Perhaps the West’s most original geopolitical thinker, Emmanuel Todd recognizes the centrality of religion in all societies, even (especially?) “post-religious” ones like today’s West. His work, which convincingly predicts the defeat and fall of the West, raises the question for Muslims: Which Islamic alternative (Murad Hoffman) should we work for as the Western influence over Muslim-majority societies recedes?
The four articles below are reposted from Peter Myers’ newsletter.
-Kevin Barrett
(1) Emmanuel Todd’s new Preface to his book The Defeat of the West
The dislocation of the West: what threatens us
EMMANUEL TODD
OCT 06, 2025
Trump’s perversity is unfolding in the Middle East, NATO’s warmongering in Europe.
At the request of my Slovenian publisher, I have just written a new preface to La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), which I feel it is necessary to publish on Substack immediately. The threat of an escalation of all conflicts is becoming clearer. This text provides a schematic and provisional, but up-to-date interpretation of the development of the crisis we are experiencing. This text is in fact the conclusion of my latest interview with Diane Lagrange on Fréquence Populaire: ‘Russia’s victory, the isolation and fragmentation of France and the West’.
Preface to the Slovenian edition
From defeat to dislocation
Less than two years after the French publication of La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) in January 2024, the book’s main predictions have come true. Russia has weathered the storm militarily and economically. The American military industry is exhausted. European economies and societies are on the verge of implosion. The Ukrainian army has not yet collapsed, but the stage of the West’s disintegration has already 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, 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 (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 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. I discuss in detail in Chapter 3 this 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 28th 2025
(2) Review by Pepe Escobar
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240118/how-the-west-was-defeated-1116245840.html
Pepe Escobar: How the West Was Defeated
09:35 GMT 18.01.2024 (Updated: 12:50 GMT 18.01.2024)
Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.
Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.
Considering the toxic NATOstan environment where Russophobia and cancel culture reign supreme, and every deviation is punishable, Todd has been very careful not to frame the current process as a Russian victory in Ukraine (although that’s implied in everything he describes, ranging from several indicators of social peace to the overall stability of the “Putin system”, which is “a product of the history of Russia, and not the work of one man”).
Rather, he focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West’s downfall. Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains NATO’s deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the “degree zero” of the West’s religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars.
{caption} Founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab welcomes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seen on a giant screen by video link at the Congress centre during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on May 23, 2022. Zelensky is similarly expected to attend the WEF’s 2024 meetings this week. – Sputnik International, 1920, 15.01.2024 {end caption}
The Collapse of Protestantism
Todd methodically analyses, in sequence, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and finally The Empire. Let’s focus on what would be the 12 Greatest Hits of his remarkable exercise.
1. At the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus was only 3.3% of the combined West (in this case the NATO sphere plus Japan and South Korea). Todd is amazed how these 3.3% capable of producing more weapons than the whole Western colossus not only are winning the war but reducing dominant notions of the “neoliberal political economy” (GDP rates) to shambles.
2. The “ideological solitude” and “ideological narcissism” of the West – incapable of understanding, for instance, how “the whole Muslim world seems to consider Russia as a partner rather than an adversary”.
3. Todd eschews the notion of “Weberian states” – evoking a delicious compatibility of vision between Putin and US realpolitik practitioner John Mearsheimer. Because they are forced to survive in an environment where only power relations matters, states are now acting as “Hobbesian agents.” And that brings us to the Russian notion of a nation-state, focused on “sovereignty”: the capacity of a state to independently define its internal and external policies, with no foreign interference whatsoever.
4. The implosion, step by step, of WASP culture, which led, “since the 1960s”, to “an empire deprived of a center and a project, an essentially military organism managed by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense)”. This is Todd defining the US neocons.
5. The US as a “post-imperial” entity: just a shell of military machinery deprived of an intelligence-driven culture, leading to “accentuated military expansion in a phase of massive contraction of its industrial base”. As Todd stresses, “modern war without industry is an oxymoron”.
