The suicide of the West and the challenges posed by the South and East (Part II)

“In the Arab countries, nobody listens to what the West says anymore,” an Algerian friend said to me not long ago. He could have added: Neither do the Asian, African and Latin American countries. The moral collapse and narcissism of the media have caused them to lose all credibility. In his latest book, “La défaite de l’Occident” (Gallimard 2024), Emmanuel Todd explains the historical and material reasons for this. The West is imploding, collapsing, emptying itself from within to sink into vacuity, mesmerised by nihilism.
  The war in Ukraine is an example of this: Russia will win this war because it is fighting at its borders and for itself. It may be an authoritarian democracy (enforcing majority decisions without regard for minorities), but its economy and society are stable, even progressing, as evidenced by its resilience in agriculture and industry, the number of engineers it produces each year, and the steady improvement in its life expectancy – which is higher than in the US despite population disparities. We have reported on this several times.

Ukraine: Dominated by
oligarchs and ultra-nationalists

Ukraine, a country that was maltreated by Stalin, but which was coddled by the Communist rulers after 1945, proved incapable of building a stable state after 1991. It never managed to free itself from the tutelage of the oligarchs and corruption. After the Russian-speaking and Russia-friendly elites in the east emigrated to Russia en masse after the US-cultivated coup in 2014, power was gradually seized by the ultra-nationalist minority in the west of the country (the “neo-Nazis,” in Russian terminology) and by anarcho-militarists in the centre of the country. These new elites made sure not to develop the country further and introducing genuine democracy. Opposition parties, trade unions, and critical media were banned not long after the 2014 coup. Today’s radicalised Zelensky regime is now living on a drip and has no plans beyond its hatred of Russia.

Eastern Europe: Berlin, Brussels
and Washington instead of Moscow

Eastern Europe followed the same pattern, only without the war. The former communist elites have defected bag and baggage to the liberal camp [since 1989]. They simply changed masters and swapped Moscow and its roubles for the euros and dollars of Berlin, Brussels, and Washington. Yesterday’s friend became the new enemy, while the region depopulated to supply German factories with cheap labour and their government officials took their orders and bought flats in London and Washington. The only exception is Hungary, which, after a tireless struggle for its sovereignty against the Turks, the Austrians, and then the Soviets, insists on preserving it against the dictates of Brussels.

Western Europe: The orchestra
is still able to mask the downfall.

As for Western Europe, in the wake of the United States, it is the victim of both its oligarchic development – its elites have separated themselves from their people – and the final decline of Protestantism, which stood for high educational standards and a work ethic that have now been consigned to the ash heap of history. Only greed, short-term profits, image, and commerce count here. Demographics are in the cellar, democracy is in crisis, German industry is in recession, debt is growing, defence is lying idle and the European political project is in danger of dying. The German engine is stalling, French balance-of-power diplomacy is fraying, while the British Titanic is sinking after missing the hoped-for Brexit boost and leaving its fate in the hands of those it formerly colonised, such as Kwazi Kharteng, Sadik Khan, Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf. But no one is paying attention, because the European orchestras have turned up the volume to hide the shipwreck.
  As for Scandinavia, after centuries of pacifism and sensible progressivism, it has abruptly turned from militant feminism to military warmongering, thanks to a succession of female prime ministers for whom this development seemed the natural course.

Homeless, neoliberal oligarchs
and decadence are ruling the US

The United States is in a process of decadence that will prove as lasting as it is irreversible. The educational level is decreasing. It has to import tens of thousands of engineers and scientists annually to keep its technology sectors even minimally competitive. Life expectancy is decreasing, while child mortality is increasing and health care costs, already the world’s highest, are exploding – as are obesity, mass shootings, and rates of incarceration.
  Amercian democracy is withering. It is disputed by the Democrats (who rejected Trump’s election and tried to bring him down through impeachment trials twice) as well as by the Republicans (who tried to deny Biden’s victory). The Protestant meritocracy of White Anglo–Saxon Protestants, the WASP middle and upper classes, have given way to a neoliberal oligarchy which is, albeit more diversely colourful, without cohesion and a home. The economy, once the steam from their well-paid bullshit jobs – they are lawyers, communicators, lobbyists, marketing experts, insurers, financiers, economists – has run out, is producing few real goods, and is living on tick while printing dollars profligately and importing massive amounts of goods, services, and human resources at the price of an indebtedness calculated in tens of trillions of dollars.
  But it comes to even worse: America does not have a vision, a culture, and a collective intelligence anymore. It jumps from one trend to the next – nowadays it is artificial intelligence – from one war to the next, from one senseless innovation to the next, from anti-Russian hysteria to an obsession with the Chinese, all with a conviction that social media and the hunt for fake news will save the day.

The anthropologic breakup
of the West and the rest of the world

And the landmark of this nihilism? It is the transgenderist Wokeism now abroad among Americans.
  Todd dates the end of Protestantism – and of Catholicism, since the Holy See now permits priests to bless same-sex couples – and the beginning of the nihilistic age to the acceptance of marriage for all and the right to switch genders at will. If a man, no matter his biological gender, can be a woman and a woman can be a man and this possibility becomes the prevalent ideology, it will lead to an anthropologic breach between the West and non-West, which appears broadly to be of the opinion that the Western world has gone crazy.
  This is the core of Todd’s theses, interpreted freely and cum grano salis.
  It remains to be seen if they will prove out and, if they do, what consequences will then manifest. This will become eident soon, especially as the Ukraine conflict is resolved. However it is, that will bring clarity to these questions.

