The Tangwall Campagin. Your book offers a geopolitical reading grid through several major antagonisms: Donald Trump against Ursula von der Leyen, Vladimir Putin against Volodymyr Zelenskyor even Benjamin Netanyahu against Ali Khamenei. Does this mean that international relations are now structured by the balance of power and by it alone?
Thomas Gomart. The goal of the book is simple: to embody geopolitics. This involves better understanding the psychology of leaders and measuring the impact of their decisions on structural factors. What is changing is the relationship between legal relationships and power relationships that Europeans struggle to understand and exploit.
Have Europeans not sinned through naivety by blindly believing in the virtues of multilateralism, the “end of history”, even in the very idea of a “world order” whose contours we struggle to discern today?
It’s easy to criticize NATO and the European Union, forgetting to remember that they were the framework for security and prosperity for a continent which twice attempted suicide with the two world wars. We also seem to forget that nationalism almost automatically leads to war. European construction produces peace, which is no small feat considering the European history inscribed in that of global capitalism. The history of Europe is also that of international trade. For my part, I place the definitive break with naive globalization with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, an event completely underestimated at the time.
“The EU produces peace, which is no small feat”
Eight years later, the large-scale invasion of Ukraine caused Europe in the broad sense – including Russia – to lose its main comparative advantage: its strategic stability. The new world disorder owes more to Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping than to the Europeans, who suffer from it for lack of strategic foresight, economic vigor and political resolution. How can we not notice the lightness of our political-media debate compared to the seriousness of international issues?
What is the situation in Europe strategically?
Europe is under three pressures. First, commercial, technological and military pressure from the United States. Second, commercial, industrial and technological pressure from China. Third, military pressure from Russia. This situation leads to the following question: how is it that 510 million Europeans rely on 340 million Americans to ensure their security against 140 million Russians?
The strategic overview is obviously not limited to the Russian threat, even if it is central today. We must guard against it while preparing for the shocks that are sure to come from elsewhere. This implies that Europe immediately makes a long-term effort, particularly in terms of productivity and reorganization.
You assert that one of the blind spots in the conflict in Ukraine plays out on a broader geopolitical scale. How does Ukraine constitute a continental strategic lock?
Russia is one of those few countries on which our political staff, on the right and on the left, always have an opinion. As with globalization in the past, it is often disconcerting in its naivety. Some fear resolute support for Ukraine more than its subjugation by Russia. They almost seem to regret seeing the Ukrainians resist. What is new is the ideological collusion between the White House and the Kremlin that has been at the forefront of the reaction to globalization. Fundamentally, neither Ukraine nor Russia has managed to adapt to globalization, while Donald Trump’s United States wants to redirect it. At the same time, the Ukrainian war tragically marked the disruption of the balance of forces in Europe.
It was at the heart of the two world wars because it is the junction point between the heartlandthe world of the steppes, and the rimlandthe world of coastlines (in geopolitics, the heartlandtheorized by the British geographer Halford John Mackinder in 1904, designates the Eurasian continental heart. THE rimlandformalized by the American political scientist Nicholas Spykman in the early 1940s, designates all the coastal and densely populated areas which border the heartlandEditor’s note). Ukraine is at the heart of the “lands of blood” which saw the clash of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. No one can now dispute the existence of Ukrainian identity.
What do you think will be the long-term consequences of the Ukrainian conflict?
This war has all the makings of a devastating cancer whose metastases are spreading throughout Europe. The level of violence inflicted on both social bodies will have effects over several decades and will force Europe to rearm. The methodical destruction of Ukraine can be seen in the figures: three deaths for every birth. For Russia, the effects are hidden by a power with which the war is consubstantial. Its losses are estimated at more than a million men killed, wounded or missing in Ukraine. Some days exceed a thousand deaths, rates equivalent to those we experienced during the First World War. Russia consumes its soldiers like kindling. It is a choice with serious consequences.
You explore a more surprising confrontation, which pits the Vatican against Silicon Valley. How does the Holy See constitute resistance to Tech?
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, most European leaders chose to prostrate themselves. The Pope has never lowered his head. His letter to the American bishops is a historical marker at the moment when the great dialectic between the pope and the emperor was replayed. Let us recall the behavior of JD Vance, who forced the doors of the Vatican.
Catholic converted after his meeting with Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, the vice-president of the United States came to seek recognition from the dying Pope Francis which he did not obtain. The conclave elected the Pole John Paul II in 1978 at a time when the USSR seemed all-powerful. The conclave elected the American-Peruvian Leo Monroe Doctrineformulated in 1823 and which defined the American continent as a whole as an exclusively American zone of influence.
“Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never again be challenged”declared the American president at the time of the capture of Nicolas MaduroEditor’s note). In the book, I expose the clash between the centuries-old temporality of the Catholic Church and the futuristic temporality of the “oligarch-intellectuals” of Silicon Valley, who claim to write the future through technology. Through this confrontation a double question is played out more broadly: that of the conditions of humanism in the digital age, and that of the acceptance – or not – of our finitude.
