THE DISLOCATION OF THE WEST.

 Those who have followed Emmanuel Todd will know that most of his predictions are based on a detailed analysis of demograpohics, economics and politics. 


'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........

(Todd puts the problem superbly as follows)

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 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.....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.




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