By EMMANUEL TODD*

What is emerging in the US and Europe is not a monolithic populism, but an archipelago of national revolts — each shaped by its own traumas and collective illusions. If the 20th century was the age of universal ideologies, the 21st is the age of disintegration: where even defeats are solitary.

My debt to Hungary

I must confess that it moves me to be here in Budapest to talk about the defeat, about the dislocation of the Western world, since my career as an author began after a trip to Hungary in 1975, when I was 25 years old. I met with Hungarian students there, and from this conversation it became clear that communism was dead in the minds of the people.

In Budapest in 1975, I had a premonition that communism was coming to an end. After that, back in Paris, I had access, partly by chance, to data on the increase in infant mortality rates in Russia and Ukraine (the central part of the USSR) and I understood that the Soviet system was on the verge of collapse. It all started on that visit to Budapest, which is why I feel I owe a debt to Hungary.

It is moving and impressive to be in this beautiful auditorium, after having met yesterday with your Prime Minister, to give this lecture, as I remember when, half a century ago, I came here as a poor student, by train, sleeping in a youth hostel and without the slightest idea of ​​what I would find in Budapest.

The necessary humility

The experience I had with my first book on the collapse of communism made me more cautious. My prediction was correct and I felt very confident: the increase in infant mortality is a very reliable indicator. But I have to admit, in all humility, that 15 years later, when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I did not really understand what was happening.

I could never have imagined the consequences of this shift for the entire Soviet sphere. I was not surprised by the rapid adaptation of the former “people’s democracies” in the Soviet sphere: in my book, I had already noted the enormous differences between Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, and the Soviet Union itself.

But the collapse in Russia in the 1990s was something I could never have imagined. The fundamental reason I could not understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not just a form of organization of economic activity, but also a form of religion. It was a belief that allowed the system to exist, and it is clear that the dissolution of that belief was at least as damaging as the dislocation of the economic system.

All of this has consequences for what is happening today. I will talk about two things here. I will talk about the defeat of the West, something very technical and specific, but not very complex, and which does not surprise me at all. I predicted it, and to some extent it is already underway in Ukraine.

But now we are in the next phase, which is the displacement of the West, and I must say that, as in the case of the displacement of communism and the Soviet system, I am unable to understand what exactly is happening. The fundamental attitude that is required now is one of humility. Everything that is happening, especially after the election of Donald Trump, is a surprise to me.

I was surprised by the violence with which Donald Trump turned against his allies, or rather, vassals. Europe’s willingness to continue or restart the war – despite Europe being the region of the world that would benefit most from a peace agreement – ​​also surprises me. We have to start from these surprises if we want to think correctly about what is happening.

I will begin by explaining why the defeat of the West does not surprise me in itself, and the reasons why I anticipated it. Then I will try to say something about the areas about which I am less certain, formulating a few hypotheses. Please excuse my uncertainty at this point, since to postulate certainties now about what will happen would be presumptuous and perhaps a sign of insanity.

I have been introduced to you as a researcher and I would like to say something about my intellectual profile. I am not an ideologue. I certainly have political opinions; I consider myself a left-wing liberal. But that is irrelevant. I am here in the role of a historian, someone who tries to understand what is happening and who aims to predict what will happen next. I think I am, or at least I try to be, capable of detecting historical trends, even if I do not agree with them. I try to see history “from the outside”, which is obviously not entirely possible, but that is what I try to do.

I will begin with a brief review of the arguments I present in my book, a book that, I admit, gave me great satisfaction, since I saw my prediction come true very quickly. I had to wait 15 years to see my prediction about the collapse of the Soviet system come true, but in the case of my prediction about the military and economic defeat of the United States, Europe and Ukraine by Russia, I only had to wait one year.

I clearly remember writing this book in the summer of 2023, at a time when the entire French, and probably Western, media was ecstatic about the genius of the Ukrainian counteroffensive organized by the Pentagon. At that time, I felt very comfortable writing, with complete conviction, that the West would certainly be defeated. Why did I feel so confident? Because I was working with a complete historical model of the situation.