6. The demographic trap: Todd shows how Washington strategists “forgot that a state whose population enjoys a high educational and technological level, even if it is decreasing, does not lose its military power”. That’s exactly the case of Russia during the Putin years.
7. Here we reach the crux of Todd’s argument: his post-Max Weber reinterpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a little over a century ago, in 1904/1905: “If Protestantism was the matrix for the ascension of the West, its death, today, is the cause of the disintegration and defeat.”
Todd clearly defines how the 1688 English “Glorious Revolution”, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution were the true pillars of the liberal West. Consequently, an expanded “West” is not historically “liberal”, because it also engineered “Italian fascism, German Nazism and Japanese militarism”.
In a nutshell, Todd shows how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the populations it controlled, “because all faithful must directly access the Holy Scriptures. A literate population is capable of economic and technological development. The Protestant religion modeled, by accident, a superior, efficient workforce.” And it is in this sense that Germany was “at the heart of Western development”, even if the Industrial Revolution took place in England.
Todd’s key formulation is undisputable: “The crucial factor of the ascension of the West was Protestantism’s attachment to alphabetization.”
Moreover Protestantism, Todd stresses, is twice at the heart of the history of the West: via the educational and economic drive – with fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God engendering a work ethic and a strong, collective morality – and via the idea that Men are unequal (remember the White Man’s Burden).
The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism.
Transgenderism and the Cult of the Fake
8. Todd’s sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He refers to “one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; “to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle: “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void.” And that’s how we became “a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the believers of ancient times.”
9. Todd’s brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is “one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality.”
And there’s an added analytical bonus: “The transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation, and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.” It gets worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the Hegemon’s wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian nuclear dear clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under Trump. Todd: “American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid.”
10. Europe’s “assisted suicide”. Todd reminds us how Europe at the start was the Franco-German couple. Then after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, that turned into “a patriarchic marriage, with Germany as a dominant spouse not listening to his companion anymore”. The EU abandoned any pretention of defending Europe’s interests – cutting itself off from energy and trade with its partner Russia and sanctioning itself. Todd identifies, correctly, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced by the London-Warsaw-Kiev axis: that was “the end of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor”. And that happened only 20 years after the joint opposition by France-Germany to the neocon war on Iraq.
11. Todd correctly defines NATO by plunging into “their unconscious”: “We note that that its military, ideological and psychological mechanism does not exist to protect Western Europe, but to control it.”
12. In tandem with several analysts in Russia, China, Iran and among independents in Europe, Todd is sure that the US obsession – since the 1990s – to cut off Germany from Russia will lead to failure: “Sooner or later, they will collaborate, as “their economic specializations define them as complementary”. The defeat in Ukraine will open the path, as a “gravitational force” reciprocally seduces Germany and Russia.
Before that, and unlike virtually any Western “analyst” across the mainstream NATOstan sphere, Todd understands that Moscow is set to win against the whole of NATO, not merely Ukraine, profiting from a window of opportunity identified by Putin in early 2022. Todd bets on a window of 5 years, that is, an endgame by 2027. It’s enlightening to compare with Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, last year: the SMO will end by 2025.
Whatever the deadline, inbuilt in all this is a total Russia victory – with the winner dictating all terms. No negotiations, no ceasefire, no frozen conflict – as the Hegemon is now desperate spinning.
Davos enacts The Triumph of the West
Todd’s ample merit, so evident in the book, is to use history and anthropology to take Western society’s false consciousness to the divan. And that’s how, focusing for instance in the study of very specific family structures in Europe, he manages to explain reality in a way that totally escapes the brainwashed collective West masses lingering under turbo-neoliberalism.
It goes without saying that Todd’s reality-based book will not be a hit among the Davos elites. What’s happening this week in Davos has been immensely enlightening. Everything is out in the open.
