Emmanuel Todd – The dislocation of the West: what threatens us

I have always been hostile to the Russophobic policies of the United States and Europe, but as a Westerner committed to liberal democracy, a Frenchman trained in research in England, the child of a mother who was a refugee in the United States during the Second World War, I am devastated by the consequences for us Westerners of the war waged without intelligence against Russia.

We are only at the beginning of the catastrophe. A tipping point is approaching, beyond which the ultimate consequences of defeat will unfold.

The ‘Rest of the World’ (or Global South, or Global Majority), which had been content to support Russia by refusing to boycott its economy, is now openly showing its support for Vladimir Putin. The BRICS countries are expanding by accepting new members and increasing their cohesion. Summoned by the United States to choose sides, India has chosen independence: the photos of Putin, Xi and Modi meeting at the August 2025 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation will remain a symbol of this key moment. Yet the Western media continue to portray Putin as a monster and the Russians as serfs. These media had already been unable to imagine that the rest of the world sees them as leaders and ordinary human beings, bearers of a specific Russian culture and a desire for sovereignty. I now fear that our media will exacerbate our blindness by being unable to imagine Russia’s renewed prestige in the rest of the world, which has been exploited economically and treated with arrogance by the West for centuries. The Russians dared. They challenged the Empire and they won.

The irony of history is that the Russians, a European and white people who speak a Slavic language, have become the military shield of the rest of the world because the West refused to integrate them after the fall of communism. I imagine that Slovenians are particularly well placed culturally to appreciate this irony, even though I know fully well, as an anthropologist of family and religion, that despite its Slavic language, Slovenia is much closer socially and ideologically to Switzerland than to Russia.

I can sketch out here a model of the dislocation of the West, despite the inconsistencies of the policies of Donald Trump, the defeated American president. These inconsistencies do not result, I believe, from an unstable and undoubtedly perverse personality, but from an insoluble dilemma for the United States. On the one hand, their leaders, both in the Pentagon and the White House, know that the war is lost and that Ukraine will have to be abandoned. Common sense therefore leads them to want to get out of the war. But on the other hand, the same common sense makes them realise that the withdrawal from Ukraine will have dramatic consequences for the Empire that those from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan did not have. This is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale, in a context of massive deindustrialisation in the United States and difficult reindustrialisation. China has become the world’s workshop; its very low fertility rate will certainly prevent it from replacing the United States, but it is already too late to compete with it industrially.

The de-dollarisation of the global economy has begun. Trump and his advisers cannot accept this because it would spell the end of the Empire. Yet a post-imperial age should be the goal of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) project, which seeks a return to the American nation state. But for an America whose productive capacity in real goods is now very low

, it is impossible to give up living on credit as it does by producing dollars. Such an imperial-monetary withdrawal would mean a sharp drop in its standard of living, including for Trump’s popular voters. The first budget of Trump’s second term, the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’, therefore remains imperial despite the tariff protections that embody the protectionist project or dream. The OBBBA boosts military spending and the deficit. A budget deficit in the United States inevitably means dollar production and a trade deficit.

Imperial dynamics, or rather imperial inertia, continue to undermine the dream of a return to the productive nation state.

In Europe, military defeat remains poorly understood by leaders. They did not direct operations. It was the Pentagon that developed the plans for the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023 (during which I wrote The Defeat of the West). The American military, even though they had their Ukrainian proxy fight the war, know that they were broken by the Russian defence – because they could not produce enough weapons and because the Russian military was smarter than them. European leaders only provided weapons systems, and not the most important ones. Unaware of the extent of the military defeat, they do know, however, that their own economies have been paralysed by the sanctions policy, especially by the disruption of their supply of cheap Russian energy. Cutting the European continent in half economically was an act of suicidal madness. The German economy is stagnating. Poverty and inequality are on the rise throughout the West. The United Kingdom is on the brink of collapse. France is not far behind. Societies and political systems are at a standstill.

A negative economic and social dynamic existed before the war and was already putting the West under strain. It was visible, to varying degrees, throughout Western Europe. Free trade is undermining the industrial base. Immigration is developing an identity syndrome, particularly among the working classes who are deprived of secure and properly paid jobs.

More profoundly, the negative dynamic of fragmentation is cultural: mass higher education creates stratified societies in which the highly educated – 20%, 30%, 40% of the population – begin to live among themselves, to think of themselves as superior, to despise the working classes, and to reject manual labour and industry. Primary education for all (universal literacy) had nurtured democracy, creating a homogeneous society with an egalitarian subconscious. Higher education has given rise to oligarchies, and sometimes plutocracies, stratified societies invaded by an unequal subconscious. The ultimate paradox: the development of higher education ended up producing a decline in intellectual standards in these oligarchies or plutocracies! I described this sequence more than a quarter of a century ago in The Economic Illusion, published in 1997. Western industry has moved to the rest of the world and, of course, to the former people’s democracies of Eastern Europe, which, freed from their subjugation to Soviet Russia, have now regained their centuries-old status as a periphery dominated by Western Europe.This is a kind of inner China where industrial workers remain numerous. Everywhere in Europe, however, the elitism of the highly educated has given rise to “populism”.

