From Russia with love

Talk in Moscow on April 23rd, 2025, for the Russian Academy of Sciences

After Budapest, Moscow : here is the text of the lecture I gave at the Russian Academy of Sciences on April 23rd, 2025, titled “Anthropology and strategic realism in international relations”.

Giving this talk intimidates me. I speak often in France, Italy, Germany, Japan and the Anglo-American world - in other words, in the West. When I do, I speak from within my world, admittedly from a critical perspective, but from within my world. Here, it is different, I am in Moscow, in the capital of the country that has defied the West and will probably succeed in this challenge. On a psychological level, it's a completely different exercise.

Anti-ideological self-portrait

I'm going to start by introducing myself, not out of narcissism, but because very often people from France or elsewhere who talk about Russia with understanding, or even sympathy, have a certain ideological profile. Very often, these people come from the conservative right or from populism and they project an a priori ideological image onto Russia. In my opinion, their ideological sympathies are somewhat unrealistic and fantasised. I don't belong to this category at all.

In France, I am what you would call a left-wing liberal, fundamentally attached to liberal democracy. What distinguishes me from people attached to liberal democracy is that, because I am a social anthropologist, because I know the diversity of the world through the analysis of family systems, I have a great tolerance for outside cultures and I don't start from the principle that everyone must imitate the West. The bias towards knowing-it-all is particularly traditional in Paris. I believe that every country has its own history, culture and path.

I have to admit nonetheless that there is an emotional dimension to me, a real sympathy for Russia, which may explain my ability to listen to its arguments in the current geopolitical confrontation. My openness does not stem from what Russia is in ideological terms, but from a feeling of gratitude for ridding us of Nazism. Now is the time to say it, as we approach May 9th, the day on which the victory is celebrated. The first history books I read, when I was 16, were about the Red Army's war against Nazism. I have the feeling of a debt that must be honoured.

I would add that I am aware that Russia emerged from communism on its own, through its own efforts, and that it suffered enormously during the transition period. I believe that the defensive war that the West forced Russia into, after all that suffering, just as it was getting back on its feet, is a moral failure on the part of the West. So much for the ideological, or rather emotional, dimension. As for the rest, I am not an ideologue, I don't have a programme for humanity, I'm a historian, I'm a social anthropologist, I consider myself a scientist and what I can contribute to the understanding of the world and in particular to geopolitics comes essentially from my occupational skills.

Anthropology and politics

I was trained as a researcher in history and anthropology at Cambridge University in England. My thesis supervisor was named Peter Laslett. He had discovered that the English family of the 17th century was simple, nuclear and individualistic. Its children had to disperse very early on. Then, at Cambridge, I had as my thesis internal examiner another great British historian, who is still alive, Alan Macfarlane. He had understood that there was a link between the political and economic individualism of the British (and therefore of Anglo-Saxons in general) and the nuclear family identified by Peter Laslett in England's past.

I am the student of these two great British historians. Fundamentally, I generalised Macfarlane's hypothesis. I realised that the map of communism at is peak, around the mid-1970s, looked very much like the map of a family system that I call communitarian (which others have called patriarchal family, or joint-family), a family system that is somehow the conceptual opposite of the British family system. Take the Russian peasant family, for example. I'm no specialist of Russia, what I do know about Russia are the lists of names of inhabitants in the 19th century, which describe Russian peasant families. These were not, like the English peasant families of the 17th century, small nuclear families (dad, mum, children) but huge households with a man, his wife, his sons, those sons’ wives, and grandchildren. This system was patrilineal because families exchanged their women to make them wives. The communitarian family can be found in China, Vietnam, Serbia and central Italy, a region that voted communist. One of the particularities of the Russian communitarian family was that it maintained a high status for women because it had appeared recently.

The Russian communitarian family emerged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Chinese communitarian family appeared before the beginning of the Common Era. The Russian communitarian family had existed for a few centuries, the Chinese communitarian family for two millennia.