The stability of Russia

I knew that Russia was a stable power. I was aware of the enormous hardships and sufferings of the Russian people during the 1990s, but between 2000 and 2020, while most in the West were portraying Vladimir Putin as a monster and the Russian people as submissive or ignorant, I was studying the data that showed Russia was stabilizing.

In France, David Teurtrie published an excellent book entitled Russie: the return of the puissance (Russia: The Return of Power). David Teurtrie demonstrated the stabilization of the Russian economy, the growing capacity of the Russian banking system to function autonomously, and how Russia had managed to protect itself from retaliatory measures in the fields of electronics and information technology, thus protecting itself from possible European sanctions. The book also included a description of the renewed capacity of Russian agricultural production, as well as the production and export of nuclear power plants.

I also had my own perception of Russia, based on rational factors. I had my own indicators. I always look at the infant mortality rate, an indicator that allowed me to predict the collapse of the Soviet system. Infant mortality has been falling rapidly in Russia. In 2022, as it still is today, infant mortality in Russia was already lower than in the United States. Infant mortality in Russia will soon be lower than in France. There was also a decrease in the number of suicides and homicides. In short, all the indicators pointed to stabilization.

To this I added my experience as an anthropologist, specializing in the analysis of family systems, which are very different historically, and their relationship with the social structures of contemporary nations. The Russian family system is communal: the traditional Russian family is based on strong values ​​of authority and equality. This family structure has shaped a collective mentality and a very strong national feeling.

Even if I had not foreseen the sufferings of the 1990s, I could, thanks to my study of the Russian family system, foresee that a solid and stable Russia would re-emerge, even if not in the form of a Western-style democracy. Its system would accept the rules of the market, but the state would remain strong, as would the desire for national sovereignty. I had no doubt whatsoever about Russia’s essential stability.

West – a long-term collapse

I also had an unusual view of the West. I had studied the United States for a long time and knew that the expansion of the United States and NATO into Eastern Europe had been made possible by the collapse of communism and the temporary collapse of Russia itself, but that it did not correspond to any distinctively American dynamic.

Since 1965, the level of education in the United States has been declining, a trend that has only accelerated in recent decades. Since the early 2000s, free trade, imposed by the West itself, with the United States at the forefront, has resulted in the large-scale destruction of American industry. My starting point was therefore the vision of a Western system that was expanding outwards but imploding from the center. I correctly predicted that American industry could not produce enough weapons to sustain Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Furthermore, he noted an important indicator that identified the respective capabilities of Russia and the United States in producing and training engineers. He noted that Russia, despite having a population two and a half times smaller than that of the United States, was able to produce more engineers, technicians and skilled workers than the United States. Only 7% of university students study engineering in the United States, compared with about 25% in Russia.

He had also understood the depth of the American crisis: behind the inability to produce engineers and the failure of the educational system lay the collapse of what had made the United States so powerful: the educational tradition of Protestantism. Max Weber (and not only him) saw in the rise of the West the rise of the Protestant world. Protestantism has always favored education, postulating that all believers should be able to read the Holy Scriptures. The success of Protestant countries in the industrial revolution, the success of England and even Germany (although Germany is only two-thirds Protestant), and, of course, the success of the United States, were versions of the rise of the Protestant world.

In this book and others, I have proposed an analysis of the evolution of religion in three stages: one "active stage" of religion, in which believing populations exercise the social values ​​of religion; a “zombie stage”, in which belief disappears, but social values ​​and the moral code remain; and finally a “zero stage”, in which not only beliefs disappear, but also the social and moral values ​​associated with them, and with them the educational systems that supported them.

In the case of the USA, to accept the hypothesis that we have reached the stage zero of religion, we must consider that the new religions, especially the evangelical ones, are no longer religions in the traditional sense; they are no longer restrictive, they are something completely different.

This is the vision I had of the West. I don't like to use the term decadence, but some American authors do. I had this whole sequence mapped out and I felt confident in my diagnosis.

in my book La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West), I also referred to American violence, the preference for war, and the endless wars of the United States. I explained this preference in terms of a religious void, which feeds anguish and leads to the deification of the void. I used the term “nihilism” several times. But what does nihilism mean?

