While the few democracies are challenged by criminal or weak leaders, public debts lay bare recklessness, the bravest are abandoned, values disintegrate, drums beat, and wars, now regional, threaten to merge into a single global war that could claim hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion victims, we risk forgetting an essential question: humanity’s survival is at stake today.
Beyond even the ravages of a planetary war, we will not survive unless we organize ourselves to escape the suicide foreseen by ecological upheavals and all other forms of life-sabotage at work today.
The horizon of this terrible catastrophe invites us to think through the absurd. Suppose the great power of tomorrow continues to build itself, as yesterday did, on a “economy of death.” It would then have to admit that a state could become a great power, or remain one, while accelerating the destruction of what underpins its power and that of others: fertile lands, a healthy population, creativity and freedom, a climate conducive to life. It’s absurd.
Persisting in following this deadly model is to condemn ourselves to failure. That is why we must think about the power of tomorrow and prepare for it today, by investing differently—not only out of conviction ethics, but also out of responsibility ethics.
Europe has every chance to succeed in this transformation. It will require a great mental energy, the force our continent has expressed in a thousand ways. Some perceive it as a bite: the Gascon “nhac,” the German “Biss” or the Italian “mordente.” Others place it in the belly: the Finnish “sisu,” just as the English “guts,” which refers to what lies inside the body. Still others read it on the face: the Italian “grinta,” the gaze of the one who will not accept defeat. And each adds their own word: the English “grit,” the Yiddish “chutzpah,” the Greek “filotimo,” the Ukrainian “nezlamnist” — which cannot be broken.
The Two Economies: The Economy of Life and the Economy of Death
All human activity falls into one of two categories: either it directly or indirectly serves to protect, nourish and flourish life, especially that of future generations; or it directly or indirectly serves to weaken, destroy, or shorten life. I call the first “the economy of life”; the second, “the economy of death.” This distinction has economic and political consequences first. It also has geopolitical consequences.
The economy of life includes all activities useful to future generations (pardon the length, but it is necessary) : sustainable energy (renewable and nuclear), sustainable mobility, decarbonized industry, healthy food, organic farming, protection of biodiversity, humus, and nature in all its forms, sober water management and fair sharing of water, the circular economy; security, defense, prevention, sustainable finance, risk insurance, lifelong education, culture, independence of the press, the development of critical thinking, protection of public liberties, freedom of fundamental research, protection of children, respect for the rights of women and minorities, tolerance, rejection of racism, openness to others, and finally the rule of law and democracy.
The economy of death (pardon the length of the list again) gathers fossil energies and all their uses — mobility, plastics, packaging, synthetic fabrics; ultra-processed food, soil artificialization, single-use everything, destruction of ecosystems and living species, misinformation, censorship, oppression, discrimination, exploitation of women and children; all drugs, from alcohol to fentanyl, xenophobia to antisemitism, gambling to speculative finance.
The economy of death is today also the most subsidized: public subsidies to fossil fuels globally exceed total global education spending and account for nearly two-thirds of global health expenditures.
It is also more profitable, and more growth-creating, than the economy of life. Polluting costs, unfortunately, much less than depolluting, and this holds for a thousand facets of the economy of death: soil exhaustion, ultra-processed foods, brainrot designed to capture children’s attention on the Internet. Of course, this low cost is a mirage, valid only in the very short term. The bill to pay later will be heavier, with all the social, physical and ecological pathologies it brings: pandemics, famines, wars and climate catastrophes.
In the future, the leading powers will be those that prioritize the economy of life from today onward.
The Strategic Goods of the Economy of Life
The economy of life has its indispensable resources, which must be secured as we currently secure fossil fuels. Among them are, of course, the riches of the soil and subsoil: their availability, but also their preservation, become an absolutely crucial sovereignty issue. And human well-being will, of course, be a central and decisive concern of policies for life.
Who Are Today the Major Powers of the Economy of Life?
Such a lens should lead us to completely rethink what we consider the wealth and power of nations. Everything that currently enters GDP calculations but falls under the economy of death must be subtracted.
Europe is today, unknowingly, the first power of the economy of life. It is the only political entity to meet the prerequisites: effective health systems, quality education, significant organic farming, a strong ecological orientation evidenced by extensive recycling. It counts 17 million hectares bio-cultivated; wind and solar occupy a major share of the energy mix; Germany recycles 68% of its waste.
