that today appears far, far more significant than it did at the time. “I remember receiving a cable that was an assessment of activities in general terms of KGB intelligence stations in the United States,” Shvets told me.

The cable came from Service A, of the First Chief Directorate in which Yuri worked. At the time, Service A was led by Major General Lev Sotskov and consisted of about 120 officers who focused on three main themes: creating material that would discredit all aspects of American foreign policy, promoting conflict between the United States and its NATO allies, and supporting Western peace movements.

Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, says Trump was used as an intelligence asset to promote key KGB talking points in the American media. credit” Apostrophe.

“Sometimes we were getting so‑ called circular cables,” says Shvets, referring to cables that were dispersed to the KGB rezidenturas in New York, Washington, and San Francisco. The term “circular,” he explained, simply meant that the cables were widely circulated throughout the First Chief Directorate. “The idea was to show us examples of craftsmanship in recruitment, in analytical work, examples to follow.”

The point of the cable, Shvets said, was not to call attention to the identity of the new asset, who wasn’t considered terribly important at the time. the time, but to the practices that had been particularly successful. In this case, they were thrilled to have completed a successful active‑ measure operation in which full‑ page ads voicing KGB talking points were printed in major American newspapers.

Even though the new Soviet asset had no security clearance or access to classified documents, Shvets said, the KGB had concluded that he could still be used to channel active measures to influential people in the United States. As a result, they put together a bunch of sound bites to deliver important messages on various political issues that were relevant at the time.

“For each country, there was a specific set of sound bites, and they changed over time, depending on the situation,” said Shvets. “There was one set for America, another set with nuances for Britain, a third for Japan, et cetera. For the KGB at the time, the idea of trying to get the US to drop security relations with Japan was one of the long‑ lasting KGB active measures, which they were disseminating.

“The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations of that time. It was a big thing— to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites.”

“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, designed for allies who won’t help,” Trump wrote. “…It’s time for us to end our vast deficits.”

In an unusual twist, the cable Yuri received unavoidably gave away the name of the KGB’s latest asset. “In handling assets, security always comes first when it comes to agents. There’s always a correlation between objectives and risks,” he said. “You can’t afford to lose a very important asset in intelligence work. If he had been seen as an important asset, this cable wouldn’t have been sent at all. The fact that his name was revealed meant that at the time he was not viewed as a valuable asset. He was not someone who couldn’t be exposed.”

In this case, that was a good thing, because the attached newspaper ad was signed by the would‑ be candidate. “He was a nobody at that time for Russia, for the entire Soviet Union. Nobody would have been interested in him other than the intelligence community.”

The day after the ad appeared, a piece in the New York Times suggested that the “nobody” in question might enter the 1988 Republican presidential primaries against then Vice-President George H. W. Bush.

As it happened, the new asset soon dropped out of the GOP primaries, but to the KGB he had already achieved something extraordinary. This active measure was successful enough that it was cause for a minor celebration. Even though the new asset was, relatively speaking, insignificant, Shvets remembered his name— Donald J. Trump.

The bottom line, according to Shvets, was that the KGB had used Trump as an intelligence asset in an active measure whose goal was to promote Soviet propaganda in mainstream media outlets. The positions put forth in Trump’s ad were and remain quite extraordinary in the context of American foreign policy. In effect, Trump was taking the shared bipartisan foundations of American foreign policy, policies that were the basis for the astonishing ascent of American power after World War II, and throwing them out the window.

And now, nearly 40 years later, Trump is finally in a position to put those ideas into practice.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

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