By EMMANUEL TODD*

French historian reveals how he predicted “Russian comeback” in 2002 based on falling infant mortality (1993-1999) and knowledge of the communal family structure that survived communism as a “stable cultural backdrop”

It seems a bit strange to me to be giving today's lecture. I give them frequently in France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the Anglo-American world—in short, the West. I speak on these occasions from within my own world; from a critical perspective, it is true, but from within my world.

Here things are different: I am in Moscow, the capital of the country that challenged the West and will probably win this challenge. Psychologically, it is a completely different exercise.

Anti-ideological self-portrait

I will begin by introducing myself, not out of narcissism, but rather because very often people from France, or from other countries, who speak of Russia in an understanding or even sympathetic way, have a certain ideological profile. Often these people come from the conservative or populist right, and they project an ideological image onto Russia. beforehand. This ideological sympathy is, in my opinion, unrealistic and fanciful. I definitely do not belong to this category.

In France, I am what you would call a left-wing liberal, fundamentally attached to liberal democracy. What distinguishes me from other people attached to liberal democracy is the fact that, as an anthropologist and because I know, through the analysis of family systems, the diversity of the world, I have great tolerance for non-Western cultures and I do not assume that the whole world has to imitate the West. This catechist attitude is particularly common in Paris. I believe, for my part, that each country has its own history, its own culture, its own trajectory.

In any case, I must confess that there is an emotional dimension in me, a genuine sympathy for Russia, which may explain my ability to listen to its arguments in the ongoing geopolitical confrontation. This openness does not result from what Russia may be on the ideological level, but from a feeling of recognition for having freed us from Nazism.

It is time to say it now that we are approaching May 9, Victory Day. The history books I read when I was sixteen told of the war waged by the Red Army against Nazism. I feel a sense of debt that must be honored.

I am aware that Russia emerged from communism on its own, through its own efforts, and that it suffered enormously during this period of transition. I believe that the defensive war into which Russia was dragged by the West, after all this suffering and just when it was trying to get back on its feet, is a moral failing on the part of the West. This is in terms of the ideological dimension.

Besides, I am not an ideologist, I do not have a program for humanity; I am a historian, I am an anthropologist, I consider myself a scientist and what I can contribute to the understanding of the world and, in particular, to geopolitics, comes essentially from my professional skills.

Anthropology and politics

I graduated in historical research and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England. My supervisor was Peter Laslett. He had discovered that the English family of the 17th century was simple, nuclear, and individualistic, with children dispersing early. I then had as my examiner another great English historian, still alive, Alan Macfarlane. He had understood the existence of a relationship between the political and economic individualism of the English and Anglo-Saxons in general and this nuclear family identified by Peter Laslett in England's past.

I am a student of these two great English historians. What I did, basically, was to generalize Alan Macfarlane's hypothesis. I realized that the map of communism, in the mid-1970s, was very similar to that of the family system that I call “communal” (and that others call the patriarchal family, or joint family), in some ways the conceptual opposite of the English family system.

Let's take the Russian peasant family for example. I'm not an expert in Rússia; what I really know about Russia are the public records of the 19th century, which describe Russian peasant families. The latter were not, like the families of the English peasants of the 17th century, small nuclear families (father, mother and children), but huge families composed of a man, his wife, his children, his children's wives and their grandchildren.

This system was patrilineal because families exchanged their wives in order to obtain wives. This type of communal family is found in China, Vietnam, Serbia, and Central Italy (a region that has always voted for the Communists). One of the peculiarities of the Russian communal family is that it reserved a high status for women, since their appearance was recent.

The Russian communal family appeared between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Chinese communal family appeared before the Christian era. The Russian communal family was several centuries old, the Chinese communal family was two millennia old.

These examples reveal my perception of the world. I do not perceive an abstract world, but a world in which each of the great nations, and each of the small nations, has had a distinct peasant family structure, a structure that explains much about their current behavior.

I can give other examples. Japan and Germany, which are so similar in terms of industry and their conceptions of hierarchy, also have in common a family structure that is different from the nuclear and community family types, namely the stem family, which I cannot discuss today.

If you look at the media today, you will see that both journalists and politicians talk about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as if they were the fundamental agents of history, or even people with the power to shape society. I see them fundamentally as the expression of national cultures, which can be in a phase of expansion, stability or decline.

