All summer long, The Grand Continent will keep moving. Each day, wherever you are, we will bring you ideas you won’t find anywhere else (though they will be everywhere come fall), texts you won’t find elsewhere or refreshingly new with our Sundays. To receive them directly in your inbox and support this momentum, consider subscribing to the magazine
As you recount in your memoirs, you have “traveled the world” far and wide through the upheavals of the past decades. Yet, despite this theoretical and practical experience, you are convinced we are witnessing today an unprecedented historical rupture. You call it “the great bifurcation” . What is it about, and why this term rather than that of a “geopolitical transition”?
Because it is precisely no longer a transition.
A genuine change of geopolitical era is taking place before our eyes: the radical shift from an international system built on rules, established after 1945, to a world driven by the ambitions of rising powers seeking recognition and by dreams of restored status for thwarted empires.
Until now, international life was marked by a continual dialogue among sovereign states where force was not an end in itself, since there were particular objectives and common frameworks. This dialogue was called “diplomacy,” and I wonder whether the era of that “diplomacy” may be over.
Yet negotiations are taking place a lot at the moment…
With a more or less modest success.
The only negotiations touching international issues and major powers are animated, concerning Iran, by Qatar and Pakistan, intervening first for economic motives—reopening the Strait of Hormuz for the former—and financial needs for the latter. With the backing of the Swiss Confederation representing American interests in Tehran; the talks unfold in a Bourgenstock hotel that belongs to the sovereign wealth fund of the emirate of Qatar.
American outreach between Lebanon and Israel is also quite limited.
When Trump threatens Europeans with removing American troops from Europe if they don’t sell him Greenland, the link between the two dossiers is fictitious; it is merely childish blackmail, with no effect.
Michel Foucher
The Europeans are not actors in any ongoing or conceivable negotiations, such as Ukraine. They have been marginalized by Israel, which sustains regional chaos and aims to foment an environment of weak regimes, whereas the opposite is needed, as shown by the pioneering visit of the French president to Damascus.
But American involvement seems to run counter to the prevailing social and political consensus. No future American secretary of state will make as many foreign visits as Antony Blinken did under Joe Biden: 424 travel days, in 89 countries.
The room for maneuver for the United States has definitively narrowed, and after Trump, society will not back a renewed engagement in international affairs. Protectionism, unilateralism, the withdrawal of international aid and support for democratic regimes have become consensus.
Precisely, is this rupture produced or merely accelerated by the Trump administration’s exercise of power?
The ultimate guarantor of this order, the United States, began to betray it themselves with the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then others followed: Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbass secession in 2014.
The margins for maneuver for the United States have narrowed and after Trump, society will not support a renewed engagement in international affairs.
Michel Foucher
From that point on, the diplomatic stage becomes a lure that masks a policy of faits accomplis—from Venezuela to Sudan, from the Middle East to South Asia—where an increasing number of regional powers of second and third order enter the game. The rewriting of historical narratives, with a messianic or even civilizational scope, legitimizes revisionisms.
Is what you describe not precisely the inverse of what Metternich built in Vienna, and which Kissinger admired: a system that linked subjects and scales to one another, the famous “linkage” that formed the common grammar of diplomacy?
When Trump threatens Europeans with removing troops from Europe if they do not sell him Greenland, the link between the two dossiers is fictitious; it is merely childish blackmail, with no effect. Kissinger and Brzezinski’s strategy of diplomatic “linkage” was the most obvious mark of Realpolitik. It sought, during the Cold War, to correlate political and military subjects in exchange for concessions—such as nuclear-arms control—by pressuring the Soviet Union to curb support for revolutionary movements in the Third World (Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Central America).
Thus, Brzezinski had forged in 1978 a linkage between the SALT II negotiations and Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa.
Closer to our own time, Kissinger’s determined backing of Pinochet’s regime in Chile aimed, by toppling Allende in 1973, to send a message to Europe’s Eurocommunists less than two years before the Portuguese Revolution and Franco’s death, a little over two years later. He feared an alleged extension of Soviet influence in Southern Europe, a key to access the Middle East theatre, without foreseeing that Berlinguer would break with the Kremlin by 1976.
The “linkage” presupposes some central actors who sometimes accept subordinating their immediate gains to the system’s overall stability. Why have the great powers renounced preserving the system’s stability, and what role do intermediate powers now play in this disruption?
Let us return to one of the diplomatic challenges of linkage: it imposes a framework on military nuclear matters. The last treaty still in force, New START on intercontinental-range weapons, expired on February 5, 2026. For the first time since 1972, no agreement regulates, controls, or limits its advancement. The possessed powers are hardening their arsenals, including France. China cites its delay relative to the United States to refuse any negotiation. Russia intends to include French and British capabilities to raise the threshold before any talks with Washington.
The end of American peace concerns the intermediate powers.
