Will the West Defeat Itself?

In France and even in the pages of the New York Times, Emmanuel Todd is seen as something of a prophet. The French Anglo-phile has written a mega best seller, called The Defeat of the West. The book has done so well in France that it has been written up by Christopher Caldwell for the New York Times.

It would be redundant to say that Todd is pessimistic, and it would be a mistake to dismiss the book as the mental drool of yet another French intellectual.

The truth is, more than a few Americans are currently persuaded that the nation is in decline. They are willing to resort to extreme political measures to reverse what seems now to be inevitable. 

Todd and Caldwell base their analyses on the situation in Ukraine.

No one wants to think in terms of defeat, but such is the prospect facing us in Ukraine. Along with a defeat in Afghanistan and the current Biden administration efforts to ensure that Israel does not win its war against Hamas, the Biden presidency has been marked by failure. No ranting from the podium and no media efforts to put lipstick on the pig will change that.

More importantly, given its incompetence, the Biden administration engages in theatrical gestures designed to show that it is strong, empowered and in charge. Like the war in Ukraine.

Todd sees it as signifying failure and incompetence:

Europeans, like Americans, are tiring of the war. They are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can win it. But perhaps most important, they distrust the United States, which has done little in this war to dispel skepticism about its motives and its competence that arose during the Iraq war two decades ago.

Unique though Americans sometimes believe their polarization to be, all Western societies have a version of it. As Europe’s “elites” see it, NATO is fighting a war to beat back a Russian invasion. But as “populists” see it, American elites are leading a war to beat back a challenge to their own hegemony — no matter what the collateral damage.

Caldwell continues:

But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.

It is surely a stretch to consider that American involvement in Ukraine signals imperial overreach. 

It is not a stretch to consider that those who cheered the imposition of sanctions on the malevolent genie called Vladimir Putin, have discovered that the gestures were more theatre than policy.

But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.

Naturally, the Biden administration, incapable of taking responsibility for any of its actions or inactions, is hard at work trying to pin the ongoing calamity of Ukraine on Republicans. Again, that belongs to political theatre, not to policy. 

Todd adds that the war exposed a dangerous American deficiency. We have not been capable of producing the military equipment that Ukraine needed. We have just discovered that we hollowed out our manufacturing base, by shipping it around the world. 

Where have we heard this before?

And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.

American decadence did not begin yesterday. And yet, we no longer produce and manufacture things, but we aspire to makework jobs that one Robert Reich once called symbolic analysts. We want to deal with symbols, not with things.

The United States produces fewer cars than it did in the 1980s; it produces less wheat. But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.

We can trot out the numbers from China, but Russia serves as a good example. Our educational system, as we have often noted on these pages, does not produce enough engineers, but happily churns out armies of lawyers and therapists.

In an advanced, highly educated society like ours, Mr. Todd argues, too many people aspire to the work of running things and bossing people around. They want to be politicians, artists, managers. This doesn’t always require learning intellectually complex stuff. “In the long run, educational progress has brought educational decline,” he writes, “because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”

Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to law, finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it. (He asks us to consider the ravages of the opioid industry, for instance.)

But then, there are our values. We are selling our values around the world, especially our liberal values involving democracy and human rights. This has not made us very popular. If we cannot impose these values by force, we will be having a serious problem.

As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.

We are persuaded that we have reached a superior moral level with our policies toward sex and gender. To many of the world's people, we seem deluded. 

As it has modernized, the United States has come to espouse a model of sex and gender that conjugates poorly with those of traditional cultures (such as India’s) and more patriarchal modern ones (such as Russia’s).

And, dare we mention the infant mortality figures, where we are world class laggards.

Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Being out of touch with reality does not just apply to transmania. It also makes it impossible for us to conduct policy:

The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”

Our minds are infested with therapy,so we are more concerned with wish fulfillment than with reality. And, like any tragic hero, we are being done in by our hybris. So says Emmanuel Todd, and his arguments are worth taking seriously.

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