Alain de Benoist: Trump, Europe’s Decline, and the Acceleration of History

Interview originally published on Breizh-Info on March 12, 2025.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

As international power dynamics undergo an unprecedented shift, Breizh-info.com spoke with Alain de Benoist to decipher the ongoing transformations. The philosopher and thinker of the New Right reflects on recent events shaking the world order: the strategic turning point initiated by Donald Trump, the rupture between Washington and Brussels, American disengagement in Ukraine, and the rising power of civilization poles opposed to the West.

In this interview, Alain de Benoist analyzes the gradual collapse of the “world of yesterday” and the consequences of a geopolitical realignment that confronts Europe with its contradictions. He also discusses the ideological impasse of European elites, mired in moral battles while the rest of the world prioritizes power and pragmatism. Facing a feverish Emmanuel Macron, who advocates for European rearmament that he failed to anticipate, Alain de Benoist provides a lucid assessment of the EU’s strategic dependence and European leaders’ inability to understand the logic of power that now guides international relations.

From the growing influence of figures like J.D. Vance in the United States to the economic and political war waged by Trump, to the role of Russia and China in this new world game, Alain de Benoist casts a sharp eye on the acceleration of history and its implications for European nations. A hard-hitting analysis to discover without detour.

Alain de Benoist: I have only known one major historical event in my life: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet system. I think I am now witnessing a second one. The “observers,” as usual, did not see it coming. History is suddenly accelerating. To the point that daily news takes on the appearance of dystopia.

Trump’s election already represented a major historical rupture. The resumption, on February 12, of contacts between the White House and the Kremlin constituted another. Two days later, in Munich, Vice President J.D. Vance declared a veritable ideological war on a Europe overwhelmed by immigration and suffering from collective amnesia, making no secret that he views it as a counter-model of decadence and civilizational suicide. Then came the announcement that Ukraine would never join NATO, and that it would not recover the territories it lost in Donbass or Crimea. On March 3, Donald Trump decided to stop all aid to Ukraine. Finally, we are witnessing the disintegration of the Atlantic Alliance in real time. Yes, even if we still lack perspective, this is a historic moment.

Alain de Benoist: Focusing on the raised voices is like focusing on the finger pointing at the Moon. What matters is what was said. Faced with a Zelensky proclaiming his refusal to stop a war he cannot win, and demanding “security guarantees” that the Americans are not willing to grant him, Trump reminded him that he is not in a position to dictate conditions because he has no cards or negotiating assets to leverage. He also told him that if he doesn’t accept what is being offered, he will be forced to sign an even more unfavorable agreement for his country, if not face total capitulation.

First, note that there is nothing abnormal about Ukraine’s fate being settled between Russia and the United States, since Russia and NATO were the real belligerents. The war in Ukraine has been, from the start, a proxy war. At the same time, we understand that it’s not just Ukraine that has lost. Emmanuel Todd rightly predicted: “Trump’s job will be to manage America’s defeat against the Russians.” That is indeed what this is about. This leads us to view this horrible fratricidal war, which has now lasted three years, in a different light. A war that I personally find unbearable because I have Ukrainian friends and Russian friends, and I feel only sadness seeing them massacre each other.

All serious experts know that the primary cause of the war was the Americans’ desire to install NATO troops up to Russia’s borders. Putin reacted as any American president would if threatened with Russian missiles deployed on his border with Mexico or Canada. The war thus began well before 2022. And it could have been avoided. For example, Ukraine’s internal problems could perfectly well have been resolved by installing a federal system in which its Russian-speaking part would have enjoyed some autonomy. But the opposite happened. Montesquieu distinguished between those who start wars and those who make them inevitable. They are not necessarily the same. François Fillon recently stated: “I have always said that this war could have been avoided if Western leaders had sought to understand its causes rather than draping themselves in the camp of good.” Translation: if they had analyzed the situation in political terms, not in moral terms.

Indeed, nothing obliged Europeans to support one camp, whether Ukraine’s or Russia’s, nor to all react in the same way (as a “collective West”). The least they could have done was determine their position based on their interests. For purely ideological reasons, they preferred to see this conflict as a “just war” where the enemy must be criminalized and considered guilty. By taking sides from the outset, they put themselves in a position where they could no longer offer mediation, thereby abandoning the possibility of posing as a “balancing power.”

Trump is a great realist. After three years during which the imminent collapse of Russia was announced weekly on television, he notes that Ukraine has lost this war, despite the military equipment and hundreds of billions it has received, and that Europeans have never been able, during these same three years, to set a goal for the war. Yet, war is never more than a means to serve a goal. Clausewitz: “The political purpose is the goal, war is the means; a means without an end is inconceivable.” Europeans no longer even know what a war is, namely an act of violence whose goal is peace. In this matter, they never had any political, diplomatic, or strategic goal, preferring to push Zelensky to rush into the trap he had set for himself.