Nihilism arises from a moral vacuum. It is a desire to destroy things, people, and reality itself. Behind the bizarre ideologies that have recently emerged in the United States and elsewhere—I have in mind especially the ideologies of transgenderism, which postulate the possibility of sex change—I see an expression of nihilism. Such ideologies are perhaps not the most serious example, but they are nevertheless expressions of nihilism, of a desire to destroy reality itself.

I had no difficulty in predicting the American defeat; I was able to do so even earlier than I could have imagined. And the war is not even over yet. I was tempted, at this point, to refer to the possibility of the Americans relaunching the war, but it seems clear to me that Donald Trump's administration is perfectly aware that defeat is already a fact.

Military defeat and revolution

Let's try to look at things in reverse order. I can't prove it, but I believe that Donald Trump's electoral victory should be understood as a consequence of the military defeat in Ukraine.

 We are living through what may in the future be called the “Donald Trump revolution” or the “Trumpist revolution.” This is a standard historical phenomenon, since it is classic for revolutions to follow military defeats. This does not mean that revolutions do not have endogenous causes within societies. But military defeat delegitimizes the ruling classes, creating opportunities for political subversion.

There are several historical examples of this phenomenon. The most obvious is the two Russian revolutions: that of 1905 was preceded by defeat by Japan; that of 1917 by defeat by Germany. The German revolution of 1918, in turn, followed defeat in the Great War. Even the French Revolution, apparently due to endogenous factors, was preceded by defeat by Old regime in the Seven Years' War, in which France lost almost all of its colonies.

And, in fact, we need not go that far. The collapse of communism, although a result of internal changes and the stagnation of the Soviet economy, was precipitated by the defeat in the arms race and the military defeat in Afghanistan.

This is the situation we find ourselves in. It is just a hypothesis, but I think that if we want to understand the violence of the Trumpist revolution, its ebbs and flows, the multiplicity of its contradictory actions, we need to see Trump's electoral victory as the result of a defeat. I am convinced that if the war had been won by the US and its proxy, the Ukrainian army, the Democrats would have won the elections and we would be living in a different historical period.

We can have fun looking for other parallels. The war is not over yet. Donald Trump’s dilemma is reminiscent of that of the Russian revolutionary government in 1917. Donald Trump must choose between a Menshevik strategy and a Bolshevik strategy. The Menshevik option would be to try to continue the war, this time with the European allies. The Bolshevik option would be to devote himself to the revolution at home and to abandon the war abroad as soon as possible. If we want to be ironic, we could say that Donald Trump’s fundamental choice is between civil war and war overseas.

The idea that military defeat paves the way for revolution helps to understand the discrepancy between Americans and Europeans. The Americans understand that they have been defeated. The Pentagon understands it. Vice President J.D. Vance, in his conversations with other leaders, admits defeat. This should not be surprising, since the United States is at the center of the war. American intelligence and weapons have fueled the war in Ukraine.

The Europeans have not reached this level of consciousness because, even though they participated in the war through economic sanctions, they did not have an autonomous role in it. They never made any decisions and therefore cannot understand what is happening, nor can they assess the extent of the defeat. That is why we see this absurd situation in which the European governments, which were not able to win the war with the Americans, now delude themselves into thinking they can win it alone.

There is an element of absurdity here, but I think that the governments of Europe are mentally situated in a moment before defeat, which for them has not yet occurred, or at least not in a clear way. I think they also fear that admitting defeat will delegitimize them and the European ruling classes, as it did in the US (delegitimizing what I call the “Western oligarchies”), and that defeat will open the way for some kind of revolutionary process, in Europe and the US. The kind of revolutionary crisis that I am postulating here would be the result of a contradiction that exists everywhere.

Democracy in crisis – elitism and populism

Hundreds of authors have written about how, throughout the Western world, we are witnessing the weakening, if not the disappearance, of democracy, and a structural opposition between the elites and the people.