 I should clarify something about my reputation. Although 95% of my research life has been devoted to the analysis of family structures, a subject on which I have written books of 500 or 700 pages each, I am not so well known for this. I am best known for three essays on geopolitics in which I use my knowledge of this anthropological background to understand what is happening in the world.

In 1976, I published the book The Final Fall, Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere (The final fall. Essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere), in which he predicted the collapse of communism. The fall in the fertility rate of Russian women showed that Russians were people like everyone else, in the process of modernization, and that communism had not created any homo sovieticus.

I identified, above all, a rise in infant mortality between 1970 and 1974 in Russia and Ukraine. The rise in mortality among children under one year of age showed that the system had begun to deteriorate. I wrote this first book when I was very young, at the age of 25, and I had to wait another 15 years for my prediction to come true.

In 2002, I wrote a second book on geopolitics, After Empire (After the Empire), at the time no one spoke of anything other than the American superpower. They explained to us that America would dominate the world for an indefinite period, in a unipolar world. I said the opposite: the world is too vast, the relative size of the United States is decreasing economically and they will not be able to control the world. Which is what ended up happening.

In this After Empire there is a prediction whose verification still surprises me. In a chapter I entitled "The return of Russia” (“The Return of Russia”), I predicted Russia’s return as a world-class power based on very little evidence. I had observed a new low in infant mortality between 1993 and 1999, after a high between 1990 and 1993. But I knew instinctively that the Russian cultural community that had made communism possible in a transitional phase would survive the anarchy of the 1990s, providing a stable structure on which something could be built.

There is, however, a huge error in this book: I predict an autonomous destiny for Western Europe. And there is a major omission: I say nothing about China.

I finally come to my third book on geopolitics, which I think will be my last: La Défaite de l'Occident (The defeat of the West). It is to talk about this book that I am in Moscow today. The book predicts that, amid the open geopolitical confrontation with the entry of the Russian army into Ukraine, the West will be defeated. Once again I am going against the general opinion in my country, or in my field, since I am a Westerner myself.

I will say first why it was so easy for me to write this book, but I will also try to say why, now that the defeat of the West seems certain, it has become much more difficult for me to explain in the short term the process of the West's dislocation, even though I am able to predict in the long term the continuation of American decline.

We are at a crossroads: we have moved from defeat to dislocation. What makes me cautious is my past experience of the Soviet collapse. Although I predicted that collapse, I was not able to foresee the magnitude of the dislocation and the level of suffering it would bring to Russia.

I had not understood that communism was not only a form of economic organization, but also a system of beliefs, a quasi-religion, that structured Soviet and Russian social life. The displacement of beliefs would entail psychological disorganization far beyond economic disorganization. We are approaching such a situation in the West today. What we are experiencing is not simply a military defeat or an economic crisis, but a displacement of the beliefs that have organized Western social life for several decades.

From defeat to displacement

I remember well the context in which I wrote The defeat of the West. I was at home in Brittany in the summer of 2023. French and other journalists were excitedly commenting on the (imaginary) successes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. I find myself writing calmly as if it were today: “the defeat of the West is certain”. I had no problem with that.

Today, on the contrary, when I talk about displacement, I prefer to adopt a more humble stance in the face of events. Donald Trump's behavior is a spectacle of uncertainty. The warmongering of the Europeans, who lost the war alongside the Americans and who now talk about winning it without them, is disconcerting.

This is the present. Short-term events are very difficult to predict. On the other hand, in the medium and long term, understanding and forecasting the West, and particularly the United States, seems easier to me, even if, of course, one cannot be certain. I had a positive medium and long-term view of Russia very early on, since 2002. But today I have a very negative medium and long-term view of the United States. What we are experiencing today is only the beginning of the fall of the United States and we must prepare ourselves to see much more dramatic things.

The defeat of the West – an easy prediction

I will initially refer to the model of The defeat of the West. Anyone can verify what is written there. I will tell you why it was relatively easy for me to conceive of this defeat. In previous years, I had already analyzed Russia's return to stability.

I never shared the Western fantasy of a monstrous regime headed by Vladimir Putin, a diabolical Putin and an idiotic and submissive Russian people, which was the dominant vision in the West. I had read Russia, the return of power (Russia, the return of power), an excellent book by a little-known Frenchman, David Teurtrie, published shortly before the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine, in which he described the take-off of the Russian economy, its agriculture, its exports, and its nuclear power plants. The author explained how Russia had been preparing, since 2014, to disconnect from the Western financial system.

