Welcome to reality! After a week of pomp and circumstance, during which the cream of the Swiss and international business, political and media worlds patted themselves on the back, extolling their virtues and successes in "improving the state of the world", the Davos forum closed its doors with its usual self-congratulation. The return to earth will be hard, for the West must now not only come to terms with the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, but also confront the moral rout to which its continuing policy of double standards - do as I say, not as I do - had led it.
In the meantime, events in Gaza have turned this moral rout into a strategic defeat.
The trouble with us Westerners - to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln - is that we can lie to ourselves all the time and fool the rest of the world some of the time, but we can't fool everyone all the time. And the time comes when we have to pay the bill. In his latest book, La défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West, Gallimard), Emmanuel Todd takes a different route to making this point. With his usual brilliance, he draws on statistical data, economic and cultural trends and rigorous argumentation that are difficult to dispute. We'll come back to this later.
While the fog of war, the effectiveness of censorship and the intensity of propaganda may have given the impression in the Ukraine that Putin-the-Demoniac was entirely responsible for the conflict, the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the war crimes committed by the Israeli army will have served, if need be, to open the eyes of the most blind. The whole planet was rightly shocked by the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, but it is now stunned - apart from the West - by the morbid rage and meticulousness displayed by the Israeli invaders over the last three months. The legitimate indignation that followed the crimes of Hamas has now been succeeded by no less legitimate indignation at the exactions committed by Tsahal against the Palestinian civilian population.
Even the law of retaliation - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - has not been respected by the Jewish state, as it very officially calls itself, despite the fact that Judaism claims it as its own: at twenty to one (23,000 Palestinians killed for 1,100 Israeli victims), all the limits of the code have been crossed. So much so that thousands of Jews, in Israel and elsewhere in the world, are alarmed.
The Israeli state is now seen by most of the world for what it is - an oppressive, annexationist, neo-colonial state, openly practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing, as recognized by Western human rights defenders (Human Rights Watch, 2021) and the International Court of Justice as long ago as 2004.
For non-Westerners, Israel is not the isolated island of democracy in a sea of dictatorships it is often portrayed as. South Africa is no exception, and Nelson Mandela said that the world would not be rid of apartheid as long as it remained in Palestine. It has lodged a complaint against Israel for attempted genocide with the ICJ, a body presided over by an American, Joan Donaghue, but reputed to be more impartial than the highly politicized International Criminal Court, subject to Anglo-Saxon influence since its creation in 2002. We await its verdict.
In any case, the moral and image damage has reached a point of no return. Western countries are caught with their hands in the cookie jar of double standards, having gone to war against Russia through the intermediary of the Ukraine because the latter had annexed and invaded provinces of its neighbor, but accepting without flinching that their Israeli protégé has been doing the same in the Golan Heights and the West Bank for fifty years, blithely violating international law.
As for Israel and the Jewish world, they are both losing the legitimacy and respect earned by the Shoah and centuries of persecution in Europe. How can a people who have suffered such hardship behave so inhumanely towards innocent children and civilians? If the memory of the Shoah is no longer a disinterested reminder of the Crime of crimes, but a propaganda tool used to justify an eradicating Zionism, if the fight against anti-Semitism is no longer the just and necessary fight against anti-Jewish racism, but a tool used to legitimize a predatory state run by a corrupt leadership, then it will become very difficult to support these causes.
Yet this is what is happening.
For the first time in history, world public opinion is witnessing live two wars with the same causes - existential security concerns against a backdrop of lethal attacks, annexations and opportunistic occupations of territories - and which are generating the same aggressive and deadly behavior, but which are receiving a radically different welcome from the West and from Davosian circles. In one case, the red carpet is rolled out for the guilty head of state; in the other, he is banished and charged with war crimes.
