State-controlled Chinese companies have since bought Serbia’s biggest steel mill, the Tirana International Airport in Albania and a major coal power plant in Romania, and leased part of the harbor of Piraeus in Greece, to name but a few of its strategic acquisitions in Europe.

While China does not seem as driven by aggressive anti-Western sentiments as Russia does, Beijing and Moscow share the strategic goal: to reduce Western influence worldwide. China delivers the money to bolster new alliances, while Russia delivers the political poison to weaken the old ones. It’s a perfect match.

Just as during the 19th-century Great Game, the Kremlin has the advantage of not needing to worry about public criticism at home as it pushes an illiberal agenda abroad. On the contrary: While applying military force abroad tends to destabilize Western governments, it seems only to bolster the regime of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

If anything, the Russian population glories in the atrocities of its former leaders as well as those of the current one. According to a 2017 poll by the Levada Center, 38 percent of Russians regard the mass murderer Joseph Stalin as the “most outstanding person” in world history, followed by Mr. Putin at 34 percent.

Here’s where the intellectual dimension of the Great Game comes in: Societal self-criticism, alien to a large part of Russian society, is a defining feature of many Western countries. Publicly expressed and debated tensions between the state and the people, and among various factions of the public, are what make a liberal society tick.

But the strength of this skepticism can prove to be a weakness if exploited by a force that seeks the destruction of the very concept of truth. As an intellectual force, Russia is to Europe what Mephisto is to Faust: “I am the Spirit that denies!” To paraphrase Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote the most famous version of their story: For all the West has built, should rightly to destruction run.

This is why the Russian disinformation and its grotesque twisting of facts is so effective. Mr. Putin knows that Europeans deeply distrust their governments on questions of war and peace, especially after several of them relied on twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war. The poison used on the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England, and the chemical weapons dropped with impunity on the children of Syria kill people as well as trust in elected representatives in London, Paris and Berlin.