Not long ago, President Trump threatened Iran with the death of “an entire civilization.” Those were words that sowed unease across the world and there were those who speculated about whether the United States would use the nuclear weapon. In France, where I am now, a widely circulated article by Paul Valéry was brought back into the foreground, published in the London literary magazine The Athenaeum in 1919 and later part of his book The Crisis of the Spirit. Valéry wrote under the emotional impact of World War I. He did not directly know the trenches and worked for his government in administrative duties, although he realized that Europe would never be the same after four years of the most devastating conflict known up to that time. Then he penned those lines: “We, the civilizations, now know that we are mortal… Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were beautiful and vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds mattered to us as little as their very existence. But France, England, and Russia would also be beautiful names… We feel that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that would bring the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join those of Menander are not entirely unimaginable: they are in the newspapers.”
“Europe has awakened abruptly to two realities: that there is a new ‘sheriff’ in town and that today’s U.S. are not the same as those that landed on Omaha Beach in 1944”
Paul Valéry harbored nostalgia for the world before 1914, when scientific-technical progress promised to place happiness within everyone’s reach. Yet few could have imagined that a wave of irrationality, the seed of the later totalitarianisms, would flood Europe and its civilization. We are experiencing something similar today. The world has changed abruptly in this current decade, although there were signs beforehand that this could happen. Europe has awakened to two realities: that there is “a new sheriff in town,” as J. D. Vance proclaimed in Munich in 2025, and that the United States of today are not the same as those that landed on Omaha Beach in 1944. It has attempted to steady itself and to believe that this is a passing storm that, sooner or later, the ballots will correct on the other side of the Atlantic.
But, while this happens —or not—, Europe is becoming aware that it stands alone against empires. One could ask, just as Valéry did in 1919, whether its fate is to be reduced to a small peninsula of the Asian continent. Empires are obsessed with nostalgia for the past and with historical grievances that they want to fix by force if necessary, especially the American and the Russian. By contrast, China, for the moment, seems to move with the discreet logic of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, but that could change if, someday, Xi Jinping decides that the time has come to demonstrate the power of the Chinese dragon. Empires dream of a return to a golden age that, in reality, never existed, and they aspire to end what they perceive as a period of decadence. Such positions represent a threat to any civilization once internal and external politics reduce themselves to a matter of friends and enemies. Moreover, they lead to a zero-sum world in which the only lasting agreements are those forged by the strong at the expense of the weak, as has happened in other moments of history.
“History also teaches us that we should distrust ideologies and political movements obsessed with decadence”
History also teaches us that we should distrust ideologies and political movements obsessed with decadence. They are the same ones that despise anything that is not their own nationalism. Those who do not share their worldview would fit the labels used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West: “They are men without instincts, slaves of logic, who replace reality with logic, the power of facts with an abstract justice, destiny with reason”. We live in times of instinct, emotion, and intuition, in which history is dismissed as the teacher of life, as Cicero used to say, and power intends to rewrite history to suit itself. It is not surprising that Spengler dismissed Thucydides as a historian, since he found him useful only for describing his immediate present, the wars between Athens and Sparta, but not for interpreting the past or foreseeing the future. The political scientist Graham Allison has warned for years against the Thucydides trap, considering the possibility of a confrontation between the United States as the dominant power and China as the rising one.
Valéry was also aware that civilizations do not disappear merely due to an assault by far stronger empires. What can erode civilizations from within is the emergence of strong leaders, whom Spengler called “men of state”, the new Caesars who would, in his view, break “the dictatorship of money and its political weapon, democracy”. If he looked at today’s world, he might recognize that cesarism can undermine democracy, but not the dictatorship of money, once its leaders fail to distinguish between the public patrimony and their own personal wealth.
“A civilization falls into crisis when it ceases to produce and share forms of thought that aspire to universality”
It can be said that a civilization falls into crisis when it stops producing and sharing forms of thought that aspire to universality. Valéry wrote in his article that “peace is perhaps the state of affairs in which the natural hostility of men finds expression in creations, rather than translating into destructions as war does.” As a literary essayist, he did not deeply engage with the relationship between peace and justice. But the truth is that, from the moment a political regime takes as its own, with deeds, Hobbes’s Leviathan assertion that the authority, not the truth, makes the law, there arises a threat to its own civilization and to others. That attitude recalls the Roman senators who, in the late fourth century, in a Christian Empire, burned incense at the altar of the goddess of Victory. They confused military success with justice, as Saint Augustine notes in The City of God.
