What a wild journey the term “useful idiot” has taken. In 1959, Congressman Ed Derwinski of Illinois entered an editorial by the Chicago Daily Calumet into the Congressional record, referring to Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union to promote peace as “what Lenin calls useful idiots in the Communist game”. In 1961, American journalist Frank Gibney wrote that Lenin had coined the phrase useful idiot. Gibney wrote that the phrase was a good description of “Communist follower[s]” from Jean-Paul Sartre to left-wing socialists in Japan to members of the Chilean Popular Front. In a speech in 1965, American diplomat Spruille Braden said the term was used by Joseph Stalin to refer to what Braden called “countless innocent although well-intentioned sentimentalists or idealists” who aided the Soviet agenda.

Writing in The New York Times in 1987, William Safire discussed the increasing use of the term useful idiot against “anybody insufficiently anti-Communist in the view of the phrase’s user”, including Congressmen who supported the anti-Contras Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Dutch socialists. After President Ronald Reagan concluded negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev over the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, conservative political leader Howard Phillips declared Reagan a “useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”

The Economist published a 2023 article titled “Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots”; it describes “Useful Idiot narratives” that support Putin’s aims and denigrate his perceived enemies.