[French politics seem to be bubbling with farmers revolts and cabinet shakeups. Marine Le Pen's populist National Rally party polls well. Sporadic riots emanating from the suburbs are a new norm. Yet low-violence turmoil is a kind of perennial in France, and the safer bet nearly always is that nothing dramatic will change on the domestic political front.
Intellectual currents may be more important. France is the first major European country (after Hungary, at least) to begin to acknowledge that the Ukraine war has turned into a major catastrophe for the West. President Macron still sings from the hymnal of Ukraine solidarity and the major voices of the center left and right still support unconditional aid to Ukraine. But cracks in the consensus are widening...
Now a Frenchman,
the veteran and well-established social scientist Emmanuel Todd has, in an ambitious lamentation of American global leadership, taken the novel's "let's not demonize Putin" sentiment to another level. At this writing, his
La Dfaite de L'Occident (
The Defeat of the West) has been at or near the top of French best-seller lists for four weeks.
Todd has had a large French readership since his first book, written in 1976 when he was a graduate student studying European peasant communities, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Michael Lind, in his preface to the English version of
After the Empire, a coruscating critique of America's imperial world role written as Washington was plunging into the Iraq War, places Todd in the tradition of the great Raymond Aron, as an enlightened liberal and empirically grounded skeptic. This is not quite precise: Todd is both more polemical and, if not dogmatically so, more left-wing than Aron. Yet he shares with him a healthy respect for social science data, deploying them here to undermine the West's most widely circulated and least challenged political narratives....
La Dfaite opens with a recitation of the surprises to emerge from the Ukraine war. The hawkishness of Great Britain, the failure of France and Germany to stand up for their own diplomatic and economic interests, the effectiveness and will to fight of the Ukrainian military are singled out. But several others are particularly important, and serve as major themes of Todd's book.
First, the
Russian economy has successfully withstood the fierce American and Western financial sanctions...
Secondly, by last summer, it had
become clear that the United States and the West lacked capacity to supply Ukraine with sufficient artillery shells...
Third, and perhaps most significantly, was the revelation of the West's ideological self-isolation as the Ukraine proxy war has ground on.
From the outset large democratic countries such as Turkey and India failed to embrace Washington's sanctions regime...]
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