Thierry de Montbrial is a French academic and geopolitical scientist. He is the founding president of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), a think tank he established in 1979. He is also a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. He has published L’Ère des affrontements: les grands tournants géopolitiques (The Age of Confrontation: Major Geopolitical Turning Points) with Dunod.
He analyses the state of the world in the Trump era.
A new generation is at the helm of IFRI. Is this a way of ensuring the sustainability of your think tank?
I have created an institution that is recognised all over the world. Yes, of course, it is very dangerous to focus on a single generation, whether it be the two extremes of young or old!
With the complexity of the world and international relations, how do you adapt your analytical tools to this reality?
One of the fundamental characteristics of the IFRI is that it brings together researchers who are concerned with an objective analysis, which I call realistic, of the global problems they study. They are asked to avoid any ideology. Their personal opinions should not count.
They try to understand objectively what is happening in the world. To do this, you have to travel, go out into the field, read and meet people. Before IFRI, I founded the Centre d’Analyse, de Prévision et de Stratégie of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have spent my life travelling. It is extremely important for understanding things and I am wary of armchair commentators!
Then, we are in constant contact with all our peers, which means that we need to know specialists and experts on the same issues all over the world. Otherwise, we are just talking to ourselves! These are some of the essential requirements for being a researcher at IFRI.
The book ‘L’Ère des affrontements’ is a reference book that is rooted in the long term and evokes the geopolitical dimensions that shape the world. What was the most difficult thing for you to write this book?
What has been worrying me for a long time is first of all the comments and analyses that can be made on a particular subject while ignoring their interactions with other subjects. What I have tried to do with a certain rigour is to show the overall complexity that all the subjects, whether it be the war in Ukraine or in Gaza, are not isolated. They are in interaction. The same is true for what is happening in the DR Congo, with Rwanda.
It is the global picture of politics that interacts with the economy and technology. The interaction of all these phenomena over time must be shown. If you want to know what the world will be like in 2025, you have to go back at least to the period of the fall of the Soviet Union. The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. For certain subjects such as political Islamism, 1979, the revolution in Iran and then the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. All of this must be kept in mind if we are to seriously understand the world in which we live today. The second concern is to set aside, as far as possible, the ideology that reduces everything to the struggle of Good against Evil. The distorting prism of ideology often leads towards false trails.
Today, we are witnessing disorder in the world and a multifaceted crisis seems to be taking hold. The process has been accelerated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House. How do you analyse this situation?
Global disorder has certainly been accelerated by Donald Trump, but it already existed. We expected it to develop. This global crisis should not be linked to one man. The starting point for this disorder is very clearly the fall of the Soviet Union, which was not only the fall of communism but also that of the last empire of the 20th century after the great empires following the First and then the Second World War.
The fall of an empire has major effects that last for decades. The war in Ukraine is one of the consequences. It was predictable, but people didn’t want to see it! Because they were encumbered by the ideology of the propagation of democracy and the market economy that would immediately spread and produce its benefits throughout the world.
The development of technology and digital technology since the 1960s has contributed to the acceleration of the crises. All of this must therefore be seen in this historical perspective. The other essential point is the rise of China. At the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chinese were extremely cautious because they wanted to be on good terms with everyone, to better consolidate the beginnings of their development.
The arrival of Donald Trump has shaken up global geopolitics. Is the ‘Trump method’ a threat or an asset in shaking up inertia?
We shouldn’t personalise Trump too much. He is certainly important, but things were already in progress. The system was already under threat. The current crises stem from the systems of governance that have gradually been established over time throughout the major global entities. There was a kind of balance of power during the Cold War, but it wasn’t really an order. There was a kind of equilibrium largely linked to nuclear deterrence.
Multilateralism was mainly in force within the Western camp. What is true is that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China and technological developments, the international system has crumbled. The ideology of globalisation of the 2000s has also evaporated. There is also the rise of new powers with very different cultures where everyone wanted a piece of the pie. As a result, today’s wars are phenomena grafted onto this fragmented backdrop.
Donald Trump is a transgressor who breaks with all the codes. I am reminded of the Canadian expression ‘brosser le bateau’, which means to shake the boat. Donald Trump ‘scrubs the boat’, then adds another layer, to put it bluntly, on the various subjects with outbursts and insults that overwhelm and burden personalities like Volodymyr Zelensky!
In your opinion, what have we not understood in this Ukrainian affair? Why this radicalisation of behaviour and this ‘Putin obsession’?
Europe is one of the fundamental issues that concerns me. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a sudden enlargement of the European community. We increased the number of member countries by a dozen too quickly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The heterogeneity of the construction weakened it. I say this today more strongly than ever. We have a group of countries that in reality do not form a unit. Each one, particularly the new post-Cold War member countries, is fundamentally thinking of its own interests.
This is understandable for the Baltic countries, for example, which have freed themselves from the Soviet yoke. Each one is connected to its own history. This is also the case for Poland. But the national histories, and particularly the concerns of the countries of the South, are not the same. The Baltic countries, for example, are not very interested in what is happening in Africa. Conversely, for the countries of southern Europe, the relationship with Russia is not at all the same as for the countries of the North. We therefore have an extremely heterogeneous whole. We pretend to believe that all this forms a whole and that we can therefore talk about the identity, defence and security of Europe!
To get out of this existential dilemma, is Europe facing an opportunity to be seized?
We need to take a fresh look at things. I see an overall perspective that is still very ideological and far removed from the awareness that should be shared by all of us. What is at stake is the very survival of the European Union. Heterogeneity is a fundamental problem for the unification of Europe. We are verbally committed to the community, but there are limits to hypocrisy.
We want to enlarge the European Union to include the future Ukraine, which will be a true nation state, but with different borders. And we will have to pay the price for these enlargements and these changes. Donald Trump is currently demanding 500 billion dollars from the Ukrainians. The reality is that the European project is already very fragile, especially economically. We are in a very bad situation. At the European level, each country is very weakened, particularly Germany and France.
Europe is in crisis. This has a cascading effect on its neighbours, the Mediterranean countries, Africa… How can we act in this contrasting and unstable environment to pursue a coherent policy?
Within the European Union, there are countries that have little interest in Africa, while others do. If we want to adopt a security-based approach to Europe as a whole, we will have to recognise that we do not have the same main concerns. It is the countries of the South that should organise themselves to develop a concept of real solidarity between Europe and the African countries. This is not the case. We have had no strategy.
The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 led to a series of strategic errors and the break-up of Libya has affected the whole of Sahelo-Saharan Africa. The positions we have taken towards Russia are having repercussions in this area, as Russia is now seeking to harm European interests in the Sahel region. This juxtaposition and this relationship of the current world crises must be understood through closely linked geopolitical and geostrategic situations.
We cannot avoid addressing what is referred to, for ease of language, as the ‘global South’. Do you believe in the structuring of this force?
The Third World was once a very heterogeneous world. Europe should pay more attention to this ‘global South’, even if it is relatively ill-defined, because it is a group that includes many developing countries that are not satisfied with the caricature of Good versus Evil, as if the spread of democracy should solve all problems. I think that Europe as a whole, particularly the southern countries, should take much more interest in this new Third World.
A ‘new Third World’ where France, by vocation, has its place?
Yes, where France has its place, but I think it has lost it a little. In world affairs, we have the place we deserve. This brings us back to the economy. As far as France is concerned, until the country resolves its fundamental economic and social problems, we will be diminished. I think the effort must start with oneself. That is what I wish for my country, in the interests of others too.