In addition, I had my usual indicators, which were more concerned with social stability than with economic stability. I continued to monitor infant mortality rates, the statistical indicator I use most. Children under one year of age are the most fragile beings in a society, and their chances of survival are the most sensitive indicator of social cohesion and effectiveness. Over the past 20 years, the Russian infant mortality rate has been falling at a rapid pace, even though overall Russian mortality, particularly among men, is still very high. For several years now, the Russian infant mortality rate has once again been lower than that of the United States.

The American infant mortality rate is one of the indicators that allows us to see that something is not right in the United States. And unfortunately, France's infant mortality rate, which has started to rise again, is also surpassing that of Russia. It pains me, as a Frenchman, to admit this, but as a historian I must be able to analyze the facts that shock me. History and its events do not exist to make me happy, but for me to study them.

I also noted the rapid decline in the suicide and homicide rates in Russia between 2000 and 2020. I had all these indicators at my disposal, as well as my knowledge of the Russian communal family structure of peasant origin, which no longer exists in a visible form but continues to operate. It is clear that the peasant family of the XNUMXth century no longer exists, but its values ​​survive today in interactions between individuals. In Russia today, there are still regulatory values ​​of authority, equality and community, which ensure a particular social cohesion.

This is a hypothesis that may be difficult for modern men and women, immersed in today's urban life, to accept. I have just arrived in Moscow, which I rediscover has changed since my last visit in 1993. Moscow is a huge, modern city. How could one imagine, in this material and social context, the persistence of XNUMXth-century community values?

I experience here what I experience elsewhere. This is what I experience, for example, in Japan. Tokyo is a huge city; in fact, with its 40 million inhabitants, it is twice the size of Moscow. But it is easy to see and accept the idea that a Japanese value system, inherited from an ancient family structure, is perpetuated there. I feel the same way about Russia, with the difference that the Russian communal family, authoritarian but egalitarian, was not the same as the Japanese authoritarian and unequal family.

Economics, demography, family anthropology: in 2022, I had no doubts about Russia’s solidity. And so, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I have been able to observe, with a mixture of sadness and amusement, how French journalists, politicians and political scientists have been putting forward hypotheses about Russia’s fragility and the inevitability of the collapse of its economy, its political regime, etc.

United States Self-Destruction

It embarrasses me to say it here in Moscow, but I must admit that Russia has never been an important topic for me. This does not mean that Russia does not interest me, but that it has never been at the center of my reflection. The core of my reflection is described in the title of my book, The defeat of the West. It is not Russia's victory but the West's defeat that is the object of my study. I think the West is destroying itself.

In order to propose and demonstrate this hypothesis, I also had a number of indicators at my disposal. I will content myself here with talking about the United States. I have been working on the evolution of the United States for quite some time.

I was aware of the destruction of the American industrial base, particularly since China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and also the difficulty the US would have in producing enough weapons to fuel the war.

I had compared the number of engineers – people dedicated to producing real things – in the US and Russia. And I had observed that Russia, with a population equivalent to 40% of that of the US, managed to produce more engineers. Simply because in Russia 25% of students study engineering, compared to only 7% in the US. Of course, the number of engineers should be seen as a key factor, which more deeply reflects the number of technicians and skilled workers and the industrial capacity in general.

I had other long-term indicators for the United States, having examined the decline in the level of education and the decline in higher education, both in quality and quantity, which began as early as 1965. The decline in American intellectual potential goes back much further. However, we must not forget that this decline came after a rise that had lasted two and a half centuries.

The United States was a huge historical success before sinking into its current debacle, a success that constituted the strongest example of the historical success of the Protestant world. The Protestant religion was the heart of American culture. It was also the heart of English culture, Scandinavian cultures, and German culture, since Germany is two-thirds Protestant.

Protestantism demanded that all believers have access to the Holy Scriptures: that everyone should be able to read. Protestantism was therefore very supportive of education everywhere. Around 1900, the map of countries in which everyone could read coincided with the map of Protestantism. Furthermore, secondary education took off in the United States from the interwar period, which was not the case in Protestant European countries.