Contrary to what is being said here and there, Trump is not an isolationist, nor is he a “defender of peace.” Like many of his predecessors, he believes, on the contrary, that defending American interests requires constant interventionism. The big difference is that he doesn’t mask this interventionism behind sublime ideals such as defending liberal democracy and the rule of law (“democracy and freedom”), and that instead of embarking on warlike adventures, he wants to prioritize commerce. He is a warmonger, but a commercial warmonger. See how he talks about Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal, adopting in a martial manner an imperialist posture based on the old American myth of the “frontier.” For him, everything is a transaction, everything can be bought or sold, everything is negotiable, everything rests on demonstrations of commercial force, without qualms. He knows very well that “gentle commerce” excludes neither aggression, nor blackmail, nor conquests. His “pacifism” is of the same nature: it rests on the simple observation that military war costs much more than it yields, and that the United States is better positioned to win commercial wars than to prevail on the battlefield. To serve his power interests, he intends to shelter behind the threat of tariffs, while advocating deregulation and free trade when it suits him.

Alain de Benoist: That’s smoke and mirrors. The two men are too different: Putin is a chess player, Donald Trump limits himself to golf and Monopoly. And above all, their geopolitical interests are opposed. What is true, however, is that Trump wants to make a fresh start in his relations with Moscow, because he apparently thinks that normalization with Putin’s Russia will be more profitable for America than the Atlantic Alliance. This could translate into a lifting of sanctions against Russia, joint energy projects, particularly in Arctic territories, or even the establishment of a plan that would avoid war with Iran. Perhaps he also hopes to loosen, not the alliance (the word “alliance” doesn’t exist in Chinese), but the ties of “limitless friendship” between Putin and Xi Jinping proclaimed in February 2022. But he will not rally Russia to “Western hegemonism.” And I also don’t believe in an American-Chinese-Russian “illiberal triumvirate,” as such an arrangement would be undermined by contradictions.

Trump is clearly a great character with paranoid tendencies (not uncommon in politics). He doesn’t care about ideas, morality, or international law (no more than Netanyahu, however). He likes winners, he prefers charisma to legalism. He admires only strength and thinks that everything can be won through heavy-handed threats. With him, power relationships replace the law, which at least has the merit of clarifying things.

Trump and Putin have in common their view of Europe as an old tired thing, incapable of politically resolving international problems, incapable of asserting itself, an old divided thing, ruined, overwhelmed, forgetful of its past and traditions, beating its breast while practicing permanent moral censorship, and generally incapable of confronting exceptional situations. In such a perspective, the rest of the world is divided between partners who have never been equals but vassals, protégés, or dominated, never allies. This does not mean that the United States is in a position of strength vis-à-vis China, multipolarity, or threats of de-dollarization. Let’s not forget that if Trump wants to make America “great again,” it’s primarily because it no longer is.

Alain de Benoist: Europeans are incorrigible. They didn’t see the populist wave coming, they bet on Kamala Harris’s election, they relied for decades on the American “umbrella” instead of taking responsibility. They now realize that, true to form, the Americans are abandoning the Ukrainians just as they abandoned the South Vietnamese and the Afghans. (The adage is well-known: being America’s enemy is dangerous; being their friend is fatal). They also didn’t see the tropism that for years has been leading the United States away from Europe. They now realize that the Americans, who are saving themselves for a confrontation with China, are disengaging from European security, leaving them naked. They don’t understand what’s happening to them. Faced with the magnitude of the gulf that has formed between the two sides of the Atlantic, they cannot believe it. Paralyzed like rabbits caught in headlights, they lament the dismantling of NATO, an organization that Macron in 2019 claimed was in a state of “brain death.”

But nothing serves as a lesson for them. They could have used this shift to reflect on what the war in Ukraine has cost them. They have wasted 150 billion euros, lost access to Russian gas and oil, also lost tens of billions in investments in Russia, they silently accepted the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, but they imagine they are in a position to give Ukraine security guarantees and ensure that the massacre can continue. Their only reaction, in other words, is to put another coin in the machine.

After repeating to us for more than half a century that “Europe means peace,” they want to continue the war, at the risk of being considered full-fledged belligerents. As they never learn from their mistakes, they are ready to put their finger in a new gear, not knowing how far it will take us. Even environmentalists preach militarism. A headlong rush into a completely delirious warmongering escalation that shows that Europeans still understand nothing about the New World Order, the new Nomos of the Earth, which is taking shape before their eyes. They had boarded a drunken ship; now they want to embark on a dead comet.