These examples reveal my perception of the world. I don't see an abstract world, but a world in which each of the large nations, each of the small nations, had a particular peasant family structure, a structure that still explains much of its current behaviour.

I can give other examples. Japan and Germany, which are so similar in industrial terms and in their conceptions of hierarchy, also share a family structure, different from the nuclear and communitarian family types, the stem family, which I won't discuss in this talk.

If you look at the media today, journalists and politicians are talking there about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as if they were the fundamental agents of history, or even the people who are shaping their society. I see them primarily as expressions of national cultures, which can themselves be expanding, stable or decadent.

I'd like to make one thing clear about my reputation. 95% of my life as a researcher has been devoted to the analysis of family structures, a subject on which I have written books of 500 to 700 pages. But that's not what I'm best known for in the world. I am known for three geopolitical essays in which I used my knowledge of this anthropological background to understand what was going on.

In 1976, I published The final fall : an essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere in which I predicted the collapse of communism. The fall in the fertility rate of Russian women showed that the Russians were people like everybody else, in the process of modernising, and that no homo sovieticus had been created by communism. Above all, I had identified an increase in infant mortality between 1970 and 1974 in Russia and Ukraine.

The rise in mortality among children under one year of age showed that the system had begun to deteriorate. I wrote that first book very young, when I was 25, and I had to wait about 15 years for my prediction to come true.

In 2002, I wrote a second geopolitical book, After the Empire : The Breakdown of the American Order, at a time when everyone was talking about the American hyperpower. We were told that America was going to dominate the world for an indefinite period, a unipolar world. I was saying the opposite: no, the world is too big, America's relative size is shrinking economically and America will not be able to control this world. That proved to be true. In After the Empire, there is a particularly correct prediction that surprises even me. One chapter is called ‘The Return of Russia’. In it, I predict Russia's return as a major power, but on the basis of very few clues. I had only observed a resumption of the fall in infant mortality (between 1993 and 1999, after a rise between 1990 and 1993). But I knew instinctively that the Russian communitarian cultural background, which had produced communism in a transitional phase, was going to survive the period of anarchy of the 1990s, and that it constituted a stable structure that would enable something to be rebuilt.

There is however a huge mistake in this book: I predict in it an autonomous destiny for Western Europe. And there's an omission: I don't mention China.

This brings me to my latest geopolitical book, which I think will be my last, La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West). It is in order to talk about this book that I am here in Moscow. It predicts that, in the geopolitical confrontation opened up by the entry of the Russian army into Ukraine, the West will suffer a defeat. Once again I appear in opposition to the general opinion of my country, or my side since I am a Westerner. I will first say why it was easy for me to write this book, but then I would like to try to explain why, now that the defeat of the West seems certain, it has become much more difficult for me to explain in the short term the process of dislocation of the West, while still being able to make a long-term prediction about the continuation of the American decline.

We are at a turning point: we are moving from defeat to dislocation. What makes me cautious is my past experience of the collapse of the Soviet system. I had predicted this collapse but I have to admit that when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I wasn't able to foresee the extent of the dislocation and the level of suffering that this dislocation would entail for Russia.

I hadn't understood that communism was not just an economic organisation but also a belief, a quasi-religion, structuring social life in Russia and the Soviet Union. The dislocation of belief was going to lead to a psychological disorganisation far beyond the economic disorganisation. We are reaching a similar situation in the West today. What we are experiencing is not simply a military failure and an economic failure, but a dislocation of the beliefs that had organised social life in the West for several decades.

From defeat to dislocation

I remember very well the context in which I wrote The Defeat of the West. I was in my little house in Brittany in the summer of 2023.

Journalists in France and elsewhere were getting excited commenting on the (fantasised) ‘successes’ of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. I can clearly picture myself calmly writing: ‘The defeat of the West is certain’. I had absolutely no problem with that. On the other hand, when I talk about dislocation today, I adopt a position of humility in the face of events. Trump's behaviour is a staging of uncertainty. The bellicosity of those Europeans who lost the war alongside the Americans and who are now talking about winning it without the Americans is very surprising.

