BRUNO BERTEZ

July 5

In a recent interview, Professor Richard Sakwa, a specialist in Russian and European affairs at the University of Kent, delivers one of the most severe critiques of American strategy heard in a long time.

I share it with you because it aligns with a key point in my analytical framework

According to Sakwa, the current tragedy of the United States is that they have become “prisoners of their own power.”Endowed with immense military force, American leaders remain convinced that this power allows them to “shape reality.”

Sakwa recalls the neoconservative slogan of the 2000s:“Empires make the weather.”

The idea was simple: a superpower can impose its will, strike a small country to demonstrate its strength, then control the narrative.

I have written several articles on this delirious theme: “we are an empire now, we produce reality and you adapt.”

This illusion is collapsing today.

The United States are indeed prisoners of their own imaginary. This imaginary was created, then developed, enriched and complexified with economic development and the rise of the productive forces.

Over time this imaginary came to life, like a sort of national myth; it produced its own autonomy, a largely verbal autonomy, which corresponded to the needs and desires of society.

The Americans ended up believing in this myth and its derivatives.

This myth shapes their culture, their collective unconscious; it penetrates them, traverses them and becomes ontological.This autonomy was driven by a kind of rhetorical logic, by a narrative logic, by Hollywood productions intended to please, to justify and to ratify.

All of this converges with my disjunction of shadows and bodies, with the Mephistophelean operation that is dear to me intellectually.

What Professor Richard Sakwa describes with rare lucidity — the United States become “prisoners of their own power” — is not merely a geopolitical observation. It is the contemporary manifestation of a much deeper process, the one I have often called the disjunction of shadows and bodies to gain power.

This Mephistophelean operation is figured in Faust.For several decades, the Western world, and particularly the United States, has concluded a Faustian pact. It created an imaginary of absolute power: the empire that “makes the weather,” that shapes reality by the sole force of its will and its narration.

This imaginary developed according to its own internal logic, its own combinatory. It obeys the pleasure principle and the principle of least effort. It refuses the negative. It does not want to know what resists, what contradicts, what obstructs.

THANKS TO THIS CONSTRUCTION THE WESTERN WORLD SENDS ITSELF INTO THE AIR

IT LEVITATES

IT BUBBLES

THE BUBBLE IS A PRIMARY STRUCTURE THAT HAS BECOME INVASIVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD.

ONE SAYS VULGARLY THAT IT NO LONGER TOUCHES THE GROUND

IT IS FREED FROM GRAVITATION,

THAT IS TO SAY FROM THE WEIGHT OF THE REAL

Like Mephistopheles, it offers omnipotence… in exchange for the soul of the real.

The signs (strategic discourses, the doctrine of the “rules-based order,” the credibility of the dollar, the narrative of inevitable victory) have gradually become autonomous. They have their own life. They ceased to re-present the real in the Derridean sense — that is, to make it present a second time, by recognizing it in its resistance.They have begun to present a parallel world, a world of shadows that take themselves for bodies.

The power of fetishes is at the heart of these processes; what gives this imaginary a quasi-irresistible force is that it is not purely ideological. It is supported by the markets.The Stock Exchange, capital flows, financial valuations, American debts treated as gold… all this functions as a system of fetishes.

Monetary and financial signs no longer content themselves with indicating an underlying reality; they produce it.

They give life to the imaginary and make it performative.

It is precisely for this reason that the illusion could last so long. The illusion enriches, it provides pleasure; the cash from these fetishes makes it possible to satisfy all desires. Even if one produces less and less because it is others who produce! By producing less and less, by producing signs and digits, “one drops the prey for the shadow.”

As long as the markets continue to validate the fiction (by buying back American debt, by accepting the dollar as the ultimate reserve, by financing endless wars), the shadow continues to dance and believe itself a body.

Sakwa puts it in his way: the neoconservative belief that “empires make the weather” was still tenable as long as reality did not come back to bite. Today, in Ukraine as in the face of Iran, the real is beginning to return. And the return of the real is always humiliating for the one who had convinced himself he could model it at will.

We are witnessing the deepening of a classic disjunction:

On one side, a Western imaginary that self-maintains, refuses the negative, multiplies contradictory and “ridiculous” declarations (to take up Sakwa’s word about Trump, but the phenomenon is bipartisan).

On the other, a real that moves further and further away from this imaginary: material limits of military power, resistance of adversaries, exhaustion of allies, demographic and productive decline, progressive loss of credibility.

This disjunction can only be resolved by a shock; that is what I regularly affirm. An event, a straw, a drop of water. Anything can force the brutal reconciliation between the shadow and the body. We are in the fractal.

This moment is not necessarily a spectacular military defeat. It can take the form of a monetary crisis, a collapse of confidence in Treasuries, a shift in capital flows, or a series of strategic setbacks that finally make it impossible to continue believing that “we control the narrative.”

Until then, the imaginary continues its autonomous trajectory. The further it moves from the real, the more fragile it becomes… and the more it needs force to maintain itself.

This is the perfect trap of the Mephistophelean operation: the more one invests in the illusion, the more one becomes its prisoner.

Sakwa observes the geopolitical surface of this process. What his diagnosis reveals is that American power is no longer in the service of a realist strategy. It has become the instrument of an imaginary that refuses to die, and which, in order to survive, is ready to drag the world into its own deathly disjunction.

The day the real imposes its reconciliation, it will not be merely a foreign policy crisis. It will be the moment when the shadows finally cease to believe that they are bodies; all the narratives will be rewritten!

AS A BONUS

What Sakwa says:Whether in the war in Ukraine or in the conflict with Iran, reality “comes back to bite the United States on the heels.”Sakwa is categorical:“One cannot shape reality. Reality always ends up returning.”

the rest of the planet, the spectacle is that of a once-respected great nation that humiliates itself through its miscalculations.Sakwa speaks of a mixture of sadness in the face of “a once great country, a once great power, and a nation populated by many formidable people.”

He does not spare the Trump administration either.

Midway through his second term, the American president is “losing control” and multiplying “ridiculous and contradictory” statements.

But Sakwa refuses to reduce the problem to a single man. The ill is deeper and bipartisan: a structural inability to practice diplomacy, an isolation from the facts, and the obstinate repetition of the same strategic errors in the hope of a different result.

Beyond personalities, Sakwa points to a systemic defect in Washington: the belief that military force can solve everything and that control of the narrative is enough to mask failures on the ground.

This vision has led the United States into dead ends in Ukraine as in the Middle East.

In summary, Sakwa’s message is clear:American power, instead of being an asset, has become a trap.By refusing to accept the limits of this power and by neglecting diplomacy, the United States lock themselves into a cycle of failures that the world observes with a form of sadness mixed with concern.