THOMAS GOMART: Who Controls Whom? The New Global Balance of Power

ELI5/TLDR

Thomas Gomart, head of the French Institute for International Relations, argues we have left the era where the right question was “who is winning?” and entered one where the better question is “who controls whom?” Power today is less about visible victory and more about the asymmetric dependencies you’ve quietly built into someone else’s life. He builds the talk around six duels — Putin/Zelensky, Netanyahu/Khamenei, Xi/Modi, Trump/von der Leyen, IPCC/Fox News, Vatican/Silicon Valley — to map a world where the liberal order’s referees have walked off, where Europe is steadily being demoted from author of rules to local actor, and where the contest for who gets to define moral authority has moved from cathedrals to data centres.

The Full Story

A framework for an accelerating world

Gomart writes books out of urgency. He served on the committee that drafted France’s 2017 strategic review under Macron and walked away convinced Europe was sleepwalking. His framework rests on three observations that he treats as load-bearing. First, the environment is degrading faster than technology can repair it — and he’s deeply suspicious of the “solutionism” that says more tech will fix everything, because it positions Europe as the loser in a contest it shouldn’t be running. Second, the question of war or peace, which Europeans had retired into the basement, is back upstairs. Third, every interdependence is asymmetric, which means the abstract noun “globalisation” hides a very specific question: who is depending on whom, and by how much.

Two writers anchor his thinking. Benjamin Constant, the early-19th-century liberal, for whom the goal of politics is to keep tyranny away. Lenin, for whom the goal of politics is to destroy the enemy. Gomart sees the contest between these two minds as alive and unresolved — and he notes that Putin keeps quoting Chernyshevsky, who shaped Lenin. Lenin’s pet question, kto kogo — “who beats whom?” — is the seed of the book’s title, with one rephrasing: in a world of dense dependencies, “control” is more useful than “victory.”

Three days that named a book

The book opens with three consecutive days in February 2025. Day one: Munich, listening to JD Vance tell Europeans their problem is migrants, not Russia, and watching him refuse to meet Chancellor Scholz while accepting AfD’s Alice Weidel. Gomart says it felt like sitting in Moscow in 2012 — the same arguments, recycled. Day two: Timothy Snyder warning Europeans that this US administration intends to come for their speech laws — DSA, DMA, the regulatory scaffolding around information. Day three: Saint-Denis, north of Paris, the episcopal ordination of a 48-year-old bishop, in a cathedral that holds the bones of French kings, surrounded by one of the country’s most ethnically diverse and poorest neighbourhoods. From these three frames he argues the West is undergoing a transatlantic schism on Catholicism itself.

He then borrows a line from Constant — “war and trade are only two ways to reach the same aim, which is to possess what you desire” — and uses it to split the world into three: war, trade, desire.

Putin and Zelensky, or the arithmetic of attrition

Two men, both 1m70, both Russian-speaking, who have met exactly once — Paris, 2019, hosted by Merkel and Macron. Watch the body language in that footage and the war is already there. Three things matter now, in April 2026. First, Zelensky is in a stronger international position than he was in February 2025, when he was humiliated in the Oval Office by Trump and Vance — Ukrainian resistance has been a strategic surprise. Second, Russia displays military inefficiency and diplomatic efficiency: most of the world (“the transactional South” — Gomart prefers this to “global South”) condemns Russia but refuses to sanction it, framing the war as a European regional problem the Europeans should clean up themselves. Third, the change in US tone amounts to “ideological collusion between the White House and the Kremlin.” His policy conclusion, drawn from a separate report: Europeans should prepare to handle “the historical Russian issue” largely on their own through the next decade.

Netanyahu and Khamenei, or how a small country gets a superpower to do its bombing

Both men carry old arm injuries, and the resemblance ends there. Netanyahu is, in Gomart’s phrase, “a pure product of globalisation” — gave up his US citizenship to enter Israeli diplomacy, fluent in New York. Khamenei, after 1989, travelled abroad once. To North Korea. Three observations on the present picture. Netanyahu convinced Trump to bomb Iran in June 2025, something Trump initially didn’t want to do — the depth of US-Israeli military integration in the Iran operation has no historical precedent, and that depth may itself produce divergence later, especially as criticism of Israel grows inside the MAGA universe. The Israeli army (citizens, reservists, six fronts at once) shows efficiency where the Russian army (treating soldiers as “little wood,” in Gomart’s phrase) does not. The blockade in the Strait of Hormuz is, he argues, the single most consequential thing happening for the future of globalisation, because globalisation is in the end a maritime phenomenon and depends on freedom of navigation.

