The Defeat of the West By Emmanuel Todd – 40 Q&As – Book Summary - La Défaite de l'Occident(2024)

The Defeat of the West By Emmanuel Todd – 40 Q&As – Book Summary

La Défaite de l'Occident(2024)

1)
Denis Rancourt recently tweeted this:

My choice for the most brilliant living geopolitical and socioeconomic analyst is French historian Emmanuel Todd.

Absolutely penetrating and extensive

His latest book, "Defeat of the Western World," has been translated into 22 languages but not into English.

https://youtu.be/oTz0gnOM3NM

2)
That's good enough for me to go and look into Emmanuel Todd.

I found this Google translation of the book.

The Defeat Of The West Emmanuel Todd 1, 2024 - 10.5MB ∙ PDF file Download
https://unbekoming.substack.com/api/v1/file/9855964a-ded6-44d6-8c1c-2c99cdab6e85.pdf

3)
I'm summarizing below to increase its accessibility.

I'm interested in the Empire, and understanding geopolitics means understanding the politics of the Empire. In fact, it seems to me that all politics is geopolitics.

4)
From the West's miscalculation of Russian military capabilities to America's industrial decline, Emmanuel Todd's "The Defeat of the West" analyses how the world's power dynamics have fundamentally shifted. Through the lens of anthropology, religious sociology, and critical economics,

5)
Todd reveals how Western nations' apparent economic dominance masks profound weaknesses in their industrial, social, and military capabilities. The Ukraine conflict serves not as the cause but as the revelation of this decline, exposing how the West's finances might no longer translate into real-world power.

6)
At the heart of Todd's analysis lies a provocative thesis: the West's dissolution of Protestant values and family structures has created a "zero state" of religion, leading to nihilism that prevents rational strategic thinking.

7)
This spiritual and social void, combined with the hollow nature of financial capitalism, has left Western nations unable to produce essential military supplies or maintain industrial capabilities despite their impressive GDP figures.

8)
Meanwhile, the rest of the world, particularly nations with patrilineal family structures, increasingly aligns with Russia's more traditional societal model, accelerating a global power shift that the West seems unable to comprehend or address.

With thanks to Emmanuel Todd.

The Defeat of the West
By Emmanuel Todd – 40 Q&As – Book Summary

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-defeat-of-the-west?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The New Structure of the World - Emmanuel Todd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmeeb8METlA&t=272s

La Défaite de l'Occident - The Defeat of the West(2024)

The lecturer, known as "France's greatest intellectual," will examine the Ukraine crisis from a cultural perspective, encouraging mutual understanding and negotiations that eventually lead to a return to peaceful daily life.

Lecturer: Emmanuel Todd (historian and social anthropologist)

Profile: French historian and social anthropologist. He was in charge of book reviews at Monde des Livres and later conducted research at the National Institute of Demography. His research includes analyzing the relationship between traditional family structures and diversity in modern society. He predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, the weakening of the American system, the Arab Spring, and more.

Emmanuel Todd - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd

Emmanuel Todd (French: [ɛmanɥɛl tɔd]; born 16 May 1951) is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. His research examines the different family structures worldwide and their relationship with beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical events. He has also published some political essays, which have received broad coverage in France.

Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine

Add info)

The Defeat Of The West Emmanuel Todd 1, 2024

- 10.5MB ∙ PDF file Download

https://unbekoming.substack.com/api/v1/file/9855964a-ded6-44d6-8c1c-2c99cdab6e85.pdf

//Summary - Level-B1//

The text highlights ten surprising outcomes of the Russia-Ukraine war. The unexpected start of the war in Europe shattered the belief in lasting peace. Ukraine's strong resistance surprised many, as it was considered a weak and failing state. Russia demonstrated economic resilience, adapting to sanctions, while Europe lost its autonomy by following US-led decisions and cutting ties with Russia, which caused energy issues. The West faced global isolation, with countries like China, India, and parts of the Muslim world either supporting Russia or remaining neutral. The US also struggled to supply enough weapons to Ukraine, revealing flaws in its military industry. The text concludes that the West's internal challenges, rather than Russia's actions, pose the greatest threat to global stability, potentially leading to the West's defeat despite the ongoing war.

The ten surprises of war

A)
On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin appeared on television screens around the world. He announced the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine. His speech fundamentally focused neither on Ukraine nor on the right to self-determination of the populations of Donbass. It was a NATO dice. Putin explained why he did not want Russia to be caught as it was in 1941 by waiting too long for the inevitable attack: "The continued expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance's infrastructure and the development military territory of Ukraine are unacceptable to us. » A “red line” had been crossed; there was no question of allowing an “anti-Russia” to develop in Ukraine; it was, he insisted, an action of self-defense.