That's the present. Short-term events are very difficult to predict. On the other hand, the medium and long terms in the West, particularly in the United States, seem to me to be more accessible to understanding and forecasting - without certainty of course. Very early on, back in 2002, I had a positive medium- and long-term vision for Russia, as I said. But today I have a very negative medium- or long-term view of the United States. What we are experiencing is only the beginning of the downfall of the United States and we must be prepared to see even more dramatic things.

The defeat of the West: an easy prediction

Let me begin by recalling the model of The Defeat of the West. This book has been published, although not in English yet, and anyone can check what it says. I will explain why it was relatively easy to conceive of this defeat. In the years leading up to it, I had already analysed Russia's return to stability at length.

I wasn't living in the Western fantasy of a monstrous Putin regime, of Putin being the devil and Russians being idiots or serfs, which was the dominant Western view. I had read Russia, the Return of Power, an excellent book by a little-known Frenchman, David Teurtrie, published shortly before Russian troops entered Ukraine. In it, he described the restarting of the Russian economy, its agriculture and its exports of nuclear power plants. He explained that since 2014 Russia had been preparing to being disconnected from the Western financial system.

I also had my usual indicators, which show social stability more than economic stability. I had continued to monitor the infant mortality rate, the statistical indicator I use the most. Children under the age of one are the most fragile members of society and their chances of survival are the most sensitive indicator of social cohesion and efficiency. Over the last 20 years, Russia's infant mortality rate has fallen at an accelerating rate, even though the overall Russian mortality, particularly for men, is unsatisfactory. For several years, the Russian infant mortality rate had fallen below the US infant mortality rate.

The American infant mortality rate is one of the indicators that shows us that America is not doing well. Unfortunately, it seems that the French infant mortality rate, which is rising, is in the process of overtaking that of Russia. It's painful for me, as a Frenchman, but as a historian I have to be able to see and analyse things I don't like. The history that is unfolding is not there to please me. It's there to be studied.

Satisfactory economic evolution and social stabilisation of Russia. There was also the rapid fall in the suicide rate and the homicide rate in the years 2000-2020. I had all these indicators and I also had my knowledge of the Russian communitarian family background, of peasant origin, which no longer exists visibly but continues to shape society. Of course, the Russian peasant family of the nineteenth century no longer exists. But its values survive in the interactions between individuals. In Russia, there are still values of authority, equality and community that ensure a particular kind of social cohesion.

This is an assumption that can be difficult to accept for modern men and women integrated in urban life. I've just arrived in Moscow, which I'm rediscovering in 2025, transformed since my last trip there in 1993. Moscow is a huge, modern city. How can I imagine, in such a material and social context, the persistence of community values coming from the nineteenth century? But I do it as I do it elsewhere. It's an experience I had, for example, in Japan. Tokyo, too, is an immense city, actually, with its 40 million inhabitants, twice the size of Moscow. But it's easy to see and accept the idea that a Japanese value system, inherited from an ancient family structure, has been perpetuated there. I feel the same way about Russia, with the difference that the authoritarian and egalitarian Russian communitarian family was not the authoritarian and inegalitarian Japanese stem family.

Economics, demographics, family anthropology: in 2022 I didn't have the slightest doubt about Russia's solidity. And so, ever since the start of the war in Ukraine, I have watched with a mixture of amusement and sadness French journalists, politicians and political scientists putting forward their hypotheses about the fragility of Russia, about the upcoming collapse of its economy, its regime, and so on.

Self-destruction of the United States

I'm a little embarrassed to say this here in Moscow, but I have to admit that Russia is not the important subject for me. I'm not saying that Russia isn't interesting, I'm saying that it's not at the heart of my thinking. The core of my thinking is referred to in the title of my book, La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West). It's not Russia's victory, it's the defeat of the West that I'm studying. I think that the West is destroying itself.

To put forward and demonstrate this hypothesis, I also had a number of indicators. I'm going to confine myself here to the United States. I had been working for a long time on the evolution of the United States.