The collapse of education in the United States is clearly related to the collapse of religion. I know that there is a lot of talk these days about those exalted evangelicals who surround Donald Trump. In any case, this is not true Protestantism. The God of evangelicals is a nice guy who gives gifts and money, not the strict Calvinist God who demanded a high level of morality, encouraged a strong work ethic and favored social discipline.

Social discipline in the United States has always owed much to Protestant moral discipline, even in the twentieth century, when it was no longer a homogeneous Protestant country, thanks to Catholic, Jewish, and later Asian immigrants. Until at least 1970, the ruling core of the country and its culture remained Protestant. At that time, jokes were made about the WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, which certainly had their flaws, but which represented a central culture and controlled the American system.

Active, zombie and zero stages of religion

A particular conceptualization allows me to analyze religious decline, not only in this book but in all my recent books. It is a three-stage analysis of the collapse of religion:

I first distinguish an active stage of religion, in which people are believers and practitioners. I then identify a stage that I call the zombie stage of religion, in which people are no longer believers or practitioners, but maintain, in their social habits, values ​​and behaviors from the previous active state of religion. I will mention, as an example, French republicanism, which succeeded the Catholic Church as a zombie civil religion.

Finally comes the third stage, which we are currently experiencing in the West, which I call stage zero of religion, in which even the social habits inherited from religion have disappeared.

I identify a temporal indicator of the arrival of this zero stage, which, however, should not be understood from a moralistic perspective. It is merely a technical instrument, which allows me to date the phenomenon around 2013-2015.

I use the laws that instituted same-sex marriage to date the beginning of stage zero. This is an indicator of the fact that nothing remains of the religious customs of the past. Marriage for everyone is post-religious. I would like to repeat that there is nothing wrong with this. My role is not to preach any morality. I am simply saying that it is an indicator that allows us to consider that we have reached a stage zero of religion.

By associating industrial decline with educational decline and then with religious decline, in order to finally diagnose a zero stage of religion, we can affirm that the decline of the United States is not a reversible and short-term phenomenon. It will not be reversible, in any case, during the years that the war in Ukraine lasts.

An American defeat

This ongoing war is a confrontation between Russia and the United States, even though the army representing the West is the Ukrainian one. It would never have happened without American equipment, without American observation and intelligence services. And that is why it is absolutely normal for the final negotiation to take place between Russia and the United States.

I cannot help but wonder why the Europeans were surprised to find themselves excluded from the negotiations. Europe’s surprise is a surprise to me. From the beginning of the conflict, the Europeans behaved like vassals of the United States. They participated in the sanctions, supplied weapons and equipment, but never led the war. This is why the Europeans cannot have a correct, realistic view of the war.

This is how far we have come. A West that has been defeated industrially and economically. Personally, intellectually, I had no great difficulty in foreseeing this defeat.

I return to what interests me most, to what is most difficult for those who work on developing prospects: à analysis and understanding of current events. I give lectures quite regularly. In Paris, Germany, Italy, and recently in Budapest. What amazes me is that at each new conference, even against the backdrop of a stable base common to all of them, there are always new elements to be integrated. We never know Trump's real position. We don't know if his desire to get out of this war is sincere.

There are extraordinary surprises, such as his quarrel with his own allies (or should we say vassals?): hearing the US president hold Europeans and Ukrainians responsible for the war and the defeat is unprecedented. I must confess my admiration for the self-control and calm of the Russian government, whose duty it is (apparently) to take Donald Trump seriously, and which must accept his vision of the war because, after all, negotiation is necessary.

Despite everything, I notice one positive element in Donald Trump, which has remained stable since the beginning: he has been talking to the Russian government, moving away from the European attitude of demonizing Russia. This is a return to realism and, in itself, something positive, even if the negotiations do not result in anything concrete.

The revolution of Donald Trump

I would like to try to understand the immediate causes of Donald Trump's revolution. Every revolution has causes that are, first and foremost, endogenous, resulting from the dynamics and internal contradictions of each society under consideration. However, it is clear from historical study how often revolutions are triggered by military defeats.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was preceded by military defeat against Japan. That of 1917 was preceded by defeat against Germany. The German Revolution of 1918 was preceded by defeat against France and England.