B)
This speech arming the historical and, so to speak, legal validity of his decision revealed with cruel realism a technical balance of power which was favorable to him. If the time had come for Russia to act, it was because the possession of hypersonic missiles gave it strategic superiority. Putin's speech, very constructed, very calm even if it betrayed a certain emotion, was perfectly clear and, if nothing forced him to give in, he would still have deserved to be discussed. However, the vision immediately emerged of an incomprehensible Putin and Russians who were either incomprehensible, submissive, or stupid. What followed was a lack of debate which disgraced Western democracy: total in two countries, France and the United Kingdom, relative in Germany and the United States. Czechoslovakia, a country of 127,900 km Warsaw Pact had sent 500,000.

C)
Like most wars, especially world wars, this one did not go as planned; it has already provided us with many surprises. I counted ten main ones.

The first was the outbreak of war itself in Europe, a real war between two States, an unprecedented event for a continent which believed itself settled in perpetual peace.

D)
The second is the two adversaries that this war brings together: the United States and Russia. For more than a decade, China had been designated by America as its main enemy. The hostility towards him was, in Washington, transpartisan and undoubtedly
the only point on which Republicans and Democrats managed, in recent years, to agree. However, through Ukrainians, we are participating in a confrontation between the United States and Russia.

E)
Third surprise: Ukraine's military resistance. Everyone expected it to be crushed quickly. Having formed a childish and exaggerated image of a demonic Putin, many Westerners refused to see that Russia had only sent 100,000 to 120,000 men to Ukraine, the country of For comparison, in 1968, to invade the Czechoslovakia, a country of 127,900 km Warsaw Pact had sent 500,000.
Like most wars, especially world wars, this one did not go as planned; it has already provided us with many surprises. I counted ten main ones.

F)
But the most surprised were the Russians themselves. In their minds, as in those of most informed Westerners, and, indeed, in reality, Ukraine was what is technically called a failed state. Since its independence in 1991, it had lost perhaps 11 million inhabitants
through emigration and declining fertility. She was dominated by oligarchs; corruption there reached insane levels; the country and its people seemed for sale. On the eve of the war, Ukraine had become the promised land of cheap surrogacy.

Ukraine had certainly been equipped with Javelin anti-tank missiles by NATO, it had, from the start of the war, American observation and guidance systems, but the fierce resistance of a country in decomposition poses a historical problem . What no one could have predicted was that he would find in the war a reason to live, a justification for his own existence.

G)
The fourth surprise was Russia's economic resilience. We were told that the sanctions, in particular the exclusion of Russian banks from the Swift interbank trading system, would bring the country to its knees. But if a few curious minds, among our political and journalistic staff, had taken the time to read David Teurtrie's work, Russia. The Return of Power, published a few months before the war, this ridiculous faith in our omnipotence nancial would have been spared us. Murder shows that the Russians had adapted to the 2014 sanctions and prepared to be autonomous in the IT and banking sectors. In this book we discover a modern Russia, far removed from the rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy that the press portrays to us day after day, capable of great technical, economic and social flexibility – in short, an adversary to be taken seriously.

H)
Fifth surprise: the collapse of all European will. Europe was initially the Franco-German couple, which, since the crisis of 2007-2008, had certainly taken on the appearance of a patriarchal marriage, with Germany as a dominating husband no longer listening to what his partner told him . But even under German hegemony, Europe retained, it was thought, a certain autonomy. However, despite some reluctance at the beginning, across the Rhine, including the hesitation of Chancellor Scholz, the European Union very quickly abandoned any desire to defend its own interests; She has cut itself off from its Russian energy and (more generally) commercial partner, sanctioning itself more and more harshly.

I)
Germany unflinchingly accepted the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which partly ensured its energy supply, a terrorist act directed against it as much as against Russia, perpetrated by its American “protector”, associated for the occasion with Norway , a country not belonging to the Union. Germany even managed to ignore Seymour Hersh's excellent investigation into this incredible event, calling into question the State which presents itself as the indispensable guarantor of international order. But we also saw Emmanuel Macron's France vaporize on the international scene, while Poland became Washington's main agent in the European Union, succeeding in this role the United Kingdom, which had become outside the Union by the grace of Brexit.