From all the usual suspects – the toxic EU Medusa von der Leyen; NATO’s warmongering Stoltenberg; BlackRock, JP Morgan and assorted honchos shaking hands with their sweaty sweatshirt toy in Kiev – the “Triumph of the West” message is monolithic.
War is Peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. If you disagree with us – on anything – you will be censored for “hate speech”. We want the New World Order – whatever you lowly peasants think – and we want it now.
(3) A Trotskyist review – from Jacobin magazine
https://www.jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine
03.10.2024
Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West
Review BY
MICHAEL LEDGER-LOMAS
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
Review of La Défaite de l’Occident by Emmanuel Todd (Gallimard, 2023).
The Western admirers of Vladimir Putin’s Russia are a strangely assorted bunch, with each finding quite different things to like about it. Tucker Carlson raves about the living standards. He returned from a recent journey to Moscow enthusing over the spotless Metro system and the cheap supermarkets. The Putin-understanders of the German far right see in him a fellow champion of ethnonationalism. The French demographer, sociologist, and all-around provocateur Emmanuel Todd is cooler and higher minded in his praise: he is drawn to Putin’s mastery of geopolitics.
Todd’s latest book argues that Western powers are locked in a doomed effort to prop up Ukraine in its war with Russia. While it has sold well in France, it has also earned some scornful reviews. Le Monde dismissed him as a false prophet and a copyist of “the Kremlin’s propaganda.” La Défaite de L’Occident (The Defeat of the West) is undoubtedly soft on Putin. Yet it abounds in imaginative and occasionally shrewd explanations for the fears and jealousies which rack Western states. Its appearance is an opportunity to take the measure of a thinker at once systematic and mercurial, a cynic but also a moralist whose one consistent aversion is to self-satisfaction. […]
Once again Todd casts the West’s search for its enemies as the sign of a religious crisis. This time though, he points not to zombie Catholicism but to the implosion of Protestantism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavian countries, who have been Ukraine’s cheerleaders in Europe. Writing for a French readership which imagines that its secular and republican model of state formation is normative, he emphasizes that states such as the United States and Great Britain had derived a sense of nationhood from the Bible long before the Bastille fell.
As a “good student” of Max Weber, he then adds the argument that their prosperity initially derived from Protestant habits of self-regulation and industry. No wonder, then, that their gradual but irreversible secularization is proving socially corrosive and politically destabilizing. Initially, this process strengthened democracy by producing a generation or two of “zombie Protestants,” who redirected their religious zeal toward the creation of welfare states. Even zombies, however, cannot live forever. “Phantasmal” Protestantism has given way to “point zero,” sweeping away what Todd wistfully regards as America’s once-benevolent WASP elite. It has been replaced by gangs of Washington insiders, whose only bond is their addiction to military grandstanding and the rentier profits of empire. Todd makes moralizing use of demographic data to suggest that dechristianization is sickening Protestant societies, as their godly industriousness degenerates into mere greed. The contrast between svelte Frenchmen and obese Americans suggests that the latter’s self-control has disappeared along with their God.
Weber would not have set so much store on waistlines. The breezy crudity with which Todd discusses Christianity blunts his insistence on its importance. For instance, his choice of gay marriage and the acceptance of transgender people as indicators of its passing is strangely arbitrary (not to mention echoing Russian diatribes against Western decadence). The emphasis on dechristianization is also inconsistent: he does not explain why it has not shaken Russia — where Orthodoxy is just as much in suspension — to the same extent.
All the same, Todd is surely right that societies flounder without the kind of public doctrine that churches once provided. It allows him to give a particularly shrewd account of the United Kingdom. He sees its Lilliputian bellicosity as a desperate attempt to revive its vanished standing as an elect nation. Although an inveterate enemy of the single currency and the neoliberal European Union, Todd is unimpressed by Brexit, which he presents as a symptom of a fraying Britishness, rather than a revival of it. Its leaders have fled this disarray by posturing as defenders of the West, even though decades of deindustrialization have so sapped its military that they cannot even emulate the French and make themselves “hated in Africa.” Boris Johnson embraced and armed Volodymyr Zelensky with an alacrity that surprised even the Americans.