Xi and Modi, and the end of European centrality

Gomart wants Europeans to feel small for a minute. India and China together have over three billion people. In 1985, when both were entering global markets, they were 5% of world GDP. They are now 22%. The relationship between them is asymmetric in two ways: China’s economy is roughly five times India’s, and four-plus decades of Chinese military investment has produced a genuine imbalance with India. They are two nuclear powers, two naval powers, who came close to open war in the Himalayas in 2020. China is ageing fast. India will likely be the world’s third-largest economy around 2030 and has two more decades of demographic dividend to spend.

His read on Indian neutrality is sharper than the comfortable European version: India is not a Kantian neutral. India is a hard nationalist, will use Hinduism against its Muslim minority, will fight Pakistan, and will not play the role of “kind India” the way some hoped China would play “kind China” before 2008.

Trump and von der Leyen, or the politics of acceptance

The Turnberry agreement of July 2025, struck on Trump’s Scottish golf course, was — Gomart says — “a political and intellectual victory for the US administration,” because European leadership accepted Trump’s reading of world trade. The cost was framed as the price of keeping the US on Ukraine. Weeks later Putin was warmly received in Washington. When European leaders, including von der Leyen, then visited the White House, Trump told her in front of the others: “you are the most powerful one.” Read it however you like; Gomart treats it as a symptom of Europe’s reduced authorship.

IPCC versus Fox News, or science losing the cognitive battle

The IPCC was created in 1988. By a strict methodology, it builds scientific consensus on climate; the Paris Agreement of 2015 was its temporary peak. Fox News was founded in 1996 by Murdoch, with Roger Ailes (d. 2017) as the operational mind. Gomart frames the contest as scientific discourse versus opinion-discourse-with-a-licence-for-fake-news, and notes — almost in passing — that AI is dragging us further into a “cognitive sphere where fake is more numerous than truth.”

Vatican and Silicon Valley, or the return of pope-versus-emperor

This is where Gomart is most interesting. He was struck by how many leaders, after Trump’s re-election, performed a strategy of prostration toward him — except Pope Francis, whose post-election letter to American bishops he calls “a turning point.” JD Vance arrived at the Vatican last year with 40 cars to be received by Pope Francis the day before the Pope died. Gomart treats the visit as a literal restaging of the medieval drama between pope and emperor. Then comes the conclave, which AI cannot predict — he marks this as not trivial — and the election of Leo, an American-Peruvian with deep European roots. His question is direct: will Leo be to the United States what John Paul II was to the USSR?

Hovering behind this is Peter Thiel, whose intellectual influence on JD Vance Gomart traces partly to René Girard, the French philosopher who taught at Stanford. Thiel has now started speaking in religious register: the Antichrist, in his recent telling, is whoever wants to regulate technology. Gomart adds that Girard’s actual students consider Thiel’s reading of their teacher partly off — Thiel borrows the vocabulary but selects the parts he likes.

The deeper move under all this: Silicon Valley has discovered it needs moral authority — the way the Manhattan Project scientists discovered, mid-build, that they needed it — and is now reaching for the language of religion to either claim it or neutralise it. Behind the visible Vatican-versus-Silicon-Valley fight, he says, may be a quieter convergence between Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party: both believe in using technology to atomise individuals into bubbles and thereby foreclose collective action.

The shape of power has changed

In the discussion, Ivan Krastev (the host) presses a point Gomart accepts: power used to mean making others do what you want. Power today increasingly means transferring your problem onto someone else. America is not unblocking Hormuz; it is comfortable with the blockade because it produces gas and oil and the burden falls on Europe and China. “The dollar is our currency and your problem,” John Connally told the Europeans in 1971, and 50 years on this is the operating system, not a bug.

Gomart adds a second layer: there is visible power and invisible control, and Netanyahu’s ability to control Trump matters more than the unlimited use of force itself. Krastev adds a third: diplomacy is increasingly being run by private middlemen — Witkoff and Kushner on the American side, Dmitriev (whose wife is best friend to Putin’s daughter) on the Russian, Erdogan’s family network, Modi. It is “back to the 19th century.” Europe, lacking personalised leadership, is structurally locked out of this register.