This duplicitous attitude is no longer tolerated outside Western borders. Like the Katyn massacre for the Poles, the Oradour massacre for the French, or the famine caused by Churchill in Bengal in 1943 for the Indians, the images of Gaza under the bombs will haunt the Arab world for decades to come, and weaken the fight against anti-Semitism throughout the world, including here at home.
The price to be paid will be high for both Israel and the West. We will have won the battle of the tunnels, but lost the war of the heart and of the law. In the eyes of the rest of the world, we will have tipped over to the wrong side of history. India's turnaround is fascinating in this respect. In the aftermath of the October 7 attack, the country took Israel's side, both out of anti-Islamic sentiment and in order to preserve its recent good relations with the United States. Then, thanks to Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar's visit to Moscow at the end of December, which went unnoticed in our country, Delhi abruptly reversed course and distanced itself from Tel Aviv and Washington, confirming its strategic friendship with Russia and renewing its non-aligned stance. In South Africa, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in early January to protest against the massacre of Palestinians. In the United States, it was young people who denounced Biden-the-Genocidaire en masse.
These examples show, once again, that the Europeans and the USA are no longer in a position to impose their narrative, and that it is being violently contested by the countries of the South and East, which now enjoy their own media and an autonomous vision of world order. In their minds, these two conflicts, which have been fuelled for decades by unconditional support for Ukraine and Israel, are seen as a means of delaying the emergence of a fairer, more equitable world order. This is something radically new.
Of course, the West has not said its last word. In fact, it could reverse the trend and re-establish its leadership by rebuilding peace. All it would have to do is bet on cooperation rather than confrontation, and on recognizing the Other rather than annihilating him. There is nothing to prevent Israel from returning the Golan Heights to Syria, living in peace with Lebanon, accepting the existence of a genuine Palestinian state alongside it, or forming a binational federal state, as many Zionists had envisaged before 1948. And if it does not wish to negotiate with the Islamist Hamas (which is merely the Muslim counterpart of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists who populate the Israeli government), there is nothing to prevent it from releasing the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, Marwan Barghouti, to take over the leadership of a renewed Palestinian Authority. If South Africa could do it, why can't Israel? That's what former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon suggests in the Guardian.
The same applies to the conflict in Ukraine. If Ukraine and NATO had agreed to accept Russia's European security project in December 2021, war would never have broken out. It is not impossible to return to it, provided all parties are brought to the table. After all, that's what the West managed to do in 1973 when it signed the Helsinki agreements with the Soviet Union. But we're a long way from that. When Switzerland sets itself up as the promoter of a peace summit in Ukraine by boycotting Russia, we can see the inanity of the project and the immense distance still to be covered to restore dialogue.
The parameters for lasting peace are well known. But no one here wants to consider them. We prefer to demonize and discredit our adversaries, to deny their humanity, and to continue betting on war in order to delay as long as possible the fateful moment when we will have to give up our claim to dominate world affairs and share power with the other powers. A residue of hubris, no doubt, but above all an excess of weakness. We no longer have the courage or the means to dare the peace of the brave. It is this tragic impotence that Emmanuel Todd's thesis forcefully illuminates: our moral regression and our inability to resolve our political difficulties other than by violence, far from being the effects of circumstance, are the rotten fruits of an inexorable and uncontrollable economic, demographic and cultural collapse.
"In Arab countries, nobody listens to what the West says anymore", says this Algerian friend. He might have added: neither do Asian, African or Latin American countries. Moral collapse and media narcissism have made them lose all credibility. In his book, Todd gives the historical and material reasons for this. The West is in the process of imploding, collapsing in on itself, emptying itself from within and sinking into the void, fascinated as it is by nihilism.
The war in Ukraine is a case in point: Russia is going to win this war because it is fighting at home and for itself. Although Russia is an authoritarian democracy (which applies the decision of the majority without regard for minorities), its economy and society are stable, and even improving, as witnessed by its agricultural and industrial resilience, its annual production of engineers and the constant improvement in its life expectancy, which are higher than those of the United States despite population differences. We've written about it several times in these columns.
