And just how long can they expect to keep playing these brinkmanship games until the populace at home has had enough of seeing their blood and treasure expended just to soothe some bureaucrat or corporate drone's ego?
I mentioned the end of the Cold War, and one of the things that brought it to an end was the Soviets giving up on supporting global revolution. Now, what brought that to an end? Gorbachev ended it, yes, but one of the reasons he did so was growing pressure at home. Because by the mid-1980's a sizable portion of Soviet citizens were fucking tired of seeing their hard earned rubles and labor going off to support "workers revolutions" in the third world while they suffered economic decline and fucking nuclear powerplant meltdowns at home. By the mid-80's they just didn't give a shit anymore. They didn't give a shit about Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, or South Yemen. They didn't give a shit about maintaining the "Eastern Alliance." And there sure as hell didn't give a shit about continuing to send their sons to get killed in Afghanistan in order to bring Communism to a bunch of backwards barbarians.
Trump, I would argue, was a similar warning shot by the American populace that's it fucking sick and tired of seeing their wealth and children's lives expended, and domestic liberty curtailed, just so a bunch of spooks and trans-Atlantic chair warmers can keep playing an IRL game of Age of Empires. The line has been drawn, and the more these wannabe Roman praetors keep playing Empire at the expense of domestic needs, the more there's going to be an even larger backlash in the future. And it will come, no matter how much they try to label dissidents as "Russian trolls," no matter how much they censor or shadowban, no matter how much they try to rig elections, and no matter how many illiterate third-world helots they try to import in order to hold the tide back.