I propose a fairly simple explanation for this phenomenon. The era of democracy was characterized by being an era in which the entire population knew how to read and write and everyone had access to basic education, but in which few had access to higher education. Under the system of universal suffrage, the elites, reduced in number, could only survive by addressing the entire population. But after the Second World War, we saw the expansion of higher education throughout the industrialized world, which led to a restratification of advanced societies.

There are now, everywhere, large contingents of people who have had access to higher education; in developed countries, among the new generations, 30%, 40%, sometimes even 50% of people have received higher education.

This huge contingent of people with higher education really believes in their social superiority, even though the level of higher education has tended to deteriorate almost everywhere. But this is not the main problem.

The real problem is that there are now so many people with higher education that they think they can realistically live only among themselves; they think they can live apart from the rest of the population. As a result, people with higher education all over the developed world – in the US, in the UK, in France, in Germany, here in Hungary – feel closer to each other than to their own fellow citizens.

What I am trying to describe is a kind of globalization, not so much as an economic reality but as a cultural dream. Personally, I have always considered this dream absurd. I studied at Cambridge, and it always seemed to me that the elites of different countries do not resemble each other. I have never taken seriously the idea that the elites of any country resemble each other. It is a collective myth.

When opinion polls examine the fragmentation of advanced societies and the attendant threats to democracy, they always reveal a pronounced divide between those who attended university and those who did not.

If we look at Donald Trump's electorate, we will find people with fewer years of education. If we look at Donald Trump's electorate, Rassemblement National in France, ditto. The same goes for the British who voted for Brexit. A similar pattern applies to the AfD in Germany and the Sweden Democrats. There is something universal about this tension within democracies.

reality shock

We are living in a very peculiar moment. The defeat against Russia is a strong reality check. The global ideology about Russia was steeped in fantasy. GDP figures, for example, have always been fictional, revealing nothing about the productive capacity of each country. This is how we arrived at the absurd situation in which Russia, whose GDP was estimated at around 3% of that of the West, has shown itself capable of producing more military equipment than the Western world as a whole.

Defeat is a reality check that triggers not only economic collapse, but also the collapse of the West's belief in its own superiority. That is why today we are witnessing the collapse of the most advanced sexual ideologies, of the belief in free trade, and of all beliefs peculiar to the West. The most useful concept for understanding what is happening is the concept of displacement.

The divergence of populisms

When there is a revolution, when a unified system is abruptly displaced, all sorts of things happen and it is very difficult to know which is the most important. But if there is one thing I am certain of, it is that the current perception of a supposed solidarity between the different forms of populism is only a temporary phenomenon.

Of course, people who challenge the elites in France, Germany or Sweden sympathized with Donald Trump’s experiment. But this is a temporary phenomenon, linked to the shift of the globalized system. The globalized ideology, in its American and European versions, told us that there were no longer different peoples. What is reappearing are precisely peoples and nations.

These peoples are different, and they all have distinct and divergent national interests. What is taking shape today is not just the multipolar world advocated by Vladimir Putin, which would imply the existence of only a few important strategic centers, but rather a world of multiple nations, each with its own history, its own family traditions, its own religious traditions (or what is left of them), very different from each other. We are therefore witnessing only the beginning of the shift.

The first shift, which we might call the transatlantic shift, is the one that separates the United States from Europe. But we have also witnessed the shift of the European Union itself and the re-emergence of European countries with very different traditions: a resurgence of European nations.

It would be ridiculous to take each of the European nations one after the other and say, “In such and such a country, I feel that such and such a thing will happen.” At one point I was tempted to suggest a different kind of polarity. In geopolitics, one can observe a certain shared sensibility among the Catholic countries of southern Europe. One can see that the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese do not have much interest in the war in Ukraine.

Na Defeat of the West, I described the emergence of a Protestant, or post-Protestant, axis that runs from the United States to Estonia and Latvia, passing through Great Britain and Scandinavia. Added to this axis would be Catholic Poland and Lithuania, for reasons that we will not have time to examine here.

