Emmanuel Todd: World War III Has Already Begun

Emmanuel Todd is an anthropologist, historian, essayist, futurologist, and author of numerous books. He may be most well known for predicting the fall of the Soviet Union, and the reasons for it, in the mid-1970s when no other social scientists, Sovietologists or political leaders could conceive of a world without the USSR. In 2003, he wrote Après l'Empire : Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (no English version published) explaining the eventual decline of the United States’ rule-based international order, as Americans like to refer to it. In an interview published in Le Figaro on January 13, 2023, he explained how this theme is central to the war in Ukraine now. It is an existential battle for both the US-NATO bloc and for Russia. Neither side can quit the fight without falling into decline afterwards.

The interviewer refers to a book that Emmanuel Todd published in 2022: World War III Has Already Begun. Curiously, it was written in French but not published in French. The book was derived from interviews done in Japan which were compiled and translated by a Japanese publisher. It has sold 100,000 copies in Japan so far. Emmanuel Todd noted in the interview that his views have not been welcome in Europe for the past year, but he said the Japanese media are interested and capable of discussing Russia in a calm and serene atmosphere, even though attitudes in Japan are quite set against Russia in the present conflict and Japan has fallen into line behind the US as a loyal client state.

The interview caught the eyes of many who have been watching the non-mainstream media for the past year because it is the first time that contrarian views have broken through in a publication such as Le Figaro. Unfortunately, the article was behind a paywall, but it was liberated after a few days. Taking articles from behind paywalls is not kind to working journalists, but by now one would think that large media corporations would have figured out a way for people to buy single articles without having the hassle of subscribing, setting up usernames and passwords, and receiving daily email notifications. People no longer have any interest in subscribing to a single news source and reading it from “cover to cover” in the evening. News junkies read dozens of sources every day, and they can’t afford subscriptions to all of them. It seems justified in this case to liberate information such as this that is so much in the public interest.

Emmanuel Todd: “The Third World War Has Already Begun”

2023/01/13

Interviewed by Alexandre Devecchio

Alexandre Devecchio: Why publish a book about the war in Ukraine in Japan and not in France?

Emmanuel Todd: Japanese are just as anti-Russian as Europeans, but they are geographically distant from the conflict, so there is no real sense of urgency. They do not have our emotional connection to Ukraine. In Japan, I don’t have the same status as in France. Here I have the absurd reputation of being a “rebel destroyer”, while in Japan I am a respected anthropologist, historian and geopolitician who speaks in all the major newspapers and magazines. And all of my books have been published there. I can express myself there in a serene atmosphere, which I first did in magazines then by publishing this book, which is a collection of interviews. This book is called World War III Has Already Begun, with 100,000 copies sold so far.

The Japanese edition of
World War III Has Already Begun

Alexandre Devecchio: Why this title?

Emmanuel Todd: Because this is the reality. World War III has begun. It is true that it started “small” and with two surprises. We went into this war with the idea that Russia’s army was very powerful and that its economy was very weak. It was thought that Ukraine would be crushed militarily, and that Russia would be crushed economically by the West. The opposite happened. Ukraine has not been crushed militarily, even though it has lost 16% of its territory to date, and Russia has not been crushed economically. As I speak, the ruble has gained 8% against the dollar and 18% against the euro since the eve of the war.

So there was a kind of misunderstanding, but it is obvious that the conflict, going from a limited territorial war to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and China-backed Russia on the other, has become a world war, even if military violence is low compared to that of previous world wars.

Alexandre Devecchio: Aren’t you exaggerating? The West is not directly engaged militarily.

Emmanuel Todd: Well, we provide weapons. We kill Russians, even if we don’t discuss this fact, but it remains true that we Europeans are, above all, economically committed. We also feel that our real entry into war is coming through inflation and shortages.

Putin made a big mistake at the beginning, which is of immense socio-historical interest. Those who worked on Ukraine on the eve of the war saw it not as a nascent democracy but as a decaying society and a failed state in the making. When the war broke out, there was a question of whether Ukraine had lost 10 million or 15 million inhabitants since its independence. We don’t know because Ukraine has not conducted a census since 2001, a classic sign of a society that is afraid of reality. I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would collapse at the first shock, or even say “Mama, you’re back!” to holy Russia. But what has been discovered, on the other hand, is that a decaying society, if fueled by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of equilibrium, and even a horizon, a hope. The Russians could not foresee it. No one could.

