American Nihilism & NATO's Defeat
Emmanuel Todd’s critique of America in Defeat of the West
Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West provides a devastating critique of America. In Todd’s history, provoked by looming defeat of NATO in Ukraine, America is not the home of the free and the land of the brave. It is a state of oligarchy and a culture of nihilism.
The claim on oligarchy is incendiary, but not uncommon. After all, Robert Michels wrote his thesis on the “iron law of oligarchy” in 1911. It described the paradox that Social Democrats, whose left-wing progressive ideas appeared to mobilize democracy and mass political participation in Germany, were run by a narrow clique, just like their establishment opponents. Michels generalized his observation to describe a common place of political and government institutions across the world. It has been incorporated into elite theory of democratic politics, including by the great Australian scholar, John Higley. Many others have made the same claim about Western democracy. Indeed, this week the progressive magazine, Axios, described the Whitehouse as ruled by the “Biden oligarchy.”
The claim of nihilism is, however, harder to understand. It is abstract and ambivalent. Within formal philosophy, nihilism is the position that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. But Todd is not writing as a philosopher. He writes as a historical sociologist with a literary imagination.
His idea of nihilism is closer to that presented by Dostoyevsky in The Devils. In this novel, idealistic radicals are drawn into terroristic murder by a cell of radical, destructive nihilists. They are estranged from collective belief, after the death of God, and are unchecked in their pursuit of revolt, power, and violence. Dostoyevsky based his novel on real historical characters in Russia in the late nineteenth century. In his own words, Dostoevsky sought to "depict those diverse and multifarious motives by which even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn in to committing such a monstrous offence.”
In Defeat of the West, Todd presents a similar story on a geopolitical stage. An idealistic America, once founded in Protestantism, has been stripped of any real shared beliefs, in what Todd calls a “state of zero religion.” It was drawn by the “Washington Gang” into violence against the world, self-destruction, and catastrophic hubris. It has fallen, he wrote, into the trap of Ukrainian nihilism.
Todd’s book is profound historical sociology, but easy to misinterpret. Some commentators, such as Pepe Escobar or Ramin Mazaheri here on Substack, do. But Todd’s idea of American nihilism is crucial to understand, especially on the eve of NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, and its proposals to command the Indo-Pacific. This once “defensive alliance” that “won the Cold War” been drawn relentlessly over the last 30 years into dangerous, reckless acts. Iraq. Afghanistan. Serbia. Libya. Ukraine. And now partnerships with Japan, South Korea, and Australia to “contain China”, or indeed, as former Australian security official Michael Pezzullo, wants to fight “an epic contest with China, with victory as the goal.” Its eastward expansion after 1990 betrayed the hopes of peace around the world and is documented by Todd in a brilliant summary of the geopolitical era of the unipolar illusion at the end of his book (I did a live summary of this narrative today in a video on YouTube). It has sundered the complementary partnership between the neighbouring great powers of Western Eurasia, Germany, and Russia. At the 2023 Summit in Vilnius, it declared China a threat to the world in bellicose rhetoric. This week NATO’s outgoing Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, rewrote history by claiming ““China is instigating the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II”.” This “brain dead” Western European alliance, as Emmanuel Macron described it, marches like a zombie to war in the West Pacific.
American nihilism has sucked the USA, NATO, and Western allies like Australia into the Ukrainian death trap. This self-described “greatest alliance in history” now threatens world peace and the future of humanity. The last thing the world needs is this ‘defensive alliance’ NATO expanding as a global force to return control of the “Indo-Pacific” to the Euro-Atlantic empires.
This post is part of a collaboration with a group of content creators who champion the cause of a peaceful, multipolar world. You can read Warwick Powell’s substack piece on the theme here. Through dialogue and collaboration, we aim to inspire actions that resonate with the values of harmony and mutual respect. I will be doing a panel discussion with members of this group later in the week in the run up to NATO’s summit
We share three simple ideas.
· We love multipolarity
· We love neutrality, or, as I prefer to say, broad mutual interdependence
· We love the world with no more NATO expansion.
The world fears the NATO alliance. It is premised on the American nihilism that Todd describes. For that reason, it is very valuable to read Todd’s own words on how nihilism has led the West to its own defeat. In my YouTube video this week I summarized the main ideas of Todd’s book.
Below the paywall for full members, I offer you translations of key passages from Todd’s book that explain his argument. Todd’s book has not yet been translated into English and these translations will help you understand this most important book on geopolitics and history in 2024.