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October 9 2024 - 7:00am
Nato will ‘disintegrate’ if Ukraine loses its war with Russia, according to the French historian and public intellectual Emmanuel Todd. Speaking to Italian newspaper Corriere di Bologna this week, Todd claimed that ‘if Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans will last for a century’, but that if the US-backed Ukrainian effort fails, ‘Nato will disintegrate and Europe will be left free.’
The comments were made during a tour to promote the Italian edition of Todd’s book The Defeat of the West, in which the author attributes Western decline to the increased secularization of Anglosphere society and argues that European powers are becoming increasingly dependent on the United States. As he sees it, the Ukraine war has only highlighted this wider malaise. In the interview with Corriere di Bologna, he claimed that ‘the Ukrainian army is in retreat, and it is a fact that it has difficulty recruiting soldiers’, adding that ‘Western economic sanctions have done more damage to the European economy than to the Russian one.’
Having stated at the beginning of last year that a third world war has already begun, Todd told the Italian newspaper that the outcome of the Ukraine war ‘will decide the fate of Europe’. He argued that Vladimir Putin ‘will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted’, and that the West ‘fantasizes about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe’, when really this ‘is simply ridiculous for a serious historian’. He added: ‘The psychological shock that awaits Europeans will be to understand that Nato does not exist to protect us but to control us.’
Todd also claimed in the interview that America’s high command encouraged the escalation of the Ukraine war, with a view to the further ‘separation of Russia from Germany’. According to the French historian, ‘forcing the Russians to enter the war to prevent the de facto integration of Ukraine into Nato was, initially, a great diplomatic success for Washington.’ But he believes that Germany and Russia will eventually repair their relations and ‘American control over Europe will be pulverized.’
More than two decades ago, Todd wrote After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, in which he argued that US economic, diplomatic and military hegemony was already on the downturn. In The Defeat of the West, published in French at the beginning of this year, the historian has suggested that ‘as its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.’ Referring to the Ukraine war, he said in the new interview that ‘we Westerners provoked this war and lost it, and with this defeat we also lost our grip on the world.’
Asked by Corriere di Bologna whether he’d rather live in Russia than Western Europe, Todd responded: ‘The liberal oligarchy is not a practical problem for me […] Basically I am just a dissident member of the intellectual oligarchy.’ While he said he would remain in France ‘as long as the regime is not fascist or racist’, he claimed he would not move to the US as the country is ‘descending into something worse than the liberal oligarchy’. That something worse, Todd argued, is ‘nihilism’.
