America has “given up” on defeating China, according to the French historian Emmanuel Todd.

Speaking late last month to the new-media outlet Fréquence Populaire Média, Todd claimed the United States had lost not only to Russia but to the entire Brics bloc — Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. The public intellectual highlighted China’s naval production, which “will soon make the US Navy a dwarf navy”, as well as “the fact that China put the Americans under embargo” for exports of rare earth metals such as samarium. What’s more, US aircraft carriers are “irrelevant facing [Beijing’s] hypersonic missiles”.

In the same interview, the academic also argued that America “gave up controlling the world” because of the threat from Russia and China, but has maintained its hold on the Western European nations. He referred to Brics as “the end of the American imperium”, and suggested that Donald Trump “arrived because of the American defeat” and is seeking to adapt his country to a new multipolar world. Todd discussed pictures of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and India’s Narendra Modi taken at the Shanghai Co-operation Summit in China earlier this year, comparing them to photographs of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin together at the Yalta Conference in 1945. “It’s an image that will be in history books,” he said.

In 2023, Todd argued that the third world war had already begun, suggesting that a cold war between China and the West would lead to the further rise of Brics countries such as India. His most recent book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), was published last year and claimed that European powers are becoming increasingly dependent, militarily and culturally, on the US. Speaking to Le Figaro at the start of this year, Todd said that “a war between the United States and China in the Pacific would last about 10 minutes.”

In a new preface to La Défaite de l’Occident published on his Substack today, Todd stated that while China’s “very low fertility rate will certainly prevent it from replacing the United States”, it is “already too late to compete with it industrially”. He added that the US “can no longer dream of confronting China militarily”, a state of affairs of which the other Brics nations, as well as Africa and the Arab world, are taking advantage. One Trump official who has pushed for a more hawkish line on China is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby. Todd labelled Colby “smart”, but stated that “I wouldn’t say this about his superior,” in reference to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Trump has paused his punitive tariffs on China at 30%, following a 90-day truce agreed in August. He has since pushed for further deals in trade and artificial intelligence as Beijing gains a competitive edge in the semiconductor market. Todd is less complimentary about this approach: “The Americans don’t know what to do.”