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There is a school of thought that believes that the fall of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe was a managed collapse to weaken the West and NATO into disarmament. This school also believes that the Sino-Soviet split was a charade to encourage Western investment into Red China in order to build up a backward economy made worse by Mao's mismanagement. There were several defectors to the West in the 1980s who claimed that the Soviet plan was to stage a false collapse to make it appear that there was no more Communist menace. Some advocates of this line of thought are J.R. Nyquist, Trevor Loudon, Lee Wheelbarger, and "Jimmy from Brooklyn" (a frequent caller to New York based talk radio shows).

Whether or not they are correct can be disputed. What cannot be disputed are that Russia and China remain closely tied militarily and economically, the countries maintain strong ties with Marxist regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua, and they are the principal suppliers to the Islamist regime in Iran. Putin and the Russian elite have done a good job in convincing a portion of rightists, like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, that Russia has become a Christian and traditionalist country. Not since King Henry IV feigned conversion to Catholicism in order to rule France ("Paris is worth a mass") has a leader (in this case Putin) gained more traction by a religious conversion experience. At the same time, China has convinced many liberals and some conservatives that it is a capitalist country even though their post-Mao economic policy has been Lenin's New Economic Policy on a very massive scale. Under the NEP, the Communist retain control of the economy through permitting limited market economics while securing control over the largest industries and the financial markets.