France, in particular, is today one of the planet’s most advanced countries on the path of the economy of life, without fully realizing it or taking credit for it. Its children are among the most well-off in the world, UNICEF says, just behind the Netherlands and Denmark, two other European countries. It has a universal health system, top-tier scientific research protected by academic freedom, a school system that, despite its flaws, remains free and mandatory until sixteen, and a long-standing tradition of social protection and public liberties guaranteed by the rule of law. Its electricity is 95.2% of low-carbon origin; it is the leading European country in organic farming by area; it protects a third of its territory with natural spaces, already surpassing its 2030 target. All this rests on a strategy clearly embraced over fifty years ago—and today threatened by the suicidal temptation to reduce budgets for research, health prevention, education, and nature protection.
China is, too, a great power of the economy of life in the making. It remains, of course, far behind on essential dimensions of the economy of life (democracy, public freedoms, freedom of the press, critical thinking, respect for the rule of law, soil protection against artificialization, healthy food, health, education, recycling, water quality, freedom of fundamental research) and remains the world’s largest emitter of CO2 and the leading builder of coal plants. In many other areas, however, it achieves remarkable results. It installed 434 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity in 2025, bringing its total fleet to over 1,800 gigawatts.
It dominates the world manufacture of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, and it invests more than anyone else in biotechnology to foster a healthy and sustainable food industry.
The United States, for its part, has regressed since 2025 in almost all dimensions of the economy of life, except defense, research and innovation. Twenty-seven million Americans remain uninsured — and yet health spending in the country accounts for 18% of GDP. Elsewhere, the Freedom House measure of public liberties sits at its lowest point, and the Trump administration is dismantling environmental rules.
The Great Powers of Tomorrow Will Be Those Who Master the Economy of Life
Nations that can, first, organize their transition toward the economy of life as a whole (not only its energy façade) will dominate the world by 2050, because they will have built a sustainable, harmonious, resilient development in the face of climate, health, social, technological, and democratic shocks on the horizon. Conversely, those that remain prisoners of the economy of death, even if they excel in certain technical components, will be weakened by the rising cost of disasters they failed to prevent, worn down by chronic diseases, exhausted soils, atrophy of critical thinking, fractured social cohesion, a population subjected to propaganda, drugs and alternative truths.
More broadly, if humanity is to survive the climatic, health, educational, demographic, and technological upheavals of the next thirty years, the share of the economy of life in global GDP must reach at least two-thirds by the middle of the century, compared to less than one-half today.
It is a colossal project, surely the largest the human race has ever undertaken, more far-reaching than the industrial revolution or the post-war reconstruction. It will require, in every country, action on four levers, which must not be hierarchized:
– A material lever, relating to our relationship to energy and nature: the development of renewable and decarbonized electricity; the electrification of all industry; the widespread adoption of organic farming that restores soils and life in humus; prudent water management and fair sharing of water; universal recycling and the circular economy; the systematic protection of biodiversity, forests, wetlands and the oceans.
– A human lever: investment in prevention. How to prevent the various risks, old and especially new, to which we are exposed? At least three families of risks should be considered: climatic, economic and social. Investing in people also means educating throughout life. It means devoting more public resources to youth and the employed than to retirees, who will have had the opportunity to build their wealth.
– An institutional lever, which touches on freedoms. The economy of life requires, as noted, a stable and legitimate rule of law, capable of guaranteeing, over several decades, the legal security of investments, the consistency of environmental and health standards, and the protection of common goods against appropriation by a few. This rule of law can be built and sustained only through credible security and defense means, especially against digital aggressions; it presupposes public deliberation, the public’s control over politics, and the ability to prevent cartels of the economy of death from durably capturing institutions.
– A technological lever: mastery of three key technologies (biotechnologies, neuroscience and artificial intelligence) and the reorientation of their uses. Biotechnologies, which can regenerate soils, restore biodiversity, develop new vaccines and preventive treatments, must not be diverted, as is the case today, toward offensive biochemical agents or unregulated eugenics. The uses of neuroscience must decisively shift from a logic of capturing attention, which prevails today, toward a logic of cognitive protection, critical-thinking education and mental health. As for artificial intelligence, it must be put to work for human health—research and diagnosis—and not for policing and surveillance tasks, as it is today.
