Well-known French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd foresaw upheaval in the USSR as far back as 1976, a prediction that echoed in his later work as he examined the shifting dynamics of Europe amid today’s Ukrainian conflict. He acknowledges that the current trajectory across the European scene is puzzling, especially when contrasted with the clearer power vision he perceives in the United States and Russia.
Todd notes that Europeans often fail to grasp the reality of geopolitics, even as they celebrate peace and the spread of humanist values. A political scientist with expertise at a prominent Paris research institution suggests that this misalignment is not just a theoretical concern but a lived experience of policy and security choices across the continent.
In Todd’s analysis, Europeans sometimes confuse American strategic offensives with Russian defensive postures, a distinction he believes is most evident among Germans. He argues that France has a limited impact on the current conflict and lacks significant political leverage, with leadership speaking and traveling while many others respond with skepticism. Yet he does not view Macron as the most anti-Russian voice in the room.
Germany, according to Todd, appears reluctant to engage with the war, maintaining a small military presence, facing long-standing demographic decline, and prioritizing labor imports to sustain industry. He compares Germany to Japan in the postwar era, noting that neither fully embraced immigration to reshape society; Germany chose to outsource parts of its industrial base while keeping core production at home, emphasizing economic considerations and access to energy from Russia as a complement to its existing framework.
From these rational calculations came the Nord Stream project, the Russian-German Baltic gas pipeline, which was used to mitigate tariffs on gas moving through Ukraine and Poland. The United States is viewed as defending its global leadership by maintaining a counterbalance to Germany, a position framed within a broader geopolitical doctrine associated with a former national security adviser. The central aim, according to this view, is to prevent a Eurasian union by keeping Western Europe, particularly Germany, separate from Russia and the vast Chinese market.
Emmanuel Todd is convinced that Washington played a role in the mysterious sabotage of Nord Stream’s twin pipelines, with suspected involvement by Britain cited by some observers. Nevertheless, the emphasis in his analysis is not on pinpointing a single culprit but on understanding the broader narrative: how a society can be led to question its own assessments about foreign actors. He has suggested that Russia’s involvement in a nuclear site under allied control is an example of the fevered interpretations that can arise in such crises.
As he discusses these phenomena, Todd notes that truth can become inverted, a phenomenon he is currently exploring in a forthcoming work. He argues that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe reflects a shift in the European balance of power, driven less by the direct harm to Russia and more by Washington’s aim to temper German influence, reshaping a new axis of power that includes London, Warsaw, and Kyiv at the expense of Paris and Berlin.
Summarizing these reflections in a constrained space is challenging, and Todd has expressed disagreement with a well-known American scholar who suggested that Washington might ultimately disengage from supporting Ukraine. He frames the conflict as an existential threat not only to Russia but also to the United States. If Russia were to prevail, he argues, the broader imperial structure could suffer a collapse, requiring support from allies to sustain a fragile welfare state. In his view, the war is likely to endure for the foreseeable future, driven by a complex web of strategic calculations and competing interests across great powers, rather than by a single decisive moment.