Example: Saudi Arabia has realized that American military bases in the Middle East were designed to protect Israel, not the Arabian Peninsula states. Hence a new defense agreement with Pakistan, which includes a nuclear dimension. Turkey probably has the second-largest army in NATO, yet its interests lie in Syria, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa. Somalia first, where an airbase is being built, while Washington has just decided to stop funding the African Union’s peacekeeping force (AUSOM).
The Kissingerian “linkage” consisted of integrating the adversary into the system to contain it, but—at least what the White House believes—that integration allowed China to prosper to the point of being able to turn the tables. The insurer would withdraw because its own economic model produced its rival.
The diplomacy of linkage originally concerned interactions between the two great powers only during the Cold War. Yet it produced two contradictory effects. The recognition of China by the United States in 1979, facilitated by Kissinger’s business, even before Pakistan’s channels, aimed to fracture a weakened Communist bloc; but it also encouraged China’s rise, confirmed by its entry into the WTO guided by Clinton, in the hope that a more developed China would give rise to a middle class eager for democracy.
We know what happened next. China’s growth has been spectacular. A unique rupture in world history—the exit from underdevelopment in a quarter of a century—serving the power, under the party’s rule, which holds that the welfare state is for the “lazy,” as Xi Jinping puts it. The social and political effects of this leap will weigh on the country’s trajectory.
That is precisely what fuels the American turn: society and political institutions alike end the 80-year Pax Americana cycle, whose instruments—free trade and freedom of the seas, collective security, and international institutions—no longer guarantee American supremacy. It is now seen as a bad bargain from which rivals, with China at the forefront, have taken advantage to impose their own terms.
The containment of Soviet expansion by Brzezinski produced, conversely, the desired result: by failing in Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed. Linkage thus destroyed a rival and produced the other.
You often cite Joe Biden’s remark from 2023: “Every six or eight generations, the world changes in a very short time.” Are we living one of those turning points?
Biden’s remarks invite us to recall a few precedents. The tragedies of World War II led the United States to establish the institutions of a liberal international order and, in Western Europe, to foster a democratically reconciled community of nations.
The Suez crisis in 1956 marked the end of British and French global dominance. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 offered the United States a moment of unipolarity, with its own driftings that led it to Iraq and endless wars in the Middle East.
From these three structural ruptures, one must ask what remains. These are moments when order reconfigures. The open question today is whether a new order will emerge, or merely a disorder.
If, as Adam Posen suggests, the United States have shifted from the role of “global guarantor” to that of a “racketeer,” can we expect China to become the new “guarantor,” or could it?
China’s ascent is spectacular: its gross domestic product has multiplied by more than fifteen since joining the WTO in 2001, under American impetus. It is a constructively engineered state—a good half of the Central Committee under Hu Jintao trained as engineers—and a planning state, where plans are implemented.
But it is premature to diagnose a translatio imperii, a transfer of power: China lacks an international reserve currency, a history of ordering the international system, and a strong social, cultural, and political appeal.
In what sense?
China does not seek to export its model or to defend universal values. It presents itself as a stabilizing pole and takes advantage of the White House’s missteps. With Trump, it mainly gained what it coveted: the status of a power equal in rank to the United States.
According to Metternich and Kissinger, international order rests on legitimacy, i.e., a minimal agreement among the great powers on the rules of the game. Could a China that refuses to submit to a universal framework, and defines itself for example as a civilizational state, be part of such a legitimacy arrangement, or could it only claim a power relation?
The Chinese, a people not given to messianism, are not missionaries. They export only their model of growth—directed and planned—to emerging countries. At the same time, they compete with the West, imitating to better surpass it. The Chinese fascination with the United States is striking: how can a country so young in world history become so powerful, they wonder? China wants to illustrate that modernization is possible without becoming Western; they follow, in this, the Meiji-era Japan and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, the great inspiration for Deng Xiaoping. They reject the idea of universal values (democracy, human rights, separation of powers, freedom of thought, speech, and writing).
The question of articulating the universalist impulse with the plurality of human experience is as old as philosophy. All cultures and all policies bear the mark of a universal aspiration and inspiration. One can advance, following Pierre Hassner , the idea of a plural universalism and remind that each cultural sphere has its invariants (in Europe, the legacies of Greece, Rome, Christianity, revolutions, civil codes, separation of powers, etc.).
In China, we note authority, merit through education (Confucius and the imperial examination system), the primacy of the collective (the old hydraulic-society mode of production), hence obedience. The Taiwanese difference is therefore intolerable for the CCP regime, which itself is not monolithic. The economist Gao Shanfan, who recently died of cancer at 55, dared to challenge the official growth figure, 5%, by stating at a Peterson Institute conference in Washington that it did not exceed 2%, a claim confirmed by the most informed experts. In 2024 he spoke of old people being full of vitality, young people not living, and the middle-aged class tired of life, meaning that the old had benefited from the economic boom while subsequent generations pay the price. It would be prudent to anticipate mid-term internal political tensions.