In short, we are in a time of constant change. I have to admit that preparing this conference has been somewhat of a nightmare. I have given frequent interviews to the Japanese press. I have given lectures in France. Each lecture is different because things change every day. Donald Trump, the heart of the revolution, is a box of surprises. I fear, in fact, that he is a constant surprise to himself. What I am saying today, therefore, is only an outline, a roadmap of the fundamental issues. In order to have some idea of ​​what might come next, I intend to focus on the three countries, the three nations that seem to me to be the most important in the near future – Russia, Germany and the United States – and try to see in which direction they are moving.

Russia as a fixed point

As far as Russia is concerned, there is nothing new. I am French, I do not speak Russian, I was in Russia a few times in the 1990s, but it seems to me that Russia is the only country that is completely predictable. At times, as if I were suffering from geopolitical megalomania, I think I can even read the thoughts of Vladimir Putin or Sergei Lavrov, because Russian policy seems to me to be, in essence, very rational, consistent and simple.

In Russia, national sovereignty is a priority. Russia felt threatened by the advance of NATO. The problem is that Russia can no longer negotiate with Westerners – neither Europeans nor Americans – because it considers them completely unreliable.

Donald Trump, however, seems more likely to agree to negotiate with Russia. He is motivated by so many phobias and resentments – against Europeans, against blacks, etc. – that it seems clear to me that hatred of Russia is not a key motivation for him. But for the Russians, his constant shifts in attitude make him a caricature of American unreliability.

Thus, Russia’s only option is to achieve on the ground the military objectives in Ukraine that are necessary for its security. Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that Russia intends, or even has the means, to attack the rest of Europe. Russia simply hopes that things will stabilise and settle down on their own, even in the absence of a peace agreement.

Vladimir Putin’s policy towards Donald Trump is certainly elegant. He does not seek to provoke him and is willing to negotiate. My personal opinion about Russia’s goals is that it will not stop at the Ukrainian departments it currently controls. Naval drones from Odessa have shown that the Russian fleet in Sevastopol is not safe. Odessa is a key security element. I am not basing this on any kind of inside information, just logical inference, and I think that Russia should stop the war once it has captured Odessa. I could be wrong.

I am not afraid of being influenced by my ideological positions. What I am afraid of is being wrong in predicting future events. I admit that I am taking a risk here. But the media fuss about the possibility of Russia attacking Europe is obviously ridiculous. Russia, with only 145 million inhabitants and 17 million square kilometers of land, has no reason whatsoever to be expansionist.

Russia is doing just fine without having to administer Poland. Personally, I hope Russia doesn't even think about touching the Baltic states, thus proving to the Europeans how absurd their view of Russia as a threatening power is.

Germany – between good and bad choice

I now come to Germany, which is for me the biggest unknown in the international system, in terms of what the outcome of the war in Ukraine will be.

When I speak of Germany, I leave aside the dominant European mythology. When we speak of the new bellicosity of the European “hawks,” of the renewed European appetite for war, we think of Europe as a whole, eager to organize itself in a united way to continue the war against Russia.

But the English no longer have an army, the French have a much reduced one, and neither the English nor the French have any significant industry any more. The military capabilities of France and England are quantitatively ridiculous.

Only one nation, only one country, really has the capacity to do something, since its industry, if mobilized, could bring a new element to the war. This country is obviously Germany. And German industry is not only that of the FRG, but also that of Austria and Switzerland, and includes that of the former people's republics, reorganized by Germany.

I see a threat there. I don't think all of Germany is warlike. The Germans got rid of their army. But Germany aspires to economic dominance, an aspiration that explains the high levels of immigration, sometimes beyond what would be reasonable. I would say that Germany found its new identity in the post-war period in economic efficiency, in a kind of mechanized society whose sole purpose is economic efficiency.

Financial stability and economic efficiency ensure a good standard of living for the population, maintain the level of exports and allow everything to function smoothly. These principles have guided Germany since the Second World War. But Europe and Germany are now suffering from sanctions that should make the Russians suffer.