I knew about the destruction of the American industrial base, particularly since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. I knew how difficult it would be for the United States to produce enough weapons to fuel the war.

I had managed to estimate the number of engineers - people dedicated to making real things - in the United States and Russia. I came to the conclusion that Russia, with a population two and a half less numerous than that of the United States, was able to produce more engineers. Quite simply because only 7% of American students study engineering, whereas the figure in Russia is close to 25%. Of course, the number of engineers should be seen as a general indicator, which refers in greater depth to technicians, skilled workers and a general industrial capacity.

I had other long-term indicators for the United States. I had been working for decades on the decline in the level of education, on the decline in the quality and quantity of American higher education, a decline that began as early as 1965. The decline in American intellectual potential goes back a long way. But let's not forget that this decline comes after a rise that spanned two and a half centuries. America was an immense historical success before sinking into its current failure. The historic success of the United States was an example, among others but the most massive, of the historic success of the Protestant world. The Protestant religion was at the heart of American culture, just as it was at the heart of British culture, Scandinavian cultures and German culture, since two-thirds of Germany was Protestant.

Protestantism demanded that all the faithful have access to the Holy Scriptures. It demanded that people knew how to read. So Protestantism was very much in favour of education everywhere. Around 1900, the map of countries where everyone could read was that of Protestantism. In the United States, moreover, secondary education took off between the wars, which was not the case in the Protestant countries of Europe.

The educational collapse of the United States is very obviously linked to its religious collapse. I'm aware that there's a lot of talk these days about the excited evangelists who surround Trump. But for me, all that isn't real religion. In any case, it's not true Protestantism. The God of the American evangelists is a nice guy who hands out financial gifts, he's no longer the strict Calvinist God who demands a high level of morality, encourages a strong work ethic and promotes social discipline.

Social discipline in the United States owed a great deal to Protestant moral discipline. This was true even in the twentieth century, when the United States were no longer a homogeneous Protestant country, with Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and then immigrants from Asia. At least until the 1970s, the leading core of America and American culture remained Protestant. The WASPs, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were then often mocked for their flaws, but they represented a central culture and controlled the American system.

Active states, zombies and the zero of religion

I use a particular conceptualisation to analyse religious decline, not just in this book, but in all my recent books. It is a three-stage analysis of the vanishing of religion.

*First, I distinguish an active stage of religion, in which people are believing and practicing.

*Then there is what I call the zombie stage of religion, in which people are no longer believers and churchgoers but retain in their social habits values inherited from the previous active religion. I would refer, for example, to French republicanism, which succeeded the Catholic Church in France in the Paris basin, as a zombie civil religion.

*Then comes a third stage, which we are currently experiencing in the West, which I call the zero stage of religion, in which the social habits inherited from religion have themselves disappeared. I give a temporal indicator for the reach of this stage zero, but that you mustn't take in a moralistic way. It's a technical tool that allows me to date the phenomenon to 2013, 2014 or 2015.

I use any law instituting marriage for all, i.e. marriage between individuals of the same sex, to date the start of stage zero. This is an indicator of the fact that there is nothing left of the religious habits of the past. Civil marriage replicated religious marriage. Marriage for all is post-religious. I repeat, I didn't say it was wrong. I'm not being moralistic here. I'm saying that this is what allows us to consider that we have reached a zero stage of religion.

Going up from industrial decline to educational decline to religious decline to finally diagnose a zero state of religion allows us to affirm that the fall of the United States is not a short-term, reversible phenomenon. In any case, it will not be reversible in the few years of this war in Ukraine.

An American defeat

This war is still going on, and even if the army representing the West is Ukrainian, it is a confrontation between Russia and the United States. It could not have taken place without American equipment. It could not have taken place without American observation and intelligence services. That's why it's perfectly normal for the final negotiations to take place between the Russians and the Americans.

