After the Empire

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (French: Après L'Empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain) is a 2002 book by French demographer and sociologist Emmanuel Todd. In it, Todd examines the fundamental weaknesses of the modern United States to conclude that, contrary to American conventional wisdom, the United States is rapidly losing control of the world stage economically, militarily, and ideologically. Todd predicts the fall of the United States as the sole global superpower. Todd often presents his views in contrast to Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard. It became a bestseller in France and was commented on most favorably in France and Japan.

1976 prediction of Soviet collapse

Todd attracted attention in 1976 when, aged 25, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates. In the late 1970s, Todd was widely pronounced an "anti-communist", just as, following the publication of After the Empire, he has been attacked as "anti-American". He challenges these labels and describes himself as a historian and anthropologist first; and it was his concern as a historian, rather than political passion, that motivated him to write After the Empire. In late 2002, he believed that the world was about to repeat the same mistake that it had made in regard to the Soviet Union during the 1970s—misinterpreting an expansion in US military activity as a sign of its increasing power, when in fact this aggression masks a decline.

Summary

Foreword

In the foreword to the German edition, Todd stresses the importance of the Franco-German alliance: Without the German resistance to the Iraq war as a signal for the "departure of Europe into strategic autonomy", France would not have been able to influence the UN to delay the war plans of the USA. The next stage should be explicit cooperation with Russia.