What I see now is the emergence in Germany of the idea that rearmament and a war economy could be a technical solution to the challenges of the German economy. And that is where the danger lies.

I can imagine that Germany wants to rearm only with a view to solving its economic problems, without any real aggressive intention. But the problem is that even if the American military industry no longer poses a threat to the Russians, a serious decision by Germany to rearm would pose a serious problem for Russia. The emergence of a German military-industrial threat could lead Russia to harden its military doctrine.

The Russians have always made it clear, and I hope our leaders will finally understand this: they know that they are less powerful than the West, than NATO, and that is why they have warned that if the Russian state is existentially threatened, they reserve the right to use tactical nuclear weapons to suppress such a threat. I have to repeat this over and over again because Europe’s recklessness in this regard is a real risk.

In France, the Russian message is seen as bluster. But Russia has always been known to do what it says. Let me repeat once again: the emergence of a German military-industrial power would lead Europe to a dramatic and total escalation.

This is the biggest element of uncertainty in the current situation. But I would add a personal concern. Germany is faced with a choice between war and peace, and it will have to make a good or a bad choice. As a historian, I cannot recall a single instance in which Germany made the right choice. But that is just a personal comment. I will now talk about what remains for me the most important aspect: the Donald Trump experiment.

United States – a bottomless pit?

The Donald Trump experiment is a fascinating phenomenon. Let me make it clear that I am not one of those members of the Western elite who love to despise him, and who in 2016 swore that he could not be elected.

At that point I was giving lectures in which I argued that Donald Trump had a keen sense of the suffering in the heartland of America, in the devastated industrial regions, with the high suicide rates, with the opioid epidemic, this version of an America destroyed by the desire for Empire. (I remember that when the Soviet system fell, the suffering was greater in the center of Russia than on its periphery.)

I always thought that Trumpism was a correct diagnosis of the situation and contained many reasonable elements. First, protectionism: protecting and rebuilding American industry was a reasonable idea. Four years ago I wrote a positive review of a book by an American scholar, Oren Cass, called The Once and Future Worker (The Worker of the Past and the Future), which I described as an elegant and civilized version of Trumpist protectionism. Today this book is increasingly cited. He is a much more sophisticated analyst than most French intellectuals and politicians.

I also thought that the desire to control immigration was in itself legitimate, even if it tended to express itself in a violent way. Likewise, it seemed perfectly reasonable to insist that there are only two sexes in the human species, a fact that has always seemed obvious to all humanity since its beginning, with the very limited and recent exception of isolated segments of the Western world.

These would be the positive aspects of the Trumpist project. Now I will briefly explain the reasons why I believe this project will fail. Trump's experiment is a mix of reasonable intuitions and nihilistic elements that were already present in the Biden administration. Not that the nihilistic elements are exactly the same in both governments, but the fact is that today we see evidence of the impulses of self-destruction that have their origin in the profound anomie of American society.

I do not believe that Donald Trump’s protectionist policy is coherent. I am not shocked by the idea of ​​raising tariffs to, say, 25%. Some of them have recently exceeded this level. This could be seen as shock therapy. To exit globalization, violent methods are necessary. But the current policy lacks coherence: the sectors affected have not been taken into account, and the question that arises is whether the imposition of these tariffs is part of a well-thought-out project or simply expresses a nihilistic desire to destroy everything.

I studied protectionism. I organized the reissue in France of the classic of protectionist theory, The national system of economic policy, by Friedrich List, a German author from the early 19th century. Any protectionist policy presupposes the role of the State in helping the development of industry. But Donald Trump's project attacks the federal State and state investments, which makes any intelligent or efficient protectionism impossible. When Republicans, or Elon Musk, attack the federal State, I do not see this as a proposal for a policy of a fundamentally economic nature.

When we think about the United States and what drives Americans, we always have to think about the racial issue, the obsession with the status of black Americans. The attacks on the federal government are not economically motivated, but rather an attack on diversity, equality and inclusion policies. They are, in fact, attacks on the black population. Firing federal employees is equivalent to firing a proportionally much higher number of black people, since the federal government is the main source of employment and income for black people. Trumpism is actually trying to destroy the black middle class by attacking the federal government.