J)
On the continent, generally, the Paris-Berlin axis has been replaced by a London-Warsaw-kyiv axis managed from Washington. This evanescence of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor is puzzling if we remember that, barely twenty years ago, the joint opposition of Germany and France to the war of Iraq led to joint press conferences by Chancellor Schröder, President Chirac and President Putin.

The sixth surprise of the war was the emergence of the United Kingdom as an anti-Russian rocket and a fly in the ointment of NATO. Relayed by the Western press, his Ministry of Defense (MoD) immediately appeared as one of the most excited commentators on the conflict, to the point of making American neoconservatives look
like lukewarm militarists. The United Kingdom wanted to be the first to send long-range missiles and heavy tanks to Ukraine.

This warmongering affected, in an equally bizarre way, Scandinavia, which had long been of a peaceful temperament and more inclined to neutrality than to combat.

We therefore find a seventh surprise, also Protestant, annexed to British excitement, in Northern Europe. Norway and Denmark are very important military relays of the United States, while Finland and Sweden, by joining NATO, reveal a new interest in war, which we will see existed before the invasion Russian from Ukraine.

M)
The eighth surprise is the most… surprising. It came from the United States, the dominant military power. After a slow rise, concern was officially expressed in June 2023 in numerous reports and articles whose original source was the Pentagon: the American military industry is deficient; the world superpower is incapable of ensuring the supply of shells – or anything for that matter – to its Ukrainian protégé. This is a completely extraordinary phenomenon when we know that on the eve of the war the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of Russia and Belarus represented 3.3% of Western GDP (United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea). These 3.3% capable of producing more weapons than the Western world pose a double problem: firstly for the Ukrainian army which loses the war, for lack of material resources; then to the queen science of the West, political economy, whose – dare we say the word – bogus character is thus revealed to the world. The concept of gross domestic product is outdated and we must now rethink the relationship of neoliberal political economy to reality.

N)
Ninth surprise, the ideological solitude of the West and its ignorance of its own isolation. Having become accustomed to decreeing the values to which the world must subscribe, Westerners expected, sincerely, stupidly, that the entire planet would share their indignation at Russia. They were disillusioned. After the first shock of the war passed, we saw the appearance of less and less discreet support for Russia almost everywhere.

O)
It could be expected that China, designated by the Americans as the next adversary on their list, would not don't support NATO. Note, however, that, on both sides of the Atlantic, commentators, blinded by their ideological narcissism, have for more than a year managed to seriously consider that China might not support Russia. India's refusal to get involved was even more disappointing, probably, deep down, because India is the largest democracy in the world, and this is a bit of a mess for the "liberal democracies" camp. We reassured ourselves by saying that it was because Indian military equipment was largely of Soviet origin.

P)
In the case of Iran, which quickly supplied drones to Russia, commentators in the immediate news did not appreciate what this rapprochement meant. Accustomed to putting the two countries in the same bag, that of the forces of evil, the amateur geopoliticians of the media and elsewhere had forgotten to what extent their alliance was not self-evident. Historically, Iran had two enemies: England, replaced by the United States after the fall of the British Empire, and… Russia. This turnaround should have alerted us to the scale of the geopolitical upheaval underway. Turkey, a member of NATO, seems increasingly engaged in a close relationship with Putin's Russia, a relationship which now combines, around the Black Sea, real understanding with rivalry. Seen from the West, the only interpretation considered was that these fellow dictators obviously had common aspirations. But, since Erdogan was democratically re-elected in May 2023, this line has become difficult to hold. In truth, after a year and a half of war, it is the entire Muslim world that seems to consider Russia as a partner rather than an adversary. It is increasingly clear that Saudi Arabia and Russia view each other as economic partners rather than ideological adversaries in managing oil production and prices. More generally, day after day, the economic dynamics of the war have increased hostility towards the West in the developing world, because it suffers from sanctions.

Q)
The tenth and final surprise is about to materialize. It is the defeat of the West. We will be surprised at such an armament when the war is not over. But this defeat is a certainty
because the West destroys itself rather than being attacked by Russia.

Let us broaden our perspective and escape for a moment the emotion that the violence of war legitimately arouses. We are at the age of complete globalization, in both senses of the word: maximum and finished. Let's try to have a geopolitical vision: Russia, in reality, is not the main problem.

R)
Too vast for a decreasing population, it would be incapable of taking control of the planet and has no desire to do so; it is a normal power whose evolution is not mysterious. No Russian crisis destabilizes the global balance. It is indeed a Western and more specifically American crisis, terminal, which endangers the balance of the planet. Its most peripheral waves came up against a mole of Russian resistance, against a classic and conservative nation-state.