For this, immense, quantifiable reforms will be required, finally making the economy of life more profitable than the economy of death, in every one of its dimensions:
– universal and rising carbon pricing; the scheduled end of fossil fuel subsidies; a taxation that truly penalizes overconsumption, soil sealing, humus destruction and water waste, and that instead encourages agroecology, recycling and the circular economy (for example by mandating, as Germany already does successfully, systematic waste collection and recovery);
– redirecting a significant portion (at least a quarter) of social protection systems toward prevention rather than cure alone, toward youth rather than retirees, by making life-risk insurance a universal right rather than a privilege. Law must guarantee sustainable and protected funding for education at all ages and for fundamental research, free from short-term pressures. There must also be binding laws protecting children from political, familial, ideological, religious, economic and digital exploitation, and guaranteeing real equality for women and minorities in access to resources, employment and political representation;
– a diplomacy of the economy of life, to promote international regulation of artificial intelligence, biotechnologies and neuroscience that conditions their deployment on aims compatible with life.
The New Geopolitical Coalitions Necessary
No nation, not even the most powerful today, will be able to muster all the resources and skills of the economy of life on its own. It will therefore require alliances of a new kind:
– mining and industrial coalitions, to secure in the long run, and in a fair manner for producing countries, access to the critical metals of the energy transition.
– scientific and educational coalitions, to pool fundamental research efforts, exchange talents and widely disseminate discoveries and innovations useful to life.
– health coalitions, so that every country, including the poorest, has access to medical discoveries and innovations.
– digital and political alliances among democracies sharing the same requirements for safeguarding freedoms, children and critical thinking, to jointly impose common rules for AI, biotechnologies and neuroscience.
– defense alliances, such as the one that protects Ukraine today, as long as dictatorships threaten democracies.
Europe Can Become the World’s Leading Power Through the Economy of Life
All in all, while China has some advantages to become the world leader of the economy of life, it lacks the essential: a taste for freedom. In this context, Europe can become the dominant superpower of the economy of life. It will require a few more specific reforms:
1 – strengthen democracy in all its institutions;
2 – fully embrace the effort of autonomous defense that a direct threat from a dictatorial regime at its borders imposes, while refusing that this legitimate effort be financed at the expense of the other pillars of the economy of life;
3 – complete the union of its capital market and its energy market, to fund on a continental scale, thanks to its enormous savings today diverted toward the United States, massive investments in the economy of life that no single member state can carry alone;
4 – undertake an aggressive economic diplomacy, exporting the standards of the economy of life, thereby making regulation a tool of global influence;
5 – equip itself with a network of alliances that guarantees the availability of key elements of the economy of life it does not produce in sufficient quantities on its soil.
None of this will be possible without channeling the mental energy of the peoples, their niaque, toward a new, exciting project: the economy of life.
Nothing Europe lacks more than a project. Becoming the world champion of the economy of life is one. That requires steering toward this goal its mental energy, its niaque. The niaque (a topic to which I have devoted a whole book) has always been, and remains, an essential—and far too little understood—dimension of geopolitics.
A war, whether military or economic, has never been won by a single arms program or by budget reforms. It requires resilience, the ability to absorb shocks, courage, sacrifice, heroism: what I call “niaque,” which can also be described as mental energy, tenacity, grit, fighting spirit, grinta, furia, chutzpah.
It is the primary energy of any power, far more than coal, oil, nuclear, naval power, or the strength of armies.
No people has become a power without possessing it for the long term. No people will become one without it in the future.
Without it, in the face of threat, the time comes for fear, resignation, cowardice, pacifism, defeatism, collaboration with the enemy, each for themselves, and collapse.
Throughout history, only peoples endowed with a very powerful niaque have become dominant powers. This was true of the Venetians, the Dutch, the English, the Americans in their time. Likewise, only peoples with this niaque have won wars: such as the Vietnamese, where it is called máu chiến; the Finns, where it is called sisu, a trait identified as the main source of their resistance to the Russians in 1939-1940. Today, Ukrainians fight a numerically superior foe largely thanks to their nezlamnist, their niaque, even more decisive than the size of their armies.
We now know that niaque arises from mobilization around a project or from the awareness of a danger. The two are today united: we are all facing a deadly enemy, the economy of death. And the economy of life is a project. The project of a continent once again leading the civilization forward.
To carry it through, to tip in time toward the economy of life, will require far more than a detailed technical program: it will require this extraordinary, total, and tenacious mental energy. Who will have it? Who will know how to transmit it to peoples hooked on all forms of illusion? This is perhaps the key question of the coming deadlines.