Ukraine, a country bruised by Stalin but cajoled by Communist power after 1945, proved incapable of building a stable state after 1991. It never succeeded in freeing itself from the tutelage of oligarchs and corruption. Gradually, power was taken over by the ultranationalist minority in the West ("neo-Nazis" in Russian terminology) and the anarcho-militarists in the Center, following the mass emigration of Russian-speaking and Russophile elites from the East after 2014. These new elites have been careful not to develop the region and establish a true democracy, as opposition parties, trade unions and critical media have been banned. Now radicalized, Zelenski's regime is on life support, with no project other than its hatred of Russia.
Eastern Europe has followed the same pattern, minus the war. The former Communist elites have passed with arms and baggage into the liberal camp. They simply changed masters, swapping Moscow and its rubles for the euros and dollars of Berlin, Brussels and Washington. Yesterday's friend became the new enemy, while the countries of the region were depopulated to supply German factories with cheap labor, and their governments took their orders and bought apartments in London and Washington. The only exception is Hungary, which, having fought relentlessly for its sovereignty against the Turks, the Austrians and then the Soviets, is determined to preserve it against the dictates of Brussels.
As for Western Europe, in the wake of the United States, it is both a victim of its oligarchic drift - its elites have seceded from their people - and of the final downfall of Protestantism, guarantor of high educational standards and a work ethic that have now disappeared into the dustbin of history. All that counts now is greed, short-term profits, image and comm. Demographics are at half-mast, democracy is in crisis, German industry is in recession, debt is on the rise, defense is lying fallow, and the European political project is on the verge of extinction. The German engine is stalling, French balancing diplomacy is unravelling, while the British Titanic is sinking after missing the hoped-for Brexit jolt and entrusting the reins of its destiny to its former colonized, such as Kwazi Kharteng, Sadik Khan, Rishi Sunak or Humza Yousaf. But no one is paying attention, as European orchestras have turned up the volume to hide the wreckage.
As for Scandinavia, after centuries of reasonable pacifism and progressivism, it suddenly switched from militant feminism to military warmongering, thanks to a slew of prime ministers for whom this evolution seemed self-evident.
As for the United States, it has entered a process of decadence that is as lasting as it is irreversible. Their educational level is collapsing. They have to import engineers and scientists by the tens of thousands. Life expectancy is plummeting, infant mortality is on the rise, and healthcare costs - despite being the highest in the world - are soaring, as are obesity, mass shootings and prisons. Democracy is withering away, contested both by the Democrats (who rejected Trump's election and twice tried to overthrow him by impeachment) and by the Republicans (who sought to deny Biden's victory). The Protestant WASP meritocracy has given way to a neoliberal oligarchy, more motley but without ties or homeland. The economy, once deflated of its highly paid bullshit jobs - lawyers, communicators, lobbyists, advertisers, insurers, financiers, economists - produces few real goods and lives on credit by printing dollars and massively importing goods, services and human capital at the cost of a debt calculated in trillions of dollars.
Worst of all, America has lost its vision, its culture and its collective intelligence. It jumps from one fad to another (today, it's artificial intelligence), from one war to another, from one futile innovation to another, from anti-Russian hysteria to Chinese obsession, convinced that social networks and the hunt for fake news will save it.
The hallmark of this nihilism? Transgender wokism. Todd dates the end of Protestantism - and of Catholicism since the Holy See authorized priests to bless same-sex couples - and the beginning of the nihilist era to the adoption of marriage for all and the right to change sex at will. When a man can be a woman and a woman a man, irrespective of his or her biological sex, and when this possibility becomes the dominant ideology, there is an anthropological break with the rest of the world, which thinks the West has gone mad.
These are the essentials of Todd's theses, freely interpreted and cum grano salis. It remains to be seen whether they are correct, and what the consequences will be. It won't be long before we find out, particularly in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, which will provide a clearer picture.
