From defeat to disintegration
EMMANUEL TODD
At the request of my Slovenian publisher, I have just written a new preface to The Defeat of the West. The threat of a worsening of all conflicts is becoming increasingly evident. This text provides a schematic and provisional, but updated, interpretation of the development of the crisis we are experiencing. This text is, in fact, the conclusion of my last interview with Diane Lagrange on Fréquence Populaire: "Russia's victory, the isolation and fracture of France and the West."
Less than two years after the French publication of The Defeat of the West, in January 2024, the book's main predictions have come true. Russia has withstood the military and economic impact. The US military industry is exhausted. European economies and societies are on the verge of implosion. Even before the Ukrainian army collapses, the next stage of the West's disintegration has been reached.
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, and the son of a mother who took refuge in the United States during World War II, I am appalled by the consequences for us Westerners of the unintelligent war waged against Russia.
We are only at the beginning of the catastrophe. A turning point is approaching, beyond which the final 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 are expanding by accepting new members and increasing their cohesion. After being urged by the United States to choose sides, India has opted for independence: the photos of Putin, Xi, and Modi gathered on the occasion of the August 2025 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will remain as a symbol of this pivotal moment. Yet the Western media continue to present Putin as a monster and Russians as serfs. These media had already failed to imagine that the rest of the world sees them as normal leaders and human beings, bearers of a specific Russian culture and a will to sovereignty. Now I fear that our media are worsening our blindness by failing to imagine the resurgence of Russia's prestige in the rest of the world, economically exploited and treated with arrogance by the West for centuries. The Russians dared. They challenged the Empire and won.
The irony of history is that Russians, a white, Slavic-speaking European people, 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 Slovenians are in a particularly privileged cultural position to appreciate this irony, although I know very 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 outline here a model of the dislocation of the West, despite the inconsistencies in the policy of Donald Trump, the American president of defeat. These inconsistencies are not, in my opinion, the result of an unstable, and undoubtedly perverse, personality, but of an irresolvable dilemma for the United States. On the one hand, its 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, that same common sense leads them to predict 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 US strategic defeat on a global scale, in a context of massive deindustrialization in the United States and difficult reindustrialization. China has become the world's workshop; Its very low fertility will undoubtedly prevent it from replacing the United States, but it is already too late to compete with it industrially.
The de-dollarization of the global economy has begun. Trump and his advisors are unable to accept this because it would mean the end of the Empire. However, a post-imperial era should be the goal of the MAGA project, Make America Great Again, which seeks the return of the American nation-state. But for a United States whose productive capacity in real goods is currently very low (see chapter 9 on the true nature of the American economy), it is impossible to give up living on credit as it does by producing dollars. Such an imperial-monetary retreat would entail a brutal drop in its standard of living, even for Trump's popular voters. The first budget of Trump's second presidency, the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," remains imperial despite the tariff protections that embody the protectionist project or dream. The OBBBA relaunches military spending and the deficit. Anyone who speaks of a budget deficit in the United States inevitably speaks of dollar production and a trade deficit. Imperial dynamics, or rather imperial inertia, continually undermine the dream of a return to the productive nation-state.
In Europe, leaders still don't fully understand the military defeat. They didn't direct the operations. It was the Pentagon that drew up the plans for the Ukrainian counteroffensive of the summer of 2023 (during which I wrote The Defeat of the West). The US military, even though it had its Ukrainian proxy wage the war, knows it has crashed against the Russian defense, because it couldn't produce enough weapons and because the Russian military outsmarted it. European leaders only provided weapons systems, and not the most important ones. Unaware of the scale of the military defeat, they know, instead, that their own economies have been crippled by the sanctions policy, especially by the disruption of the supply of cheap Russian energy. Dividing the European continent economically in two was an act of suicidal madness. The German economy is stagnating. Across the West, poverty and inequality are rising. The United Kingdom is on the brink. France is close behind. Societies and political systems are gridlocked.
A negative economic and social dynamic already existed before the war and was already putting the West under great strain. It was visible, to varying degrees, throughout Western Europe. Free trade undermines the industrial base. Immigration develops an identity syndrome, especially among the working classes deprived of secure, well-paid jobs.
More profoundly, the negative dynamic of fragmentation is cultural: mass higher education creates stratified societies in which the most educated—20%, 30%, or 40% of the population—begin to live among themselves, consider themselves superior, despise the popular sectors, and reject manual labor 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 inegalitarian subconscious. The ultimate paradox: the development of higher education ended up causing a decline in the intellectual level in these oligarchies or plutocracies! I described this sequence more than a quarter of a century ago in 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 regained their centuries-old status as a periphery dominated by Western Europe. In chapter 3, I discuss in detail this kind of inner China, where many industrial workers remain. However, throughout Europe, the elitism of the most educated has given rise to "populism."