Even the French Revolution, apparently more linked to endogenous causes, was preceded by the defeat that ended the Seven Years' War in 1763, a very heavy defeat that resulted in the loss of all its colonies for the Ancien Régime. The collapse of the Soviet system, in turn, was triggered by a double fiasco: the defeat in the arms race with the United States and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

I believe it is necessary to start from this notion of a defeat that leads to a revolution in order to understand Donald Trump’s revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we do not know where it will ultimately lead us, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Or a counterrevolution? In any case, it is a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that is directed against the European and Ukrainian allies/vassals, but also against the very interior of American society, against universities, gender theories, scientific culture, racial inclusion policies, free trade and immigration.

This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Several people have told me about conversations between members of Donald Trump’s team in which their awareness of defeat is clear. People like JD Vance, the vice president, and many others have understood for a long time that America has already lost this war.

This is a fundamentally economic defeat. The sanctions policy has shattered the fantasy of the West's alleged financial omnipotence. The Americans have been confronted with the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. The Pentagon is well aware that one of the limits to its action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex.

Such an awareness of defeat contrasts with the lack of awareness of Europeans. Europe did not organize the war. Since they did not organize it, Europeans cannot have a full awareness of defeat. To achieve this, they would need to have access to the reflection carried out by the Pentagon, which they do not have. That is why Europe is mentally situated in a time before the defeat, while the current US administration is mentally situated in a time after it.

My experience studying the fall of Soviet communism has taught me that the collapse of a system is both an economic and a mental phenomenon. What has collapsed in the West today, and first and foremost in the United States, is not only economic domination but also the system of beliefs that superimposed itself on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are in full collapse. But, as in every revolutionary process, we cannot yet know which new belief will be most important, which new belief will emerge victorious from this process of decomposition.

What's reasonable about the Trump administration

I want to make it clear that I did not initially harbor any hostility toward Donald Trump. When he was first elected in 2016, I was one of those who maintained that America was sick: that its industrial and working-class heartland had long been destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policies of the Empire, and that there were plenty of reasons for a large part of the electorate to vote for Donald Trump.

There is a lot that is quite reasonable in Donald Trump’s intuitions. Protectionism, the idea that it is necessary to protect American industry in order to rebuild it, is the result of a quite reasonable intuition. I am a protectionist myself and have written extensively on the subject. I also consider the idea of ​​controlling immigration to be reasonable, even though I recognize that the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is indefensibly violent.

Another reasonable element, which seems to shock many Westerners, is Trump's insistence that there are only two sexes, men and women. I do not see this as any rapprochement with Putin's Russia, but rather a return to the common-sense conception of humanity since the dawn of the Homo sapiens, a biological piece of evidence on which, in fact, the church and science agree.

In other words, there are reasonable elements in Donald Trump's revolution.

Nihilism in the Trump Revolution

I must now explain why I am pessimistic, despite the presence of these elements, all things considered, reasonable; and why I think the Trump experiment will fail. I will recall here why I have been optimistic about Russia since 2002, and why I am pessimistic about the United States in 2025.

There is in the behavior of Donald Trump's administration a deficit of thought, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of Defeat of the West: nihilism. I explained, in Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero stage of religion takes us back to the fundamental problem. What is a man? What is the meaning of things? One of the classic answers to such questions, in times of religious collapse, is nihilism. We move from anguish in the face of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to the desire to destroy things, men and, ultimately, reality itself.

Transgender ideology does not in itself represent anything wrong on a moral level, but it is fundamental on an intellectual level, because, by saying that a man can become a woman and that a woman can become a man, it demonstrates a desire to destroy reality itself. Associated with cancel culture (cancel culture) and the preference for war, it was an element of the nihilism prevalent in the Joe Biden administration. Donald Trump rejects it.

However, what is shocking today is the emergence of other forms of nihilism: a desire to destroy science, universities, and the black middle classes; a disorderly violence in the application of protectionist measures. When, without thinking, Trump talks about imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, without considering that the entire Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see in action a desire for both destruction and protection.

When it decides to impose, without warning, protectionist tariffs against China, forgetting that most of the smartphones Americans are produced there, I think it is not only stupidity, but also nihilism. And, to place ourselves on a higher moral register, the fantasy of transforming the Gaza Strip, once its population has been expelled, into a resort Wouldn't tourism be a high-intensity nihilistic project?

I would look for the fundamental contradiction in Donald Trump’s policy in the question of protectionism. The theory of protectionism states that protective measures cannot work unless the country adopting them has a qualified population that can take advantage of them. A protectionist policy will not be effective in the absence of qualified engineers, scientists and technicians, of whom the US does not have enough. Yet there is now talk of expelling Chinese and other students, the very ones who would make up for the shortage of engineers and scientists. This is absurd.