Key Takeaways

“Who controls whom” is the upgraded question. Lenin’s kto kogo assumed pure victory. In a world of asymmetric interdependence, control — quiet, structural, sticky — beats victory. Sanctions, currency, undersea cables, chip foundries, freight corridors are the actual instruments.
The transactional South is not the global South. Most of the world condemned Russia and refused to sanction it. Frame the rest of the world as transactional, not aligned, and you read it more accurately.
Three nuclear ages. Cold War (two players), post-Soviet (disarmament + nonproliferation), and now a third with nine nuclear states where the three most heavily sanctioned — Russia, Iran, North Korea — all have a nuclear card. North Korea is the model: a garrison state that became a nuclear-and-ballistic power in one generation at the expense of its own population, and now sits beyond meaningful sanction.
Russia’s nuclear taboo is degrading culturally, not doctrinally. Russian state media now routinely names Warsaw, Berlin, Paris as targets to be nuked. The doctrine hasn’t changed; the discourse has, and that’s its own data point.
5% to 22% in 40 years. India + China share of world GDP, 1985 to today. China is roughly 5x India’s economy. India’s demographic dividend has two more decades; China is ageing now.
Macron’s three nuclear inflections. Stay on minimal deterrence (“strict sufficiency”) but stop publishing warhead numbers, like the UK. Combine conventional and nuclear forces “shoulder to shoulder.” Open a strategic nuclear dialogue with eight European partners — quiet diplomacy, not bluster.
Catholicism is shrinking in Europe and growing everywhere else. France went from ~90% of the population baptised in the 1970s to ~30% today. Catholicism is dynamic in Latin America, Africa, North America (driven heavily by Latino migrants — note the paradox with white-identity politics), and China.
Palantir as the first openly ideological company. Gomart claims Palantir tells employees explicitly they’re working against Muslims and Chinese. Marketed positioning, not just contracts.
Diplomacy by middlemen. Witkoff, Kushner, Dmitriev, Erdogan family — peace deals negotiated relative-to-relative, with no shared standards across conflicts. What you do in Ukraine has no bearing on what you do in Gaza. Europe, lacking equivalent personal ties to Trump, is structurally absent.

Claude’s Take

Gomart is the real thing. French strategic-studies institutional grandee, civilian on the team that wrote France’s military doctrine, did the unfashionable work of spending months on a French frigate to learn what the world looks like from a navy officer’s chair. The book under discussion does the unglamorous job of building a framework — three trends, two thinkers, six duels — and then walking through it. The framework holds up better than most because he keeps the unit of analysis at the right level: not “great powers” in the abstract, but specific people in specific dyads with specific dependencies.

The strongest parts are the readings of asymmetry that you don’t hear on Anglo-American podcasts. The transactional South distinction is sharp. The observation that Russia’s military inefficiency is being papered over by its diplomatic efficiency catches something most analysts miss. The pope-versus-emperor frame for Vance’s Vatican visit is the kind of long-arc historical instinct French strategic culture still produces and most others don’t. The Palantir-as-ideological-company line is the kind of thing you should hold lightly — he didn’t substantiate it on stage — but it points at a real shift in how some tech firms market their identity.

Where to be careful. The “Israel controls Trump” framing is a useful corrective to the “Trump controls everyone” frame, but it’s a single instrument, not a theory. The Vatican-as-counter-weight argument leans on a sample of one — Pope Francis’s letter — and a hopeful read of Leo XIV. The framework treats Europe as a coherent strategic actor more than the evidence supports; he’s a French strategist writing partly for French readers, and the implicit “Europe = France-shaped” shows. His read on India as hard nationalist is correct and a useful counter to the wishful European version, but he doesn’t engage with India’s actual hedging behaviour with much texture.

The most quotable claim, and the one to sit with: power used to mean making others do what you want; it now increasingly means handing your problem to someone else. If true, then a great deal of policy commentary that asks “what is X trying to achieve?” is asking the wrong question. The right question is “whose lap has X just dropped this in, and can they refuse it?”

Score: 8. Dense, structured, primary-source thinking from someone who has read the rooms and read the archives. A little Eurocentric in its concerns even while diagnosing Eurocentrism as a problem, but that’s a small tax for the quality of the rest.