“Neither China nor Russia today offers an ideological alternative to the existing order. As capitalist, oligarchic, extractivist states, they are fully integrated into the postwar global economic architecture.”
The writers forget the inherent contradictions in capitalism that determine cooperation and conflict. China, not Russia, represents an economic and technological threat to the Western capitalist expansion (share of markets, extraction of resources, capital accumulation, etc), which in turn affects the social and economic relations in Western societies (domestic social conflicts). The threat of China is enough to create conflict between states. No ideological alternative is required. The writers seem to ignore the economic relative decline the major Western countries have been experiencing (in productivity, living standard, infrastructure, growth…) and how that impacts on the states's imperialist policies.
In search of new geopolitics
Le Monde diplomatique, October 2026
Excerpts
In 1997 George F Kennan warned that NATO expansion would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’. So the architect of the West’s cold war strategy of containing the Soviet Union was angered and dismayed when the US Senate approved the accession of three former Eastern bloc states – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – the following year.
Now, he predicted, ‘the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.’
While the conflicts in the Middle East have benefited Russia by diverting international attention and supplies of surface-to-air munitions, no decisive development has fundamentally altered the front line. This deadlock is increasingly convincing those involved of the need for an end to hostilities, but the EU and the member states most strongly committed to supporting Kyiv see dark days ahead.
The EU's industry, which in the late 1990s aspired to catch up with Silicon Valley and create a ‘knowledge economy’, is being repurposed to produce interceptor missiles, tanks and drones. Its strategy, once based on the idea of being a balancing power, albeit coloured by its qualified sense of Western primacy, is being refocused on the need to erect a military and moral bulwark against the threat of Russia.
How can peace, and the concessions it requires, be conceivable when the future has been staked on Kyiv’s total victory? This gamble has initiated a vicious cycle.
From Warsaw to Rome, Tallinn to Athens, the lives of hundreds of millions of people are now being shaped by often alarmist reports of Russian sabotage and, at the same time, cuts to social services, healthcare and education, since fat military budgets demand social austerity. By contrast, the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza, when weighed in the balance of Europe’s moral concerns, scarcely registers.
Crucially, none of these changes, which affect the security of the continent and the fate of its people, have been put to a popular vote or even properly opened up to public debate. War and the preparations for war, international relations and geopolitics are all off limits. Or rather, they are the preserve of the specialists – removed from democratic scrutiny by a coterie of self-appointed experts, retired generals redeployed to television studios, former diplomats reinvented as social media influencers, journalists and columnists, all competing to present war as necessary in the most portentous terms. All the while working to marginalise or exclude those who dissent from Europe’s newfound hawkishness.
So pointing out Kennan’s opposition to NATO enlargement, Western interference in Ukraine to help secure the election of ‘friendly’ governments, the influence of far-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and so on, may now be regarded as disinformation since these three facts, though demonstrably true, are ‘tangential’ to Euro-Atlantic propaganda and appear to lend support to the Kremlin’s side of the story. Ironically, the New York Times has published detailed reporting on each of these claims.
Reporting on current conflicts also suffers from institutional containment: whether it’s the French foreign ministry – where, since Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, hawkish Young Turks have largely replaced the last of the Gaullist old guard – or state-funded strategic and geopolitical thinktanks, analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war and the wars in the Middle East converges on a single orthodoxy reminiscent of the liberal commentators of the 1990s, starry-eyed about globalisation. Newcomers to this game won’t risk rocking the boat.
The centrist media’s latest favourite, Le Grand Continent, a website and journal established at the Ćcole Normale SupĆ©rieure (ENS) in 2019, espouses a Macronist line – Europhile, Russophobic and worried about populism – which is attuned to the populist threat.
Sciences Po, meanwhile, has been frogmarched back into line by its director Luis Vassy, who served as chief of staff to former (Macronist) foreign minister StƩphane SƩjournƩ. It is launching a strategy institute on the US model, and hopes to establish a campus in Brussels where students will be taught (in English) an uncritical Eurocentrist worldview. The space left for pluralism between these twin bastions is thinner than a cigarette paper.
From institutions such as these comes a third element in the containment of international news: the leadership of the traditional media, their columnists and contributors. Senior editors shape a caricatured version of international relations that focuses obsessively on issues such as the Russian threat and the supposed obstacle to countering it: Trump’s erratic behaviour.
In France, dissenting voices on foreign policy are so rare in the mainstream media that any appearance by Emmanuel Todd, Pascal Boniface or John Mearsheimer attracts considerable interest. Will they soon be banned – or sanctioned – as part of Ursula von der Leyen’s ‘fight’ against those who ‘despise our values and want to shatter our European unity’? The ideological rectification campaigns with Orwellian names (‘European Democracy Shield’) launched by the EU ostensibly to combat disinformation – a sort of updated version of the Inquisition – are a sign that the liberal Enlightenment model is breaking down.
While the neoliberal creed of the 1980s and 90s gave rise to the powerful alter-globalisation movement, the bellicose equivalent from Europe’s neoconservatives has yet to encounter any comparable pushback.
Today, two crucial factors make peace and international cooperation, rather than rearmament and war, the most realistic approach for our times: on one hand, the failure of armed conflicts to achieve the aims of those who initiate them; on the other, the threat of the planet’s annihilation through global warming, nuclear escalation or artificial intelligence.
Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Lebanon have suffered invasion, bombardment and military threats, while international law and the institutions created to preserve peace stand by, unable to prevent them. One by one, the shared rules intended to constrain the power of states are giving way to the logic of force.
Yet history shows that war rarely pays, as the US knows all too well. With the exception of the Gulf war, its major military interventions have almost always ended in disaster.
Military power is once again becoming a tool states wield to secure access to resources, trade routes, supply chains and strategic technologies. According to the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure reached $2.887tn in 2025, its 11th consecutive annual increase and the highest level ever recorded. Europe’s military spending jumped 14% in a single year, to $864bn: it was up 24% in Germany and 50% in Spain. Three countries – the US, China and Russia – now account for more than half of global military expenditure.
This growing level of conflict is especially surprising because the great powers are no longer engaged, as they were in the last century, in an existential confrontation in which they seek to impose their own model on the world. Neither China nor Russia today offers an ideological alternative to the existing order. As capitalist, oligarchic, extractivist states, they are fully integrated into the postwar global economic architecture.
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