From Ukraine to Gaza
While The Defeat of the West is less scientific and more anecdotal than Todd’s earlier books, it remains thoroughly “anthropological” in its insistence on the power of a political unconscious. To understand the decisions of individual politicians, one should consider the unseen and deep-seated structures that influence them. The risk of such an approach is that the analyst will find in the unconscious whatever they find amusing or convenient to put there. Todd’s book contains too many examples of such whimsy to mention. Let one example stand for many: he speculates that Antony Blinken’s Jewish roots in antisemitic Ukraine might be motivating him to keep it embroiled in a ruinous war as a “just punishment” for persecuting his ancestors. Todd’s references to his own Jewish ancestry hardly excuse such conspiratorial flourishes.
Todd has often essentialized and overdetermined the world as he finds it, a tendency evident in The Defeat of the West. His admittedly gripping portrait of America and Europe’s post-Christian nihilism is so overwhelming that it leaves little space for solutions. Only the Germans inspire him with some hope. Although Todd has always classed Germany as an authoritarian society and disliked its efforts to foist economic austerity on the European Union, he loathes American power more. He has long hoped that Germany might shed its status as an “inert” nation and team up with the Russians to break NATO’s hold over Europe, which has allowed America to “robotize” its political and economic elites. Todd impatiently anticipates Ukraine’s defeat primarily because it might reopen the opportunity for such an alliance, which seems neither a very plausible nor inviting prospect.
Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, it seems unlikely to vindicate Todd’s fading reputation as a prophet. For all their confused values and stuttering economies, European societies remain stronger and wealthier than his gloomy prognostications or his loaded comparisons with Russia allow. Perhaps the “nihilism” and the “narcissism” which characterize their politics are in the eye of the beholder. By contrast, the war in Gaza, which began just as Todd wrote the coda to his book, is vindicating some of its wilder flourishes. The unconditional support of America’s elderly political elite for Israel’s invasion does indeed suggest they are in the grip of a psychic crisis which finds expression in a “need for violence.” The “childish simplicity” with which President Biden likened Israel to Ukraine as beleaguered bastions of freedom show how quickly Western values can become discredited by their addled defenders. The “irrational” commitment of America’s military materiel to the destruction of Gaza’s cities — which met with the protracted, if uneasy, acquiescence of its European allies and the mainstream media — suggests that all is not well with the West.
(4) A war they cannot win but dare not end
https://www.rt.com/russia/626032-war-west-cant-win/
7 Oct, 2025 14:44
Behind the illusion of deadlock: what’s really happening in the Ukraine conflict
This is the war the West can’t win, can’t end, and can’t afford
By Vasily Kashin, Political Science PhD, Director of the Centre for Comprehensive European and International Studies, HSE
Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, talk of a “stalemate” in Ukraine has become a convenient Western refrain – the kind of phrase that sounds sober while disguising strategic drift. In reality, what looks static on the battlefield conceals deep political movement, both in Washington and in the war itself.
Trump’s early approach to the conflict was loud but logical: impose a ceasefire along existing lines, freeze the situation, and move on. His mix of threats and incentives – sanctions on one hand, the promise of renewed partnership on the other – echoed the same objectives the Biden administration privately pursued in 2024.
The difference was style. Biden lacked the political strength and health to launch a diplomatic campaign; Kamala Harris might have, had she succeeded him. Trump, by contrast, acted decisively. He made his will known to the generals, the allies, and the public in his usual unfiltered fashion.
When efforts to force India and China to participate in an oil embargo failed over the summer, Washington pivoted to negotiation. The White House began floating the idea of a broader “security guarantees” deal – a truce embedded within a larger settlement. The battle today is over what those guarantees would mean in practice.