I find it strange that most Europeans are currently surprised to see themselves left out of the negotiations. Their surprise is a surprise to me. Since the beginning of the conflict, most Europeans have behaved like subjects of the United States. They have taken part in the sanctions, they have supplied arms and equipment, but they have not led the war. This is why these Europeans do not have a correct or realistic representation of the war.

This is where we are. The West has been defeated industrially. Economically. Foreseeing this defeat was not a big intellectual feat.

This brings me to what interests me most and what is most difficult for a futurologist: analysing and understanding current events. I give talks quite regularly. I've given talks in Paris. I've given talks in Germany. I've given talks in Italy. I recently gave one in Budapest. What strikes me is that with each new talk, while there is always a stable base, common to all, there are also new events to add and understand. We never know what Trump's real attitude is. We don't know whether his desire to end the war is sincere. There are extraordinary surprises like his sudden resentment against his own allies, or rather his subjects. It was very surprising to see the President of the United States point the finger of blame for the war and the defeat at the Europeans and Ukrainians. Today, I have to confess my admiration for the control and calm of the Russian government, which must (on the face of it) take Trump seriously, which must accept his portrayal of war because negotiations are necessary.

However, I have noticed one positive element in Trump that has been stable since the beginning: he is talking to the Russian government, he is moving away from the Western attitude of demonising Russia. It's a return to reality and, in itself, a positive thing, even if these negotiations don't lead to any tangible outcome.

The Trump revolution

I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump revolution.

Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of a dynamic and of contradictions internal to the society concerned. However, one thing that is striking in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German Revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat.

Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, was preceded in 1763 by France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost almost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I believe that we must start from this notion of defeat leading to a revolution in order to understand the Trump revolution. The current experiment in the United States, even if we do not know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? In any case, it is a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, violence that is directed, on the one hand, against allies and subjects, Europeans and Ukrainians, but which is also expressed internally, within American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Black people in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration.

This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have told me about conversations between members of the Trump team, and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J. D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war.

For the United States, it was a fundamentally economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not all-powerful. Americans were struck by the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon are well aware that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex.

This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the Europeans' lack of awareness.

The Europeans did not organise the war. Because they did not organise the war, they cannot be fully aware of the defeat. To be fully aware of the defeat, they would need access to the Pentagon's thinking. But the Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans are therefore mentally before the defeat, while the current American administration is mentally after the defeat.

Defeat and cultural crisis

My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I said, one important thing: the collapse of a system is as much mental as it is economic. What is collapsing in the West today, and first and foremost in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated or accompanied it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which belief will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.

The reasonable side of the Trump administration

I would like to point out that I did not initially harbour any hostility towards Trump on principle. During Trump's first election in 2016, I was among those who acknowledged that America was ailing, that its industrial and working-class heartland was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the Empire's general policy, and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. There are some very reasonable things in Trump's intuitions. Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected in order to rebuild its industry, is the result of a very reasonable intuition. I myself am a protectionist. I wrote books on this subject a long time ago. I also consider the idea of immigration control to be reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent.

Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration's insistence that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see this as a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia, but rather a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological fact on which, incidentally, science and the Church agree.

There are reasonable things in the Trump revolution.

Nihilism in the Trump revolution

I must now explain why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experiment will fail. I will repeat why I was optimistic about Russia as early as 2002 and say why I am pessimistic about the United States in 2025.

There is a lack of thought, a lack of preparation, a brutality, an impulsive, unthinking behaviour in the Trump administration's behaviour that evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism.

In The Defeat of the West, I explain that religious void, the zero stage of religion, leads to anxiety rather than a state of freedom and well-being. The zero stage brings us back to the fundamental problem. What does it mean to be human? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a period of religious collapse, is nihilism. We move from the fear of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a desire to destroy things, people, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious in a moral sense, but it is fundamental in an intellectual sense because to say that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a desire to destroy reality. This, in association with cancel culture and a preference for war, was one element in the nihilism that prevailed under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all of that. However, what strikes me at the moment is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a desire to destroy science and academia, the black middle classes, or disorderly violence in the application of the American protectionist strategy. When Trump thoughtlessly wants to establish tariffs between Canada and the United States, even though the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see this as an impulse toward destruction as much as protection. When I see Trump suddenly imposing protectionist tariffs on China, forgetting that most American smartphones are made in China, I tell myself that we cannot simply dismiss this as stupidity.

