The dislocation of the West: What Threatens Us

By Emmanuel Todd October 6, 2025

In part:

One of the fundamental concepts of the West’s defeat is nihilism. I explain how the ‘zero state’ of the Protestant religion – secularisation at its end – not only explains the collapse of American education and industry. The zero state also opens up a metaphysical void. I am not personally a believer and I do not advocate a return to religion (I do not believe it is possible), but as a historian I must note that the disappearance of social values of religious origin leads to a moral crisis, to a drive to destroy things and people (war) and ultimately to an attempt to abolish reality (the transgender phenomenon for American Democrats and the denial of global warming for Republicans, for example). The crisis exists in all completely secularised countries, but it is worse in those where the religion was Protestantism or Judaism, which are absolutist religions in their search for the transcendent, rather than Catholicism, which is more open to the beauty of the world and earthly life. It is indeed in the United States and Israel that we see the development of parodic forms of traditional religions, parodies that are, in my opinion, nihilistic in essence.

This irrational dimension is at the heart of the defeat. This defeat is therefore not only a ‘technical’ loss of power but also a moral exhaustion, an absence of positive existential purpose that leads to nihilism.

This nihilism is behind the desire of European leaders, particularly on the Protestant shores of the Baltic, to expand the war against Russia through incessant provocations. This nihilism is also behind the American destabilisation of the Middle East, the ultimate expression of the rage resulting from America’s defeat by Russia. Above all, let us not succumb to the overly simplistic conclusion that Netanyahu’s regime in Israel is acting independently in the genocide in Gaza or in the attack on Iran. Zero Protestantism and zero Judaism certainly tragically combine their nihilistic effects in these outbreaks of violence. But throughout the Middle East, it is the United States, by supplying weapons and sometimes attacking directly, that is ultimately responsible for the chaos. It pushes Israel to action just as it pushed the Ukrainians. The first Trump presidency established the US embassy in Jerusalem, and it was Trump who first imagined Gaza transformed into a seaside resort. I am aware that it would take a book to prove this thesis, a book that would dismantle the interactions between the actors one by one. But, as a professional historian who has been involved in geopolitics for half a century, I feel that, like NATO Europe, Israel has ceased to be an independent state. The problem with the West is indeed the programmed death of the nation state.

The Empire is vast and is falling apart amid noise and fury. This Empire is already polycentric, divided on its goals, schizophrenic. But none of its parts is truly independent. Trump is its current ‘centre’; he is also its best ideological and practical expression, combining a rational desire to retreat into its immediate sphere of domination (Europe and Israel) with nihilistic impulses that favour war. These tendencies – withdrawal and violence – are also expressed within the American heart of the Empire, where the principle of hierarchical fracturing operates internally. A growing number of Anglo-American authors are evoking the coming of a civil war.

The American plutocracy is pluralistic. There is the plutocracy of financiers, that of oilmen, that of Silicon Valley. Trumpist plutocrats, Texan oilmen and recent Silicon Valley converts despise the educated Democratic elites of the East Coast, who themselves despise the white Trumpists of the heartland, who themselves despise black Democrats, and so on.

One of the interesting features of America today is that its leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between internal and external issues, despite MAGA’s attempt to stop immigration from the south with a wall. The army fires on boats leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centres of Democratic cities in the United States, and sponsors the Israeli air force for an attack on Qatar, where there is a huge American base. Any science fiction reader will recognise in this disturbing list the beginnings of a descent into dystopia, that is, a negative world where power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty and perversity intermingle.

So let us remain ourselves, outside America. Let us retain our perception of the inside and the outside, our sense of proportion, our contact with reality, our conception of what is right and beautiful. Let us not allow ourselves to be dragged into a headlong rush to war by our own European leaders, those privileged individuals lost in history, desperate at having been defeated, terrified at the idea of one day being judged by their peoples. And above all, above all, let us continue to reflect on the meaning of things.

Read full intro at link below:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-175377338

I highly recommend to read, and reflect on, the whole essay.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-175377338