Star Wars 20 years ago: Allegories
of the West’s present and future?

In the meantime, one is able to shine a light on this conclusion by means of history and even cinematic fiction. Isn’t the Star Wars saga, George Lucas’ noted work, nothing less than a metaphor for the change of the American republic to an authoritarian planetary imperium? A corrupt galactic republic transforms into a tyrannic imperium by a coup of its reigning elites – supported by a trade federation that longs for new planetary markets. The oligarchy has taken over. The outer manifestations of democracy remain – institutions, senators, consuls, and so on – but nothing of its spirit. A faceless emperor – think of the gnomes in Davos, praying from the globalist catechism – controls everything with an iron fist, thanks to an exaggerated militarism and legions of clones who willingly execute protocol, whilst a handful of slightly crazy rebels with the support of some brave Jedi try to restore the bright side of the Force. Fifty years after the first film, how can one not see an allegory of the development of the United States?

History could teach
those who lack insight

Did the Roman republic not take the same path while transforming into an oligarchic, autocratic imperium, albeit Cicero tried to stand against it? Under the pressure of the oligarchies, which had enriched themselves by endlessly conquering new markets in Greece, Gaul, Anatolia, and North Africa, the civil religion and the democratic forces crumbled and had to give way to a global elite without faith and legislation. Traditional values – those of the ascetic Latin peasant soldier – were extinguished in favour of greed, misuse of authority, a political clientele economy, and brothers’ wars between plebeian demagogues such as Marius or Caesar and senatorial oligarchs such as Sulla and Lepidus. Until an ambitious and frenetic tyrant [Augustus] permanently restores authority with force of weapons and the wits to keep up appearances by pretending to be just a humble primus inter pares, a first among equals.

Fake democracy: This, too,
was known to the ancient Romans

Here, too, the republican forms – lections of senators and tribunes of the people, Senate sessions, consuls, and lictors – remained in place. But real power was concentrated in the hands of an emperor, supported by a thin layer of patricians who controlled finance, trade, large estates, and even tax collection, while wars were waged incessantly against external enemies described as barbaric. Think of the reviled personalities Putin and Xi Jinping: These are our present-day versions of such distant barbarians.
  For a more detailed treatment of these questions, see my book “Le continent perdu” (The Lost Continent, Syrtes 2019) and my contribution “The Global World and the New Western Empire” (The 17^th International Likhachov Scientific Conference, Saint Petersburg, 18–20 May 2017).
  Finally, one American and contemporary historian should be mentioned: Paul Kennedy, who analysed the dynamics of decline in his noted “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Random House, 1987). In an update to mark the 35^th anniversary of the publication of his book, published in The New Statesman on 20 September 2023 he re-examines the dilemmas facing any hegemonic power threatened by imperial overstretch while in relative decline, as the United States is. Washington has only two options left: to pool its resources, which means offering fewer guarantees to fewer people, or to strengthen its credibility with its large circle of chums. This, in turn, means “realising that the current system is no longer viably and that we are going to have to invest substantially more in all aspects of national security”, as Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, told Bloomberg TV on 29 December 2023.
  Biden prefers to avoid this difficult choice by refraining from reducing his commitments, but also from spending enough to fulfil them. The problem: Despite its colossal size, the 886 billion US-Dollar defence budget for the fiscal year that began 1 October, is nowhere near enough (far from enough) to meet this target. Trump favours the opposite approach: a strategic retreat to defensible targets and thus a restriction to indispensable allies. Hence his reticence towards NATO and the continuation of the war in Ukraine, and his interest in an amicable settlement with Russia.

Paul Kennedy: Game over.

For Paul Kennedy, the game is over: The US no longer has the political and economic means to double or triple its military spending to satisfy 50 allies at the same time and to fight on three fronts simultaneously – in Ukraine, Israel, and in Taiwan or Korea should there be an open conflict in the Pacific. In the future, Kennedy wrote in The New Statesman “The American security blanket will be tighter, smaller, limited to those well-known places such as NATO-Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel, Korea, maybe Taiwan, and not much else.”
  Personally, I would like to add that history knows one such precedent, that of the Eastern Roman Empire. When Emperor Constantine realised that the empire was unable to fight on all fronts at the same time, he decided, in 330 A. D., to leave Rome and retreat to Constantinople. The western part had collapsed after a process that had lasted a century and a half. In this way, he managed to prolong the existence of the eastern part by more than a thousand years. It was a strategy not lacking in foresight, as one has to admit.  •

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Guy Mettan is a freelance journalist and member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva, which he chaired in 2010. He worked for “Journal de Genève”, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and “Le Nouveau Quotidien”, and later as director and editor-in-chief of “Tribune de Genève”. In 1996, he founded the Swiss Press Club, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.