The war has raised European tensions a notch. It is impoverishing the continent. But above all, as a major strategic failure, it is delegitimising leaders who are incapable of leading their countries to victory. The development of conservative popular movements (usually referred to by journalistic elites as ‘populist’ or ‘far-right’ or ‘nationalist’) is accelerating. Reform UK in the United Kingdom. AfD in Germany, Rassemblement National in France… Ironically, the economic sanctions that NATO hoped would bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia are about to bring a cascade of ‘regime changes’ to Western Europe. The Western ruling classes are being delegitimised by defeat at the very moment when Russia’s authoritarian democracy is being relegitimised by victory, or rather, over-legitimised, since Russia’s return to stability under Putin initially assured it uncontested legitimacy.

Such is our world as we approach 2026.

The dislocation of the West takes the form of a ‘hierarchical fracture’.

The United States is giving up control of Russia and, I increasingly believe, of China. Blockaded by China for its imports of samarium, a rare earth element essential to military aeronautics, the United States can no longer dream of confronting China militarily. The rest of the world – India, Brazil, the Arab world, Africa – is taking advantage of this and slipping away. But the United States is turning vigorously against its European and East Asian ‘allies’ in a final effort at overexploitation and, it must be admitted, out of sheer spite. To escape their humiliation, to hide their weakness from the world and from themselves, they are punishing Europe. The Empire is devouring itself. This is the meaning of the tariffs and forced investments imposed by Trump on Europeans, who have become colonial subjects in a shrinking empire rather than partners. The era of liberal democracies standing in solidarity is over.

Trumpism is ‘white populist conservatism’. What is emerging in the West is not solidarity among populist conservatives, but a breakdown of internal solidarity. The rage resulting from defeat is leading each country to turn against those weaker than itself in order to vent its resentment. The United States is turning against Europe and Japan. France is reactivating its conflict with Algeria, its former colony. There is no doubt that Germany, which, from Scholz to Merz, has agreed to obey the United States, will turn its humiliation against its weaker European partners. My own country, France, seems to me to be the most threatened.

One of the fundamental concepts of the West’s defeat is nihilism. I explain how the ‘zero state’ of the Protestant religion – secularisation at its end – not only explains the collapse of American education and industry. The zero state also opens up a metaphysical void. I am not personally a believer and I do not advocate a return to religion (I do not believe it is possible), but as a historian I must note that the disappearance of social values of religious origin leads to a moral crisis, to a drive to destroy things and people (war) and ultimately to an attempt to abolish reality (the transgender phenomenon for American Democrats and the denial of global warming for Republicans, for example). The crisis exists in all completely secularised countries, but it is worse in those where the religion was Protestantism or Judaism, which are absolutist religions in their search for the transcendent, rather than Catholicism, which is more open to the beauty of the world and earthly life. It is indeed in the United States and Israel that we see the development of parodic forms of traditional religions, parodies that are, in my opinion, nihilistic in essence.

This irrational dimension is at the heart of the defeat. This defeat is therefore not only a ‘technical’ loss of power but also a moral exhaustion, an absence of positive existential purpose that leads to nihilism.

This nihilism is behind the desire of European leaders, particularly on the Protestant shores of the Baltic, to expand the war against Russia through incessant provocations. This nihilism is also behind the American destabilisation of the Middle East, the ultimate expression of the rage resulting from America’s defeat by Russia. Above all, let us not succumb to the overly simplistic conclusion that Netanyahu’s regime in Israel is acting independently in the genocide in Gaza or in the attack on Iran. Zero Protestantism and zero Judaism certainly tragically combine their nihilistic effects in these outbreaks of violence. But throughout the Middle East, it is the United States, by supplying weapons and sometimes attacking directly, that is ultimately responsible for the chaos. It pushes Israel to action just as it pushed the Ukrainians. The first Trump presidency established the US embassy in Jerusalem, and it was Trump who first imagined Gaza transformed into a seaside resort. I am aware that it would take a book to prove this thesis, a book that would dismantle the interactions between the actors one by one. But, as a professional historian who has been involved in geopolitics for half a century, I feel that, like NATO Europe, Israel has ceased to be an independent state. The problem with the West is indeed the programmed death of the nation state.

The Empire is vast and is falling apart amid noise and fury. This Empire is already polycentric, divided on its goals, schizophrenic. But none of its parts is truly independent. Trump is its current ‘centre’; he is also its best ideological and practical expression, combining a rational desire to retreat into its immediate sphere of domination (Europe and Israel) with nihilistic impulses that favour war. These tendencies – withdrawal and violence – are also expressed within the American heart of the Empire, where the principle of hierarchical fracturing operates internally. A growing number of Anglo-American authors are evoking the coming of a civil war.

The American plutocracy is pluralistic. There is the plutocracy of financiers, that of oilmen, that of Silicon Valley. Trumpist plutocrats, Texan oilmen and recent Silicon Valley converts despise the educated Democratic elites of the East Coast, who themselves despise the white Trumpists of the heartland, who themselves despise black Democrats, and so on.

One of the interesting features of America today is that its leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between internal and external issues, despite MAGA’s attempt to stop immigration from the south with a wall. The army fires on boats leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centres of Democratic cities in the United States, and sponsors the Israeli air force for an attack on Qatar, where there is a huge American base. Any science fiction reader will recognise in this disturbing list the beginnings of a descent into dystopia, that is, a negative world where power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty and perversity intermingle.

So let us remain ourselves, outside America. Let us retain our perception of the inside and the outside, our sense of proportion, our contact with reality, our conception of what is right and beautiful. Let us not allow ourselves to be dragged into a headlong rush to war by our own European leaders, those privileged individuals lost in history, desperate at having been defeated, terrified at the idea of one day being judged by their peoples. And above all, above all, let us continue to reflect on the meaning of things.

Paris, September 28^th 2025