In the meantime, we can use history, and even cinematic fiction, to shed some light on the situation. After all, isn't Georges Lucas' Star Wars saga a metaphor for the transformation of the American republic into an authoritarian planetary empire? A corrupt galactic republic is transformed into a tyrannical empire through a coup d'état by its ruling elites, backed by a Trade Federation hungry for new planetary markets. The oligarchy has seized power. The forms of democracy - institutions, senators, consuls - have been preserved, but not its spirit. A faceless emperor - think of the gnomes in Davos spouting the globalist catechism - rules with an iron fist, thanks to exacerbated militarism and legions of clones who obediently carry out the program, while a handful of wacky rebels, assisted by a few valiant Jedi knights, attempt to restore the light side of the Force. Fifty years after the first film, how can we fail to see this as an allegory for the evolution of the United States?
Didn't the Roman Republic and its transformation into an oligarchic, autocratic empire follow the same path, despite Cicero's attempts to oppose it? Civic religion and democratic forces collapsed under the pressure of oligarchies enriched by the relentless conquest of new markets in Greece, Gaul, Asia Minor and North Africa, and had to give way to lawless global elites. Traditional values, those of the austere Latin peasant-soldier, were replaced by greed, prevarication, political cronyism and fratricidal struggles between plebeian populists like Marius or Caesar and senatorial oligarchs like Sylla and Lepidus. Until, that is, an ambitious and inspired tyrant restored lasting authority by force of arms and a skillful ability to keep up appearances by pretending to be no more than a modest primus inter pares.
Here, too, the republican forms of government - elections of senators and tribunes of the plebs, sessions of the Senate, consuls and lictors - remained. But real power was concentrated in the hands of a single person, an emperor supported by a thin layer of patricians who controlled finance, trade, large landholdings and even tax collection, while incessant wars were waged against external enemies described as barbaric. We're thinking here of the hated figures of Putin and Xi Jinping.
(For more details, see my book "Le continent perdu" (Syrtes, 2019) and my contribution "The Global World and the New Western Empire" (The 17th International Likhachov Scientific Conference, Saint-Petersburg, May 18-20, 2017).
A final contemporary American historian, Paul Kennedy, analyzed the causes of the "birth and decline of the great powers". In an update published in The New Statesman on the 30th anniversary of the publication of his book, he re-examines the dilemmas facing any hegemonic power threatened with imperial over extension while in relative decline, as in the case of the United States. Washington now has only two options: to concentrate its resources, which means offering fewer guarantees to fewer people, or to strengthen its credibility with its wide circle of supporters, which means "realizing that the current system is no longer viable and that much more should be invested in national security". Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told Bloomberg TV.
Biden prefers to dodge this difficult choice by renouncing both reducing his commitments and spending enough to meet them. Problem: the $886 billion defense budget for 2024 is woefully inadequate to meet this target, despite its colossal size. Trump advocates the opposite strategy: a strategic retreat to defensible objectives, limited to indispensable allies. Hence his reticence towards NATO and the continuation of the war in Ukraine, and his interest in finding an accommodation with Russia.
For Paul Kennedy, the die is cast: the United States no longer has the political and economic means to double or triple its military spending to satisfy 50 allies at once, and to fight on three fronts at the same time - Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, or Korea if open conflict were to break out in the Pacific. In the future, "American security coverage will be narrower, smaller, limited to those well-known places like NATO-Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel, Korea, maybe Taiwan, and not much else," Kennedy concludes.
On a personal note, I'd like to add that history has known such a precedent, that of the Eastern Roman Empire. Noting the Roman Empire's inability to fight on all fronts at once, Emperor Constantine decided to abandon Rome and retreat to Constantinople. The western part of the empire collapsed, after a process that lasted a century and a half. But in the process, he managed to prolong the existence of the eastern part for over a thousand years. A strategy that was not lacking in vista, we agree.
Guy Mettan, freelance journalist
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