The very same people who have, for thirty years, destroyed all the industrial and military production capacities of European nations, now propose, under the leadership of the influence agent Ursula von der Leyen (the Hyena), to set up a European “war economy” for “rearmament.” Macron, at the head of a country that is increasingly isolated on the international scene, politically paralyzed and indebted to the point where interest payments on the debt (more than 50 billion euros per year) now represent the second largest item of state expenditure, clearly dreams of leading this war party (“we are at war, whatever it costs,” a familiar tune). The French army, whose arsenals are almost empty and whose budget has been cut to the bone, is incapable of participating for more than eight days in a high-intensity war, but he nonetheless assures that we’ll see what we’ll see. Oh, how lovely war is when you’ve never fought it! He who recommended to his partners in June 2022 “not to humiliate Russia” now calls for doing exactly the opposite. He is incapable of standing up to the Algerian president or confronting the Comorian one, but he flexes his muscles, assuring that he will face the “Russian threat” which, according to him, weighs on France and Western Europe. A threat that is nothing but a grotesque fantasy whose only objective is to create fear. A threat brandished like a scarecrow. This is the time to remember an excellent Georgian proverb: the sheep spends its life in fear of the wolf, but in the end, it’s the shepherd who eats it!

For Europeans, war does not pit enemies against each other, in the traditional sense, but an “aggressor” and an “aggressed.” In a conflict, one must always blame the “aggressor,” because he is the guilty one—even though this “aggressor” may very well have acted because he was in a situation of legitimate defense. This change in vocabulary confirms the great return of the “just war.” Reducing war to a duo of “aggressor” and “victim” (as in knife attacks or sexual assaults) has us swimming in pure moralizing. This takes us back to the good old days of the League of Nations, whose history we know, and even more to the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, to the time when irenicism consisted in thinking that war could be outlawed. Today, it is bellicosity that sets the tone. But it is just as unpolitical.

It is certainly not bad for the various European states to equip themselves with a powerful defense industry, but on condition that it is independent, that is, on condition of forgetting the United States. This is not in any case what will save Zelensky: if Ukraine can no longer benefit from American aid, it is not the meager means available to the European Union that will make him win. There are also too many divergences between member states to define common interests or goals between them, and therefore common operational policies. There can be no European army as long as Europe is not politically united, which is to say that today it is a chimera. As for a “European umbrella” that would arise from France’s decision to extend the perimeter of its deterrence to its neighbors, it would be even less credible than the “American umbrella” has ever been. As Jacques Sapir has pointed out, who can think that France would accept “risking seeing Paris vitrified to save Bucharest, Prague, or Warsaw”? In short, in the immediate future, we will multiply discussions about military and financial means that we do not have and continue to tread water.

Alain de Benoist: Trumpism is an improbable mixture of pluto-populism, technological Caesarism, anarcho-capitalism, anti-state sovereignism, and libertarian ideology. Donald Trump forms with Elon Musk a Caesarian duumvirate that irresistibly evokes the end of the Roman Republic. J.D. Vance has very likable sides, but it is difficult to know exactly what he represents in this constellation, which also includes American myths: “manifest destiny” and the new Promised Land, the analysis of society from the individual, the self-sufficiency of the market, the primacy of economics and commerce, devotion to technology, and messianic optimism. Above all, let’s not forget that it is not the greatness of Europe that Donald wants to restore, but that of America, which he knows is threatened.

Alain de Benoist: It is not impossible that the United States is on the brink of civil war, or a new War of Secession. But I don’t think this scenario applies to Europeans. What threatens Europe most is not civil war. It’s worse: it’s chaos.

Alain de Benoist: Neither one nor the other—especially since moral domination is not incompatible with decadence! The European Union is not locking itself into “ideological battles” either; it is locking itself into a very particular ideology whose three essential pillars are the society of individuals, liberal capitalism, and human rights. Liberal democracy, the rule of law, and the reign of market values alone are the consequences.

Alain de Benoist: It is useless to talk about strategies when the men are not there to conceive or implement them. Europeans today are the sick men of the planet. They don’t have the slightest idea of what Europe’s destiny could be, because the word “destiny” has no meaning for them. Led by ectoplasms or sleepwalkers, who have never had occasion to fight but are today ready to engage their peoples in a nuclear war, Europe is in a state of civilizational exhaustion, in accordance with Spengler’s predictions. These terrible words of Cioran come to mind: “It is in vain that the West seeks a form of agony worthy of its past.”

Alain de Benoist: The final struggle is now engaged: either a planet governed by a single hegemonic power (or a single universalist ideology), or a world articulated between several poles of power and civilization, “great spaces” corresponding to the great regions of the world, each directed by the country most able to exert its influence in the civilizational area to which it belongs. But nothing will be possible as long as we persist in believing that the world is primarily populated by individuals, when it is primarily shared between different peoples, languages, nations, and civilizational areas, each with their own ambitions and principles. The new Nomos of the Earth requires that these great civilizational areas take into account their identity as a priority, that is, their history, and refrain from intervening in other areas to apply pseudo-universal values that are in reality their own. “Civilizational States” or chaos!

I am neither optimistic nor concerned. I am simply trying to understand what will happen.

Interview conducted by YV