Pierre Lellouche was elected to the French National Assembly and served as Secretary of State for European Affairs and Secretary of State for Foreign Trade under President Nicolas Sarkozy. His book will offer historians valuable material for reflection when emotions finally yield to a sober analysis of the long march towards the Ukrainian catastrophe.

Lellouche argues that responsibility for the Ukraine crisis lies “equally with the errors of Western politicians” because they allowed emotion rather than “strategic reflection” to guide them (12). After all, “Russia’s red lines were known by everybody” since Ukrainian “independence in 1991” (41) when President George H. W. Bush warned that the US will support democracy in Ukraine but not “the promotion of suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred” (56). Before NATO offered membership to Ukraine in 2008, Lellouche writes, it should have answered Senator Sam Nunn’s famous question: “does this contribute or not to the security of the Alliance as a whole?” (92) The war hysteria gripping NATO today suggests that it did not. Lellouche finds NATO’s “policy incoherence” baffling because the same promises had already provoked the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 (65).

Lellouche sees Ukraine as a victim of both American and Russian “imperial ambitions” to “control the European continent,” in which the Europeans themselves were “indifferent, incoherent, and incapable of defining their own strategy” (85). As a French politician, Lellouche singles out Germany’s obsession with its economic “success story” as the reason for its “triple dependence” on the US for security, the Russians for cheap and reliable energy supplies, and the Chinese for exports (74–76). Lellouche openly expresses what so many European politicians refuse to admit about the consequences of an American pullback from NATO: the Russian threat is only an excuse because the real fear is that Germany will “reconstitute Mitteleuropa” and, given its historical proclivity to “vacillate” between “commerce” and “war,” will again become dangerous for Europe (298–99).

Moreover, “the global consequences of this war” are “more important than the war itself” because they accelerated the coming of the “post-Western world” in which China will emerge “as the principal dominant power” (13) and Europe will lose the most by having the EU bureaucracy grow “at the expense of the states” it governs (97). This is why the EU blew past all the “off-ramps” that the Russians offered—in Paris in December 2019, Moscow in December 2021, and Istanbul in March 2022 (102).

Even more alarming for Europe and the west is the feeling of resentment in the Global South, which the Europeans have ignored while they “gaze constantly at their European navel” (180). Lellouche marshals some sobering figures. In 1995, the G7’s combined GNP accounted for 45.3 percent of the world and those of the emerging E7 economies (China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Türkiye) accounted for 22.6 percent. By 2005, the G7’s GNP fell to 31.5 percent while the E7’s accounted for 36.3 percent. By 2025, this imbalance will increase to 50 versus 20 percent in favor of the E7 (185). Western hegemony is economically unsustainable. The west risks committing a historic blunder by ignoring “the South” the same way it did when it dismissed Russia as “a middle power of little importance” after the Cold War (188). Meanwhile, the sanctions on Russia have accelerated the construction “of a future alternative global system” in the guise of BRICS+ “that will weaken Western positions” (202). The sanctions that the west imposed on Russia may be a form of war “without body bags,” but they will undermine the US dollar in the long run (208–9).

Furthermore, while the war Ukraine may have marked “a separation between the West and the Global South,” the war in Gaza became “a definite divorce” (218). The redirection of weapons from Ukraine to Israel, which the Islamic world sees as a colonizing force, became the perfect recruitment and mobilization tool for Russia and China in the Islamic world. Lellouche thus sees the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts as the first manifestations of a “polywar” between the Global South and the west (227).

Once translated into English, this book will become a useful instruction tool for undergraduate and graduate classes for its insights into the Ukraine conflict as a manifestation of the profound geopolitical recalibration currently under way on our planet.