Alexandre Devecchio: But have the Russians not underestimated, despite the state of real decomposition of society, the strength of Ukrainian national sentiment, or even the strength of European support for Ukraine? And don’t you yourself underestimate it?

Emmanuel Todd: I don’t know. I’m reflecting on that as a researcher, admitting that there are things we do not know. For me, strangely, one of the fields in which I have too little information about is Ukraine. I could tell you, on the basis of old data, that the family system of Little Russia [or Malorussia, the term for Ukraine used during the tsarist empire] was nuclear, more individualistic than the Greater Russia system, which was more communitarian and collectivist. I can tell you that, but what has become of Ukraine, with massive population movements, self-selection of certain social types through emigration before and during the war? I cannot answer this question. For the time being, we do not know.

One of the paradoxes I face is that Russia does not pose a problem of understanding for me. This is where I am most out of step with my Western environment. I understand everyone’s emotions, so it is painful for me to speak as a cold historian. But when we think of Julius Caesar locking Vercingetorix in Alesia and then taking him to Rome to celebrate his triumph, we don’t wonder if the Romans were evil or deficient in values. Today, being in tune with the emotions of my own country, I can clearly see the entry of the Russian army into Ukrainian territory, the bombings and deaths, the destruction of energy infrastructure, the Ukrainians freezing to death all winter. But for me, the behavior of Putin and the Russians is understandable in a different way, and I will tell you how.

To begin with, I admit to having been caught off guard by the beginning of the war. I couldn’t believe it. Today I share the analysis of the American “realist” geopolitician John Mearsheimer. He made the following observation. He told us that Ukraine, whose army had been taken over by NATO soldiers (American, British, and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine as a member of NATO. The Russians are therefore (as Putin said the day before the attack) waging a war from a defensive and preventive point of view. Mearsheimer added that we should have no reason to rejoice about possible difficulties of the Russians because, since this is an existential question for them, the harder it was, the harder they would hit. The analysis seems to be true. I would add a supplement and a criticism to Mearsheimer’s analysis.

Alexandre Devecchio: Which is?

Emmanuel Todd: When he says that Ukraine was a de facto member of NATO, he does not go far enough. Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were unaware of what was going on in Ukraine militarily. French and German naivety were criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. That’s true, but that was because they did not know that the Americans, British and Poles would enable Ukraine to fight a broader war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

Now the criticism. Mearsheimer, as a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one “game” of power among others. After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it’s one more debacle. So what? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: “We can do whatever we want because we are safe, far away, between two oceans. Nothing will ever happen to us.” Nothing would be existential for America. This lack of analysis today leads Biden into a headlong rush. America is fragile. The resilience of the Russian economy is pushing the US imperial system towards the abyss. No one foresaw that the Russian economy would stand up to NATO’s “economic power.” I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate this.

If the Russian economy resisted sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for the United States to finance its huge trade deficit for nothing. So this war has become existential for the United States. Just as Russia cannot withdraw from the conflict, neither can they. That is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other. Chinese, Indians, and Saudis, among others, are jubilant.

Alexandre Devecchio: But the Russian army still seems to be in a very bad position. Some go so far as to predict the collapse of the regime. Don’t you believe this will happen?

Emmanuel Todd: No. At first there seems to have been a hesitation in Russia, the feeling of having been abused, of not having been warned. But now the Russians are settled on the war, and Putin benefits from something which we have no understanding of. It is that the 2000s, the Putin years, were for the Russians the years of a return to balance, of the return to normal life. I think that Macron will represent for the French the discovery of an unpredictable and dangerous world, a reunion with fear. The 90s were a time of unprecedented suffering for Russia. The 2000s were a return to normal, and not only in terms of living standards. We saw suicide and homicide rates plummet, and above all, my favorite indicator, the infant mortality rate plunged and even fell below the American rate.

In the minds of Russians, Putin embodies stability, and at the most extreme he is something Christ-like. Fundamentally, ordinary Russians believe, like their president, that they are waging a defensive war. They are aware of having made mistakes at the beginning, but their good economic preparation has increased their confidence, not in the face of Ukraine (the resistance of the Ukrainians is for them understandable—they are brave as Russians, after all; the Westerners would never fight so well!) but in the face of what they call “the collective West”, or “the United States and its vassals”. The real priority of the Russian regime is not military victory on the ground. It is not to lose the social stability achieved in the last 20 years.