The theory of protectionism also states that protective measures can only launch or relaunch industrial production if the State participates in the construction of new industries. However, we see Donald Trump attacking the State, which should foster scientific research and scientific progress. And what is worse: if we try to identify the motivation for the fight against the State by Elon Musk and others, we will see that it is not even economic in nature.

Those who are familiar with American history know the fundamental role of the federal state in the emancipation of blacks. Hatred of the federal state is most often derived from resentment against blacks. When one attacks the federal state, one attacks the central administrations that emancipated and protected blacks. A large proportion of the black middle classes owe their jobs to the federal state. Attacks on the federal state cannot therefore be part of a reasonable general conception of economic and national reconstruction.

When I think about the multiple and contradictory actions of Donald Trump’s administration, the word that comes to mind is “displacement.” A displacement that no one can know where it will lead.

Absolute nuclear family + zero stage of religion = atomization

I am quite pessimistic about the United States. To conclude this exploratory exercise, I will return to my fundamental concepts as a historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this lecture that the fundamental reason why I was able to believe very early, back in 2002, in Russia's return to stability was the awareness of the existence of a communitarian anthropological background in Russia.

Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the return of religiosity in Russia to understand its stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values ​​of authority and equality, which also allow us to understand what the nation means in the minds of Russians, the relationship between the form of the family and the idea that people have of the nation, the correspondence between the community family and a strong, compact idea of ​​the nation and the people. As is the case in Russia.

In the case of the United States, as in England, we see the opposite picture, a nuclear family model, individualistic, lacking precise rules of succession, where the freedom of will is sovereign. This family model is very unstructured for the nation. Its advantage is its flexibility. Generations succeed one another by separating. The rapidity of adaptation in the USA and England, as well as the plasticity of social structures (which allowed the industrial revolution and the American takeoff), have their origins fundamentally in this absolute nuclear family structure.

But alongside, or beneath, this individualistic family structure, there was in the United States and England the discipline of the Protestant religion, with its socially cohesive force. Religion, a major structuring factor for the Anglo-American world, has disappeared. The zero stage of religion, combined with family values ​​that are not very structured, does not seem to me to be an anthropological and historical formula for stability.

The Anglo-American world is heading towards ever greater atomization, an atomization that can only lead to an accentuation, without any visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten some important positive factor.

Unfortunately, I can find only one additional negative factor at this time, which I discovered while reading a book by Amy Chua, a Yale professor and one of JD Vance's mentors. In the book, entitled Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018), the author highlights the exceptional character of the American nation: a “civic” nation, founded on the adherence of all successive immigrant groups to political values ​​situated above and beyond ethnicity. Without a doubt. We also know that this has always been the official theory. But there has always been a dominant white Protestant group, originating from a very long history and, deep down, perfectly “ethnic”.

This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, truly post-ethnic, a purely “civic” nation, in theory united by its attachment to the Constitution and its values. Amy Chua’s fear is that the US will revert to what she calls “tribalism.” A regressive pulverization.

Each of the European nations is, in essence, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a group linked to a land, with its language and its culture, of a people rooted in history.

Each of them has a stable background. The Russians have, the Germans have it, the French have it, even if today they are very confused about these concepts. The US no longer has it. A “civic” nation? Beyond the concept, the reality of a “civic” American nation, but devoid of morals, in times of zero stage of religion, does not seem to bode well. It even gives me the chills.

My personal fear is that we are not at all near the end, but only at the beginning of the collapse of the United States, which will reveal to us things we cannot even imagine. More than in an American Empire, whether triumphant, weakened or destroyed, the threat lies there: in encountering things we cannot even imagine.

I am in Moscow today, and so I will conclude by talking about the future situation in Russia. I will say two things, one pleasant, the other disturbing. Russia will certainly win this war. But in the context of the decomposition of America, it will have enormous responsibilities in a world seeking equilibrium.

*Emmanuel Todd is a historian and anthropologist. Researcher at the French National Institute of Demographic Studies. Author of, among other books, After the Empire: Essay on the Decomposition of the American System (70 Editions). [https://amzn.to/4jUbJfs]

Lecture given at the Russian Academy of Sciences on April 25, 2025.

Translation: Jose Eduardo Fernandes Giraudo.

---

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE