Emmanuel Todd
Emmanuel Todd (b. 1951) is an historian, demographer, and social anthropologist.
In 1976 Todd predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire, first published in French in 2001, he predicted the decline of the United States.
Defeat of the West
In his latest (and last) book, The Defeat of the West[1] (La Défaite de l’Occident), he laments the West's inability to distinguish facts from wishes, as seen in its behavior during the NATO war in Ukraine. Nihilism, a lack of values and of acceptance of reality, has infested Western thinking:
| “ | Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality. | ” |
Emanuel Todd's first book The Final Fall was a prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse based on its infant mortality rates. In The Defeat of the West states that certain of Western values are "deeply negative." He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its children. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led Todd to predict the Soviet collapse, Todd notes is higher in Joe Biden's America (5.4 per thousand) than in Putin's Russia[2] — and three times higher than in Japan.[3]
Fréquence Populaire Média interview
In an interview with Fréquence Populaire Média in September 2025[4] Todd said he believes fundamentally the US is accepting what he calls "defeat" against not only Russia but China as well, and that President Trump is effectively trying to manage this defeat and to adapt the US to multipolarity. He says that the US's defeat in Ukraine isn't like Afghanistan or Iraq, but that it represents what he calls "America's first major strategic defeat of its history."
In the war, he says Russia has become "the shield of all the rest of the world who can't stand US guardianship of global finance [and] the exploitation of the working populations in the rest of the world by Westerners." As he puts it, Russia has demonstrated "that they were able to face the whole West," and with the rise of BRICS financial systems, this represents nothing less than "the end of the American imperium" - a defeat Trump must now manage.
With regard to China he says that the US have in fact "given up" trying to contain them because the balance of power now makes it impossible. He points to "Chinese naval production that will soon make the US Navy a dwarf navy", "US aircraft carriers [that] are irrelevant facing hypersonic missiles" and the fact that China managed to "put the Americans under embargo" for rare earth exports.[5]
Todd characterizes Europeans as "crazy, we are dealing with crazy people" who think they can act as winners and impose conditions despite being the biggest losers of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.
He is particularly virulent against the media and the general intellectual climate in Europe, speaking of a "process of intellectual and moral degeneration" where "all notions of truth, of honor, of reflection" are being lost.
He says that the end of the US's global hegemony doesn’t mean they won't relinquish control of what they still do control, specifically Europeans.
References
- ↑ The Defeat of the West.
- ↑ In 2024, Russia's infant mortality rate was 4.67, which was a 2.77% decline from 2023.
- ↑ This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West's Defeat, Christopher Caldwell, New York Times Guest Opinion, March 9, 2024. Archived at https://archive.is/TsI7P#selection-317.0-439.20M
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJyaBbyAPs8
- ↑ https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/has-america-in-fact-already-withdrawn
External link
- Emmanuel Todd: "Europe is a US colony."
- The Defeat Of The West, Mark Wauck, Jan 15, 2024
