Comment by ModernMech

It’s really much more simple and banal than that. The fact is, Trump and Musk are just a pure distillation of our narcissistic culture. Their venality is the venality of our society. None of this would be possible without the public’s buy-in. Fact of the matter is we did this to ourselves, we are a sick society, and Putin just got lucky.

If you want to frame it Cold War terms tho, you could say Capitalism turned out the same as Communism, just took longer. In the end no one won the war.