Let us turn to one of the central questions of your work, borders. How does this bifurcation threaten them directly?
It is one of the period’s most characteristic features: the critique by three categories of powers—established, declining, and rising—of the Westphalian notion of the straight-line border, in favor of a neo-imperial view of a state that is “without limits.”
“The empire has no limits,” one hears in Moscow: a power center surrounded by subordinate states, as they were in the past. As if the old English-American distinction between border, the line, and frontier, the zone, was reactivated through cultural, religious, civilizational arguments. In China, this distinction is drawn between the jiang (the delimiting border) and the yu (the space over which authority is exercised); Thailand has long rejected Western-style border delimitation methods.
The open question, today, is whether an order will emerge, or merely disorder.
Michel Foucher
As soon as the sovereignty of other states becomes a relative norm, borders become obstacles to transgress. When President Trump promises Canada’s Prime Minister the fate of an annexed state governor, it is a striking example of this rhetoric of “anything goes.” And this rhetoric is spreading: it is adopted by second- and third-order powers with strong regional ambitions—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Sudan, the Horn of Africa. The taboo on the inviolability of internationally recognized borders is increasingly challenged, and historical disputes resurface in the absence of a binding framework.
In the face of disputes like those between Thailand and Cambodia, you argue for a “technical” re-territorialization of the problem.
The only way out for two countries quarrelling over a boundary is to treat border-tracing issues as technical questions—tracings, reference cartography, prior agreements, best practices, precedents for settlement—and to handle them as such, with expert support. This is precisely what the bifurcation makes harder: when the civilizational narrative takes precedence over the treaty, one no longer negotiates a line but claims a sphere.
Faced with border disputes, two attitudes are possible: either political instrumentalization (where elections or power can be lost on these nationalist-tinged topics) or treating them as legal (delimitation) and practical (demarcation) issues.
Are we also witnessing a crisis of the international order that seems to return us to the twilight of the Westphalian system?
Yes, and this crisis is clarified precisely by a distinction long present within the Westphalian system: that of orders within power, introduced by Montesquieu and analyzed by Luigi Mascilli Migliorini in his remarkable study of Metternich.
What this tradition teaches us is that international balance is never built solely on the reciprocal relation between the major powers (the so-called first order) but requires integrating second- and third-order powers as well.
Yet this is exactly what the current order has ceased to do: by marginalizing the secondary powers, it has broken with this logic of global balance. An equilibrium that ignores the secondary powers cannot be achieved, and it is this instability that characterizes the crisis we are living, as in the twilight of the Westphalian system.
Perhaps here we find an answer to an earlier question. Has the “linkage” disappeared because the great powers can no longer discipline the secondaries, or because they themselves have adopted their fait accompli methods?
My sense is that it is both, unless we invent a third European path based on cooperation, co-decision, and the establishment of a collective framework.
What can France and Europe do in this context?
“In times of crisis, one seeks to return to yesterday’s world, whereas in times of shock one must move toward a new world.” In the case of established Europe, the question of its territorial limits and the organization of its security has been reactivated by the Ukraine war and the scheduled end of strategic American support. Therefore, it is necessary to offer new answers to these concrete elements of the great bifurcation underway. The aim is to organize established Europe—in the form of the European Union—facing revisionisms.
To replace the transatlantic link that has been ultimately weakened, it would be wise to build a European security and defense alliance, centered on a small group of countries with real military capabilities. Since Charles de Gaulle, successive French presidents have always alluded to the European dimension of France’s “vital interests” safeguarded by its independent strike force. In that spirit, it was a hard border, a distant heir to Vauban’s fortifications. This shows how much the world has changed since 2020. This defense alliance would be steered not by a single Washington-based leader but by a four-person executive. Bringing together national ambitions that are fragmented pieces of Europe and forming a genuine alliance with its partners to weigh on global affairs is the true challenge of the era ahead.
In this regard, it is essential that national defense-capacity strengthening efforts be framed. Just as German unification inserted itself into a European framework (the immediate accession of the former East German states, Kohl’s renunciation of the Deutsche Mark in favor of the euro but with a central bank based in Frankfurt), it is crucial that the epochal change—“Zeitenwende”—clearly articulated by former Chancellor Olaf Scholz three days after the fateful February 24, 2022, day of Russia’s general aggression against Ukraine—be managed through cooperation.
Yet the sovereign matters remain primarily a national responsibility. The risk of a distinct path, a possible Sonderweg, is real, according to Johann Wadephul .
One reason for this intent to assert primacy is the growing concern among our German friends about France’s political and financial situation, its reform incapacity, and the weakening of its geoeconomic position in the world that Emmanuel Macron’s strong diplomatic drive alone cannot compensate. How can Europe carry weight if one is not strong at home?