The war has increased tension in Europe. It impoverishes the continent. But above all, as a major strategic failure, it delegitimizes leaders incapable of leading their countries to victory. The development of conservative popular movements (which journalistic elites often refer to with terms like "populist," "far-right," or "nationalist") is accelerating. Reform UK in the United Kingdom. AfD in Germany, Rassemblement National in France… Ironically, the economic sanctions with which NATO hoped for "regime change" in Russia are about to bring a cascade of "regime changes" to Western Europe. The Western ruling classes are delegitimized by defeat, while Russian authoritarian democracy is relegitimized by victory—or rather, overlegitimized, since Russia's return to stability under Putin assured it unquestionable legitimacy from the outset.
This is what our world looks like as we approach 2026.
The disintegration of the West takes the form of a "hierarchical fracture."
The United States is relinquishing control of Russia and, increasingly, I believe, of China as well. Subjected to the Chinese blockade for its imports of samarium, a rare metal indispensable for military aeronautics, the United States can no longer dream of confronting China militarily. The rest of the world—India, Brazil, the Arab world, Africa—benefits from this and escapes its grasp. But the United States is turning vigorously against its European and East Asian "allies," in a last-ditch effort at overexploitation and also, it must be admitted, out of pure and simple 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 of a reduced empire instead of partners. The era of supportive liberal democracies is over.
Trumpism is a "white popular conservatism." What is emerging in the West is not a solidarity of popular conservatisms, but a breakdown of internal solidarities. The rage provoked by defeat leads each country, to dissipate its resentment, to turn against the weakest. The United States turns against Europe or Japan. France rekindles its conflict with Algeria, a 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 weakest European partners. My own country, France, seems to me 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—secularization carried to its conclusion—not only explains the collapse of American education and industry. The zero state also opens a metaphysical void. Personally, I am not a believer and I do not advocate any return to religion (I don't 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, an impulse to destroy things and people (war), and ultimately, 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 secularized countries, but it is worse in those whose religion was Protestantism or Judaism, 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 precisely in the United States and Israel that we see the development of parodic forms of traditional religions, parodies that, in my opinion, are nihilistic in essence.
This irrational dimension is at the heart of defeat. Therefore, this is not just a "technical" loss of power, but also a moral exhaustion, a lack of positive existential purpose that leads to nihilism.
This nihilism is behind the desire of European leaders, especially on the Protestant shores of the Baltic, to expand the war against Russia through incessant provocations. This nihilism is also behind the American destabilization of the Middle East, the quintessential place for the expression of rage resulting from the American defeat by Russia. Above all, let us not give in to the all-too-easy evidence of the Netanyahu regime's warlike autonomy in Israel in the genocide in Gaza or the attack on Iran. Zero Protestantism and zero Judaism tragically blend their nihilistic effects in these outbursts of violence. But throughout the Middle East, it is the United States that, by supplying arms and sometimes by attacking itself, is ultimately responsible for the chaos. It pushes Israel to action as it pushed the Ukrainians. Trump's first presidency established the US embassy in Jerusalem, and it was Trump who first imagined Gaza transformed into a seaside resort. I realize 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 historian by profession and after half a century dedicated to geopolitics, I feel that, like NATO Europe, Israel has ceased to be an independent state. The West's problem is the planned death of the nation-state.
The Empire is vast and disintegrating in sound and fury. This Empire is already polycentric, divided in its goals, schizophrenic. But none of its parts are independent at all. Trump is its current "center"; he is also its best ideological-practical expression, as he combines a rational will to retreat into its immediate sphere of domination (Europe and Israel) with nihilistic impulses that prefer war. These tendencies—withdrawal and violence—are also expressed in the American heart of the Empire, where the principle of hierarchical fracture operates internally. More and more Anglo-American authors are evoking the coming of civil war.
The American plutocracy is pluralistic. There's the financiers, the oilmen, and the Silicon Valley plutocracy. Trumpist plutocrats, Texan oilmen, or Silicon Valley newcomers despise the educated, Democratic elites of the East Coast, who in turn despise the white Trumpists of the heartland, who in turn despise Black Democrats, and so on.
One of the interesting peculiarities of contemporary America is that its leaders are increasingly struggling to distinguish between what's internal and what's external, despite MAGA's attempt to halt immigration from the south with a wall. The military fires on ships leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centers of Democratic-run cities in the United States, and orders Israeli air forces to attack Qatar, home to a massive US base. Any science fiction reader will recognize in this disturbing enumeration the beginning of a dystopian entry—that is, a negative world in which power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty, and perversity intertwine.
Let us remain ourselves, outside the United States. Let us maintain our perception of the interior and exterior, our sense of moderation, our connection to reality, our conception of what is just and beautiful. Let us not allow ourselves to be dragged into a warlike headlong rush by our own European leaders, those privileged people lost in history, desperate for defeat, terrified at the thought of one day being judged by their people. And, above all, let us continue to reflect on the meaning of things.
Paris, September 28, 2025
