For anyone who doesn't know, he's a professor of history at Yale and on the Council on Foreign Relations. His short book, On Tyranny, was a best seller last year.
In The Road to Unfreedom, he writes that Russia's goal is for the U.S. to become like Russia.
"The essence of Russia's foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of the basic problems is the absence of a succession principle. Russia opposes European and American democracy to ensure that Russians do not see the democracy might work as a succession principle in their own country. Russians are meant to distrust other systems as much as they distrust their own. If Russia's succession crisis in fact can be exported--if the United States could become authoritarian--then Russia's own problems, although unresolved, would at least seem normal. Pressure on Putin would be relieved. Were America the shining beacon of democracy that its citizens sometimes imagine, its institutions would have been far less vulnerable to Russia's cyberwar. From Moscow's perspective, America's constitutional structure created tempting vulnerabilities. Because of the evident flaws in American democracy and the American rule of law, it was all the easier to intervene in an American election."
Here's another relevant paragraph:
"The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all. If all the federal government did was maximize inequality and suppress votes, at some point a line would be crossed. Americans, like Russians, would eventually cease to believe in their own elections; then the United States, like the Russian Federation, would be in permanent succession crisis, with no legitimate way to choose leaders. This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia's problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalization of Russia's syndromes by way of contagion."
Here's also a piece Snyder wrote for The Guardian, which is a short version of the arguments he makes in the book:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-russia-politics-of-eternity-timothy-snyder
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