A personal, centralized policy
Trump has stripped away layers of bureaucracy, bringing Russia policy directly under his control and that of a few loyal aides. There is little expert machinery around it. The military-to-military channels that should be discussing demobilization or verification measures remain idle.
Instead, the Trump administration is trying to present Moscow with a finished product – a ready-made Western consensus hammered out with Western Europe and Kiev – and demand that Russia either accept or face the consequences.
At the same time, Washington is ratcheting up pressure: verbal barbs like calling Russia a “paper tiger,” leaks about longer-range missiles, and renewed attempts to isolate Russian oil exports through India. In every respect, Ukraine is marching in lockstep with the United States, from political messaging to targeting decisions.
Trump’s central claim is that America can now afford to step back – that Western Europe, armed with pooled resources and US-made weapons, can sustain Ukraine indefinitely. In this vision, Washington sells the arms, the EU pays the bills, and Russia bleeds slowly.
It is a neat theory, but delusional in practice. The US remains deeply embedded in the war’s infrastructure. American satellites guide Ukraine’s drones and artillery; American communications systems knit together its command structure. Efforts to substitute British OneWeb for Starlink have gone nowhere.
Although Brussels (and London) covers much of the cost, the US still funds tens of thousands of troops deployed across the continent, as well as the logistics chain that keeps them active. This drains resources from the Pacific at a time when Washington is already stretched thin against China.
The promised “pivot to Asia” has again become a slogan without substance. China’s military power has grown exponentially since Obama’s era, while the US industrial base struggles even to meet Ukraine’s short-term needs.
Western Europe’s financial strain
Trump’s claim that Western Europe can fund Ukraine alone also falters under scrutiny. Of the $360 billion pledged to Kiev by early 2025, more than $134 billion came from the US. Even by official figures, Ukraine’s 2026 defense needs exceed $120 billion, half of which remains unfunded.
As Trump insists that future American supplies be paid for at market rates, EU costs could easily double. Dreams of using frozen Russian assets are unlikely to fill the gap – their confiscation would trigger legal chaos and provoke retaliation against Western European holdings in Russia. The debates over “reparation loans” may sound bold, but they only reveal the bloc’s growing desperation.
While the front lines appear static, Ukraine’s military and social fabric are fraying. Desertion and draft evasion are climbing at exponential rates: over 250,000 criminal cases for abandonment or desertion have been opened since 2022. Even the amnesty program launched last year lured back barely a tenth of those who left.
Former commander Valery Zaluzhny himself admitted that the “stalemate” is breaking – but in Russia’s favour. Moscow’s forces, aided by superior drone technology and heavier firepower, are advancing through thinly held positions. FPV drones alone now account for up to 80 percent of Ukrainian casualties.
Meanwhile, Russia’s production advantage is expanding. Its defense industries have adapted to sanctions with unexpected speed, delivering both standard weapons and new low-altitude air-defense systems designed to neutralize small drones. Air superiority, if achieved, could transform the war overnight, and it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is closest to that threshold.
A dangerous temptation
In this climate, Washington and Kiev are tempted to raise the stakes. The idea of using Western-made missiles to strike deep into Russian territory has moved from the fringe to the discussion table. The Biden team flirted with this option; Trump, less cautious and more theatrical, might yet cross that line.
Such escalation would drag the conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders and invite responses that neither Washington nor Brussels could control.
To call this situation an “impasse” is to misunderstand it. The war is not frozen but evolving – technologically, politically, and strategically – in ways that favor Moscow. Ukraine’s Western backers are trapped by their own contradictions: a war they cannot win but dare not end, a financial burden they cannot sustain but fear to drop.
The United States, for all its noise about disengagement, remains enmeshed in the conflict it pretends to mediate. Europe, meanwhile, is discovering that moral grandstanding is no substitute for industrial power.
What appears to be a stalemate, then, is really the slow unwinding of a Western strategy that mistook endurance for success. The front may look still, but history – as ever – is moving beneath it.
This article was first published by the magazine Profile and was translated and edited by the RT team.
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