So they are waging this “economic war”, especially an economic war of men because Russia has its demographic problem, with a fertility of 1.5 children per woman. In five years they will have hollow age classes. In my opinion, they must win the war in five years or lose it. That’s a normal duration for a world war. So they are waging this war on the economy, rebuilding a partial war economy, but wanting to preserve men. This is the reason for the withdrawal from Kherson, after the others in the Kharkiv and Kiev regions. We count the square kilometers taken over by the Ukrainians, but the Russians are waiting for the European economies to fall. We [Europeans] are their main front. I could obviously be wrong, but I maintain that the behavior of the Russians is readable because it is rational and harsh. The unknowns lie elsewhere.

Alexandre Devecchio: You explain that the Russians perceive this conflict as “a defensive war”, but no one has tried to invade Russia, and today, because of the war, NATO has never had so much influence in the East with the Baltic countries wanting to integrate more.

Emmanuel Todd: To answer you, I propose a psycho-geographical exercise, which can be done by a zooming our perspective out. If we look at the map of Ukraine, we see the entry of Russian troops from the North, the East, the South. And there, indeed, we have the appearance of a Russian invasion. There is no other word for it. However, if we zoom out farther, towards a view of the world taking in Washington, we see that NATO guns and missiles converge from far away towards the battlefield. It’s a movement of weapons that had begun before the war. Bakhmut is 8,400 kilometers from Washington, but 130 kilometers from the Russian border. A simple reading of the world map allows us, I think, to consider the hypothesis “Yes, from the Russian point of view, it must be a defensive war.”

Alexandre Devecchio: According to you, the entry of the Russians into the war is also explained by the relative decline of the United States.

Emmanuel Todd: In After the Empire, published in 2002, I spoke of the long-term decline of the United States and the return of Russian power. Since 2002, America has had a series of failures and setbacks. The United States invaded Iraq but left, leaving Iran a major player in the Middle East. They fled Afghanistan. The satellite status of Ukraine set up by Europe and the United States did not represent an increase in Western dynamism but rather the end of a wave launched around 1990, relayed by the anti-Russian resentment of the Poles and the Baltic states. However, it was in this context of American reflux that the Russians took the decision to bring Ukraine to heel because they felt they finally had the technical means to do so.

I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar (The India Way), Minister of External Affairs of India, published just before the war, which sees American weakness. He knows that the confrontation between China and the United States will not have a winner but will give space to a country like India, and many others. I would add but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the United States, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its grip on its original protectorates.

If we read Brzeziński (The Grand Chessboard), we see that the American empire was formed at the end of the Second World War by the conquest of Germany and Japan, which are still protectorates today. As the American system shrinks, it weighs more and more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include here the whole of Europe). The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the United States in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are virtually annexed. On the European continent, we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the decline of our autonomy is considerable, and rapid. Recall the Iraq war when Chirac, Schröder, and Putin held joint press conferences against the war.

Alexandre Devecchio: Many observers point out that Russia has the GDP of Spain. Don’t you overestimate its economic power and resilience?

Emmanuel Todd: War becomes a test of political economy. It is the great revealer. The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (United States, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), which is practically nothing. One wonders how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles. The reason for this is that GDP is a fictitious measure of output. If we remove from US GDP half of its overcharged health spending, the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, the best filled prisons in the world, an entire economy of ill-defined services including the “production” of its 15 to 20,000 economists with an average salary of $ 120,000, we then realize that a significant part of this GDP is vapor. War brings us back to the real economy. It allows us to understand what the true wealth of nations is. It is productive capacity, and therefore the capacity for war. If we go back to material variables, we see the Russian economy. In 2014, we put in place the first major sanctions against Russia, but it then increased its wheat production from 40 to 90 million tons in 2020. Meanwhile, thanks to neoliberalism, US wheat production, between 1980 and 2020, went from 80 to 40 million tons. Russia has also become the largest exporter of nuclear power plants. In 2007, the Americans explained that their strategic adversary was in such a state of nuclear decay that soon the United States would have a first-strike capability on a Russia that could not respond. Today, the Russians have nuclear superiority with their hypersonic missiles.

