Who are the big troublemakers these days? I’m not talking media noise. I mean war, crimes against humanity, dictatorships — the real bloody stuff.

Shia Iran and its proxies (including the Sunni Salafi jihadists they’ve opportunistically harnessed) sit at the center. And behind much of it: Vladimir Putin.

We need to stop treating Iran as the endgame. Putin is the master puppeteer — the Butcher of Grozny, Aleppo, Mariupol, and, dare I say, the strategic enabler behind October 7.

His ideological “Rasputin” is Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin’s 1997 blueprint, Foundations of Geopolitics, was never just about Tehran. It laid out a Russo-Islamic axis to dominate Eurasia and break Atlantic power.

Straight from Dugin’s Playbook

“In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution. … The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” (p. 32-33 of my book, see at the end)

On Ukraine, he did not mince words:

“Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness” […] “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions, represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”

And on China (fifteen years before Xi’s rise):

“Tibet-Sinkiang-Mongolia-Manchuria taken together comprise a security belt of Russia. […] Eurasia-Russia must seek at all costs to promote the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state. […] Without Sinkiang and Tibet, the potential geopolitical breakthrough of China into Kazakhstan and Siberia becomes impossible.”

The method? Control both straits to the Arabian Sea — the gateway to India and beyond: Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Sounds audacious, except Dugin wrote it as a strategic primer for the Russian Academy of the General Staff, and he’s been singing the same tune for thirty years.

Putin operationalized it almost immediately. In August 1999, Yeltsin appointed him Prime Minister. As the Second Chechen War erupted, he enlisted his former foe Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chief Mufti of the Chechen separatists. After Akhmad’s assassination, his son Ramzan took over — now a Colonel General in the Russian Army and Hero of the Russian Federation since 2004.

By 2013, Putin was deeply embedded in the Middle East, eroding the Truman Doctrine while Obama looked on. Russia’s 2015 intervention in Syria solidified the axis. Today, Moscow positions itself as the Islamic world’s BFF, exemplified by the XVII International Economic Forum “Russia–Islamic World: KazanForum 2026.” Putin’s greetings excerpt:

“For centuries, our country has been home to representatives of diverse religions and peoples… Islam is one of the world’s great religions… We remain committed to deepening friendly relations with all Islamic states… Russia also participates as an observer in the work of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”

This brings us to the “Kill Two Birds with One Big Beautiful Stone”: Get the ayatollahs out of Iran. Putin loses his key Middle East lever, his broader Eurasian project frays, and the pressure on Ukraine disappears. Almost no one talks about this 30-year strategy. We all need to.

I traced exactly how we sleepwalked into this in my 2018 book, Between Obama’s Lines – How We Almost Lost The Middle East, The Cold War, and The Atlantic Alliance. The pattern was visible long before today’s headlines. I added the word “Almost” in 2016 when Trump defeated Obama and Clinton. I don’t plan to delete it.

As I wrote in the final paragraph:

“We were now at The Tipping Point of the Atlantic Alliance. One more step by Russia through any of its proxies, most likely Iran, and at some point, Turkey, Putin would have succeeded where Stalin had failed, and Hitler before him. Just like Dugin said, and one step beyond what Golitsyn had predicted (502). But Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and the Iraqi Kurds were busy writing the next chapter. This was in mid-2014.”

(I was off on Egypt, and the Kurds remain in limbo — but the broader warning holds.)

Regime change in Iran isn’t just about Tehran — it’s the lever that cracks the entire Eurasian axis.