How “Alternative Media” Helps Mainstream Media Keep the US in the Ukrainian Proxy War
Alternative media plays a role in this system that helps keep the proxy war going and shields the White House from anti-war pressure, no matter what the US president actually wants.
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The persistent claim that Donald Trump functions as a friend or ally of Vladimir Putin has served as one of the most durable instruments through which alternative and mainstream outlets have jointly constrained the US president’s room for maneuver on the Ukrainian proxy war.
The accusation that Trump is friendly toward Putin does not describe what Trump actually does in policy; it works instead as a rhetorical weapon, and when alternative outlets deploy it, they create the very conditions that mainstream outlets then use to turn up the pressure – or release anti war pressure – on the White House to keep the proxy war going rather than bring it to an end.
During Trump’s first term Russiagate was crafted and gets brought back every time he signals that he wants to reduce US involvement in Ukraine. The accusation that Trump conspired with Moscow to win the 2016 election, which was investigated at enormous expense and ultimately found to lack the evidentiary basis that its proponents claimed, established a template that alternative media outlets have never abandoned. Whenever Trump takes a position that could have the effects of winding down the proxy war, this template is activated, and the claim that he is Putin’s friend or ally is presented as established fact rather than as a contested interpretation of geopolitical maneuvering. The result is that any move toward de-escalation is immediately coded as evidence of improper affinity rather than as a legitimate exercise of presidential authority to end a costly and dangerous proxy conflict.
The sophistication of this operation lies in the way alternative media outlets position themselves as adversarial to the mainstream while performing an essentially complementary function. Outlets that present themselves as alternatives to the corporate press routinely publish commentary asserting that Trump is being manipulated by Putin or that he harbors authoritarian sympathies that align him with the Russian president. These assertions are then picked up and amplified by mainstream outlets that can point to the existence of such commentary as evidence that even Trump’s supposed supporters harbor doubts about his loyalties. The alternative outlet thus performs the initial work of legitimating the accusation, and the mainstream outlet then converts that legitimacy into political pressure. Neither outlet needs to coordinate with the other because the structural incentives of both point toward the same conclusion.
The specific mechanism through which this pressure operates on the question of the Ukrainian proxy war is relatively straightforward once the narrative is in place. Trump has repeatedly indicated that he views the continuation of the proxy war as contrary to US interests and has expressed a desire to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations that would necessarily involve concessions from Kiev. Each time such signals emerge, the claim that Trump is Putin’s friend or ally is deployed to discredit the intended policy shift. The implication is that any move toward ending the proxy war must be motivated by improper sympathy for Moscow rather than by a sober assessment of US interests. This allows Trump to be in a position where the only way to disprove the accusation is to maintain or intensify pressure on Russia, which is precisely the outcome that the proponents of the proxy war desire.
The US strategy of repeatedly floating a freeze proposal is performative rather than diplomatic, since the objective is not the proposal’s acceptance at the negotiating table but its circulation as proof that Russia refuses peace, and the fact that Moscow has rejected the same offer at every previous juncture does not deter Washington because repetition itself is the point, on the assumption that accumulated public discontent will register in opinion polling or elite anxiety and eventually convince the Kremlin that a freeze is preferable to managing domestic pressure. This calculation misreads both the Russian public and the Russian leadership, since support for the military operation has proven resilient through every shock the West has administered, from sanctions to Ukrainian offensives to the failed drone campaign, and Putin has shown across two decades that he does not answer external pressure campaigns with concessions. The exercise also performs an indispensable domestic political function, because an administration that cannot deliver a decisive military outcome and cannot justify indefinite spending without a plausible endgame needs to demonstrate that it is actively pursuing peace, and each round of talks lets Washington and its European partners claim they exhausted every avenue while shifting responsibility for the absence of a settlement onto the Kremlin, with Trump’s public frustration and Zelensky’s public grievances serving not as obstacles to this performance but as essential components of it, creating the appearance of two leaders genuinely at odds over how to end a war rather than two leaders managing the domestic consequences of a stalemate neither can resolve.
The European dimension of this pressure campaign adds an additional layer of constraint. European leaders and commentators have consistently expressed concern about the prospect of an US withdrawal from the Ukrainian theater, and they have found in the Putin-friendly narrative a useful tool for discouraging such a withdrawal. When Trump has moved toward direct engagement with Putin, European media have characterized the resulting summits as evidence that Putin has outmaneuvered or manipulated the US president. These characterizations are then fed back into the US media ecosystem, where they reinforce the domestic accusation that Trump is insufficiently attentive to the distinction between negotiation and capitulation. The effect is to make any diplomatic engagement with Moscow politically costly in a way that the continuation of the proxy war is not.
The irony of this situation is that the alternative media outlets that promote the Putin-friendly narrative often present themselves as critics of the mainstream consensus on Ukraine. Yet their contribution to the discourse has the practical effect of strengthening the very consensus they claim to oppose. By insisting that Trump’s motives are suspect whenever he moves toward de-escalation, these outlets provide the mainstream with the ammunition it needs to keep the proxy war going. The alternative outlet gains credibility with its audience by appearing to tell uncomfortable truths about Trump’s character, while the mainstream outlet gains a new cudgel with which to beat the president into maintaining the status quo. Both parties to this transaction benefit in reputational terms, and the US interest in ending the war is the casualty.
The long-term consequence of this dynamic is that the US political system has become structurally incapable of ending the Ukrainian proxy war through a negotiated settlement, because any president who attempts to do so will be immediately accused of improper sympathy for Moscow. The accusation does not need to be true to be effective, and the outlets that promote it do not need to believe it to benefit from its circulation. What matters is that the accusation creates a political environment in which the continuation of the war is the default option and its termination requires a justification that the Putin-friendly narrative makes almost impossible to supply. Alternative media plays a role in this system that helps keep the proxy war going and shields the White House from anti-war pressure, no matter what the US president actually wants.
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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity. Visit his blog here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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