Russia therefore has a real capacity to adapt. When we want to mock centralized economies, we emphasize their rigidity, and when we glorify capitalism, we praise its flexibility. We are right. For an economy to be flexible, of course, you need the market, and financial and monetary mechanisms. But first you need a workforce that knows how to do things. The United States is now more than twice as populous as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). Still, with comparable cohort proportions of young people in higher education, in the United States, 7% study engineering, while in Russia it is 25%. This means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russians train 30% more engineers. The US is filling the gap with foreign students, but they are mostly Indian, and even more are Chinese. This substitute resource is not secure and is already dwindling. This is the fundamental dilemma of the US economy. It can only face Chinese competition by importing Chinese skilled labor. I propose here the concept of economic balancing. The Russian economy, for its part, has accepted the rules of the market (it is even an obsession of Putin to preserve them) but with a very large role for the state. It also owes its flexibility to the training of engineers that allow industrial and military adaptations.

Alexandre Devecchio: Many observers think, on the contrary, that Vladimir Putin has benefited from the sale of raw materials without having been able to develop his economy.

Emmanuel Todd: If that were the case, this war would not have taken place. One of the striking things about this conflict, and which makes it so uncertain, is that it raises (like any modern war) the question of the balance between advanced technologies and mass production. There is no doubt that the United States has some of the most advanced military technologies, which have sometimes been decisive for Ukrainian military successes. But when we enter into a war of attrition, not only on the side of human resources but also on the material side, the ability to continue depends on the industrial production of less advanced weapons. We find by closer inspection the question of globalization and the fundamental problem of the West. We have relocated so much of our industrial activities that we do not know if our war production can function. The problem is admitted. CNN, the New York Times, and the Pentagon wonder if America will be able to restart the production lines of this or that type of missile. But it’s also unclear whether the Russians are able to keep pace with such a conflict. The outcome and solution of the war will depend on the ability of both systems to produce armaments.

Alexandre Devecchio: According to you, this war is not only military and economic, but also ideological and cultural.

Emmanuel Todd: I am speaking here mainly as an anthropologist. In Russia there have been denser, communal family structures, some of whose values have survived. There is a Russian patriotic feeling that is something we have no concept of here, nourished subconsciously as a nation as a family. Russia had a patrilineal family organization, that is to say one in which men are central, so it cannot adhere to all Western neo-feminist, LGBT, transgender innovations. When we see the Russian Duma passing even more repressive legislation on “LGBT propaganda,” we feel superior. I can feel that way as an ordinary Westerner, but from a geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of soft power, this is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship organization was patrilineal, and one can feel a strong understanding of Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia asserts a reassuring moral conservatism. Latin America, however, is on the Western side in this regard.

When it comes to geopolitics, we are interested in multiple areas: energy and military power relations, arms production (which refers to industrial power relations). But there is also the ideological and cultural balance of power, what Americans call “soft power”. The USSR had a certain form of soft power in communism. It influenced part of Italy, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Serbs, French workers, but communism was basically abhorred by the entire Muslim world for its atheism, and it inspired nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. Today, however, Russia, repositioned as an archetype of the great power, not only anti-colonialist but also patrilineal and conservative of traditional mores, can be much more seductive. The Americans now feel betrayed by Saudi Arabia, which refuses to increase its oil production, despite the energy crisis caused by the war, and in fact it takes the side of the Russians, in part, of course, out of oil interest. But it’s obvious that Putin’s Russia, which has become morally conservative, has become sympathetic to Saudis, who I’m sure have a bit of trouble with American debates about transgender women (defined as males at conception) accessing women’s bathrooms.

Western newspapers are tragically amusing. They keep saying “Russia is isolated. Russia is isolated”. But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small. As an anthropologist, one can explain the map. On the one hand, there are countries classified by The Economist as having a good level of democracy (namely the Anglosphere, Europe) and on the other hand authoritarian countries, which stretch from Africa to China through the Arab world and Russia. For an anthropologist, this is a banal map. On the “western” periphery are countries with a nuclear family structure with bilateral kinship systems; that is, where male and female kinship are equivalent in defining the social status of the child. At the center, along with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, are community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political values, is, at a deeper level, a conflict of anthropological values. The failure to recognize this difference and the depth of it makes the confrontation dangerous.