Furthermore, one of the problems facing Donald Trump’s protectionism and his attempt to promote national re-centering is the absence of a nation in the European sense in the US. This is an easy topic in Hungary. Hungarians know very well what a nation is. The sense of national identity in Hungary is more acute than anywhere else in Europe, and this can be seen in the Hungarian government’s policies, which are largely independent of those imposed by the European Union.

But even the French, with their elites who claim to be global and disembodied, detached from their country, are a nation. There is a way of being French that goes back centuries or even millennia. The same applies to the Germans and to each of the Scandinavian peoples. There is a depth to their history and way of life that gives them a national identity that is always ready to re-emerge.

The United States is different. The United States is a “civic” nation. In the past, there was a core leadership that gave it consistency, the WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), who led the country even after they ceased to be the majority. But one of the key events of the last three or four decades has been the disappearance of this core and the transformation of the United States into an extremely fragmented society.

I would describe myself as a peaceful patriot, not at all aggressive or bellicose. A patriotism rooted in history can be a valuable economic resource during times of economic crisis. The Hungarians have this resource, and I think the French and Germans do too. But I am not sure that the Americans have it.

I will conclude my survey of Trumpism’s prospects on a pessimistic note, by examining a more concrete, less abstract or anthropological aspect: the productive capacity of the United States. In order to rebuild industry, even under the protection of a tariff wall, the United States would have to build machine tools. Machine tools are the industry of industry. Today it would, in fact, be more accurate to speak of industrial robotics.

But it is already too late for the US. In 2018, 25% of machine tools were produced in China, 21% in the German-speaking world (Germany, Switzerland and Austria) and 26% in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The US was tied with Italy at 7%. France’s figures were even lower. It seems to me that it is too late for the US to reverse this situation and rebuild an independent industry. And if I had to bet, I would say that Trumpism will fail there too.

One can therefore envisage a situation in which the United States, uncertain of which path to take after the failure of its policy, could launch itself into war, confident that Germany will do its part in the production of military goods, on the pretext that the Russians are showing themselves to be too inflexible.

Donald Trump’s intention to withdraw the US from the war seems sincere to me. It seems to me that, if he could, he would prefer a civil war to a war overseas. But the US does not have the resources to become an industrial power again. The US was an Empire and its most significant industrial production was displaced to the periphery of the Empire, to East Asia, Germany and Eastern Europe. The industrial heart of the US was hollowed out, producing insignificant numbers of engineers and machine tools. I do not believe that this heart can beat again.

I would like to confess a personal anxiety, a concern that, although I cannot justify it, haunts me. The United States was for a long time the most advanced country in the world. My mother's family, of Jewish origin, took refuge there during the Second World War, seeking safety. My paternal grandfather, a Jew from Vienna and the son of a Jew from Budapest, became an American citizen.

The United States was the pinnacle of civilization, and now that pinnacle is collapsing. We are seeing things of a brutality and vulgarity that, as a scion of the upper middle class in Paris, I cannot accept. I think, for example, of Donald Trump's behavior towards Volodymyr Zelensky. I see there signs of a clear moral collapse.

But this is not the first time that the West has seen the moral collapse of its most advanced member. At the beginning of the 20th century, Germany was the most advanced country in the Western world. German universities led the way in scientific research. And yet Germany sank into Nazism. And one of the things that prevented us from stopping Nazism was that we could not imagine that the most advanced country in the West could produce such an abomination.

So, I have to admit, my real fear today goes beyond rational argument, and I would have no way of proving it. As I said, we have to be humble before history. Everything I am saying could be disproved in a couple of months, or even less. My real fear, then, is that the United States is about to bring about events that we cannot even imagine now, and that will be all the more terrible the less we can imagine them.

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

Conference given at the Varkert Bazaar of Budapest, in the context of Eötvös Conference, organized by 21st Century Institute, on April 8, 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