It is foolishness, certainly, but it may also be nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: Trump's fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilistic project.

The fundamental contradiction in American policy leads protectionism to failure. The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country has the skilled population that would allow it to benefit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists and skilled technicians. The Americans do not have enough of these. Yet I see the United States starting to chase away its Chinese students, and so many others, the very people who enable it to compensate for its shortage of engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or revive industry if the state intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Yet we see the Trump administration attacking the state, the very state that should be nurturing scientific research and technological progress. Worse still, if we look for the motivation behind the fight against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realise that it is not even economic.

Those who are familiar with American history know the crucial role of the federal government in the emancipation of Black people. Hatred of the federal government in the United States most often stems from anti-Black resentment. When you fight against the American federal government, you are fighting against the central administrations that emancipated and still protect Black people. A high proportion of the Black middle class has found employment in the federal government. The fight against the federal government is therefore not part of a general vision of economic and national reconstruction.

When I think of the multiple and contradictory actions of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose outcome is somewhat unclear.

Absolute nuclear family + zero religion = atomisation

I am very pessimistic about the United States. To conclude this exploratory lecture, I will return to my fundamental concepts as a historian and social anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this lecture that the fundamental reason why I believed, quite early on, as early as 2002, that Russia would return to stability was because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's return to stability. I see a family-based, community-based culture, with its values of authority and equality, which also helps us to understand a little about what the nation means to Russians. There is indeed a connection between the form of the family and the idea of the nation that people hold. The communitarian family nourishes a strong, compact idea of the nation or the people. Such is Russia.

In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we have the opposite situation. The English and American family model is nuclear, individualistic, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of testament reigns. The absolute Anglo-American nuclear family gives very little structure to the nation. The nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations in that system follow one another while remaining separate. The rapid adaptation of the United States and England, and the plasticity of their social structures (which enabled the English Industrial Revolution and the American boom) were made possible by this absolute nuclear family structure.

But alongside or above this individualistic family structure, both England and the United States had the discipline of Protestantism, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was crucial to the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with family values that provide very little structure, does not seem to me to be an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. The Anglo-American world is heading towards ever greater atomisation. This atomisation can only lead to an accentuation, with no visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor.

Unfortunately, I can now only find one additional negative factor, which came to my attention when reading a book by Amy Chua, a Yale academic who was J.D. Vance's mentor. Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) highlights, as many other texts have done before it, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded on the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values that transcend ethnicity. Admittedly, this was the official theory from very early on. But there was also a dominant white Protestant group in the United States, which itself had a fairly long and ordinary ethnic history.

Since the fragmentation of the Protestant group, the American nation has become truly post-ethnic, a purely ‘civic’ nation, theoretically united by its attachment to its constitution and values. Amy Chua's fear is that America will revert to what she calls tribalism. A regressive fragmentation.

Each of the European nations is, at its core, regardless of its family structure, religious tradition, or vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its own language and culture, a people rooted in history. Each has a stable foundation. The Russians have it, the Germans have it, the French have it, even if they are a little strange at the moment when it comes to these concepts. America no longer has it. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation deprived of morality by the zero state of religion is mind-boggling. It even sends a chill down your spine.

My personal fear is that we are not at the end, but only at the beginning of a downfall of the United States that will reveal to us things we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: not in an American empire, whether triumphant, weakened or destroyed, but in new things we cannot imagine.

I am in Moscow today, so I will conclude on the future situation of Russia. I will say two things, one pleasant, the other worrying for Russia. Russia will undoubtedly win this war. But in this context of a decomposition of America, Russia will retain very heavy responsibilities in a world that will have to find a new balance.