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June 03, 2025
The Defeat of The West And Its Dislocation

In 1976 the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd predicted the down fall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire, first published in French in 2001, he predicted the (relative) decline of the United States.

In his latest (and last) book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), he laments the West's inability to distinguish facts from wishes, as seen in its behavior during the war in Ukraine. Nihilism, a lack of values and of acceptance of reality, has infested western thinking:

Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality.
Todd recently opened a substack where he is posting speeches and talks he has given.

Two of those, a recent talk given in Russia (in French) and one given in Hungary (in English) make (mostly) similar points.

The downfall of the Soviet Union led to deep psychological and societal dislocations in Russia. The defeat of the West, or 'liberal democracy', is leading to similar consequences in Western societies.

While Todd had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, he had not anticipated the consequences it would have for Russia:

But the collapse of Russia in the 1990s is something I would never have anticipated. The fundamental reason why I was unable to understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not simply a means of organising economic activity in Russia, but also a kind of religion. It was belief that allowed the system to exist and the dissolution of that belief represented, of course, something at least as damaging as the dislocation of the economic system.
It took three decades for Russia to overcome the psychological dislocation that was the result of the destruction of its political and economical system.

Todd is suspecting that a similar process is currently happening in the West:

All of this has a bearing upon what is happening today. I will talk about two things in my lecture. I will talk about the defeat of the West, by which I mean something quite technical and specific, which is not very complex and has not surprised me. I had anticipated it, and to a certain extent it’s already under way in Ukraine. But we are now in the next phase, which is the dislocation of the West, and I have to say that, just as in the dislocation of communism, of the Soviet system, I am unable to understand exactly what is going on. The fundamental attitude that we need to have now is, I would say, an attitude of humility. Everything that’s happening, especially since the election of Donald Trump, surprises me.
I have been surprised by the violence with which Trump has turned against his Ukrainian and Europeans allies – or rather his vassals. The will of the Europeans to continue or restart the war – even though Europe is certainly the region of the world which would be most advantaged by a peace agreement – has also been a great surprise to me. We have to start from these surprises if we want to think properly about what’s going on.

I will discuss those surprises, some of which concern me a lot, in a later piece.

The defeat of the Soviet Union (and Russia) came after it had lost the economic war with the West. It had also lost a war in Afghanistan. The Soviet system had turned out to be a failure.

The West, or as Mearsheimer is arguing (vid), 'liberal hegemony', has been routed in Afghanistan. The attempts to 'liberate' Libya and Syria have failed to the point where the Western 'war on terror' launched against al-Qaeda has led to the installation of an al-Qaeda bigwig as the new president of Syria. The economic decline of the West is demonstrated by the rise of China. The West's moral self-defeat of its 'values' can be daily witnessed in Gaza.

'Liberal democracy', the system of ideas that has for decades been the leading light of the West, has failed.

Like communism in Russia, 'liberal democracy' has not only an economic side but is also a kind of religion. The failure of this belief system is upon us.

The accumulation of defeat after defeat by the 'liberal democracy' system has led to a psychological breakdown, an internal dislocation of the West. This is now leading to irrational acts and to seeking refuge in wishful thinking.

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Or, as Alastair Crooke is summarizing the phenomenon and warns:

The psychological dislocation caused by ‘defeat’ may explain (but not justify) the West’s ‘curious’ inability to understand world events: The almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions: It’s blindness – for example, to the Russian experience of history and to the long history behind Shi’a defiance in Iran. Yet, even as the political situation deteriorates … there is no sign of the West becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality – until it is forcibly expelled.