Russia is 1) not that powerful by far, 2) its elites, those very ones spoken about when expressing these conspiracy theories, are pissing hot water from a mere hint of being friends with any US administration.
They have sort of an inferiority complex, there was recently a damned TV report, apparently, about an American diplomat visiting a cafe and ordering a cheburek (Central Asian street food). It’s so much bootlicking that one can confidently say Russia’s elites are much bigger US fans than Russians in average.
They might be unintentionally making the effect you described upon the US, while trying to somehow become part of its processes, but it’s a small nudge compared to the more serious reasons.
I think this is because the people who are now Russia’s elite came to power in the 90s, a lot of ex-Soviet people looked at the situation pretty simply - as in “we were the losing superpower in this cold war thing, now it’s ended and we are friends, so we are going to become like America in those movies with white middle class people all owning cars and houses”, and those of them who were doing politics, apparently, wanted to have their own political system as “cool” (or whatever, some immeasurable feeling) as the American one.
The Iron Curtain was a huge mistake, people who put it in place were thinking in 30s categories when the 30s were long gone. People inside thought that they only put barriers before you to protect something you’d want to have. A generation of Soviet people grew with that feeling, where everything Soviet was boring and bad, and everything Western magical and good. It wasn’t even about freedom or morality. Just about “coolness”. People breaking the USSR in the 80s and 90s knew that the world around it isn’t virtuous and kind, but they thought it’s “cooler”. Everyone thinks they’d do well when put into an adventure, when safe. Nobody thinks they’ll be some guy who gets eaten by a crocodile on the second page, or a coward, or an idiot, or a sucker.
So. When the Russian “wide mass” realized that for the West it consists of suckers and crocodile fodder, it became disillusioned and the wound healed, except for some rare idiots who kept believing into that picture, not being exposed to reality.
When the Russian elites realized that, they just decided to lower the bar, and be content with playing US sometimes, and getting US citizenship for themselves and their children, and being there often, and playing with US politics. I don’t think it’s directed at somehow corrupting and undoing the US, simply not enough power. They are just regularly touching in the shop something they can’t afford to buy.
It made very different people millionaires and billionaires. Some local businessmen (a very American type in stereotypes, something between a conman and a normal mom and pop business owner), some professors with good understanding of mathematics involved, some translators for big people, some red directors who converted their Soviet power into new power.
And in my childhood I thought they are all thieves, my worldview is more nuanced now. Life is complex.
People talk of KGB as of the main important target of all potential lustrations in the future, but Eugene Kaspersky is KGB, and of people meaningful in Russia he’s honestly very fine. Some people talk of Yeltsin as someone good, but he was a Politburo member. People who remember general Lebed sometimes think he was killed because he was an honest patriotic politician, and he surely made the impression with that simple Soviet flat with a rug on the wall, that Siberian manner of speech, those pacifist and humanist things he would say in interviews (he managed to say without accusations and conflict that people who are mafia or terrorists or both for one government are friends for another and this is business as usual ; he also managed to say without losing any dignity or surrendering any important point that Russians can’t fight more wars after the XX century and that people fight to live in peace, these seem pretty obvious, but some obvious things don’t sound good on TV), except when he was made governor of his part of the world, he quickly became, eh, a normal governor - with new realty and a lover in Moscow, with very expensive idiotic PR actions (like that campaign with Alain Delon in the middle of a depressive Soviet junkyard with a Lenin statue endorsing Lebed), and so on, somehow the memory of him omits those few last years of his life, before the helicopter crash.
Now when I think about it, I didn’t think they are all thieves, I knew life is complex and that I don’t personally know all these people.
So - American billionaires don’t want to be trillionaires, I think. They want to be princes. Perhaps patricians. Or maybe mandarins. The issue is that they are blind to how all three things existed, using them as labels for their own dream of power over humans without complications. Princes were subject to God, Pope and their suzerain, multiple such sometimes, like in Brittany or Holsten or … Patricians obeyed the customs of their republic, whose first citizen usually was a plebeian - the man who was first named “first citizen” notably was, and his cognomen is now used to refer to emperors. Mandarins lived in the kingdom where the only unbreakable law was the mandate of heaven, and weren’t considered better people - certainly no more than as far as their emperor had it.
I believe we will endure. I don’t know about the USA, but maybe it’s for the best that this project goes to version 2.0 .