the essential
At the end of the 20th century, we thought we were done with war. But she is still there and she has changed. With “The Strategic Awakening” Jean-Baptiste Jeangène-Vilmer gives us a powerful analysis on the entry into a new geopolitical era and on the challenges for which we must prepare.
Since 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, war has returned to the gates of Europe. Other wars – Gaza, South Lebanon, etc. – are redefining global balances by adding a hybrid side to conflicts which requires us to fundamentally rethink what war is today. This is what Jean-Baptiste Jeangène-Vilmer proposes to do in his latest work “The Strategic Awakening. Essay on permanent war.
Former director of the Strategic Research Institute of the Military School (IRSEM) from 2016 to 2022, jurist, philosopher, today French Ambassador to Vanuatu – in this crucial Indo-Pacific where France wants to be “a power of 'balance' according to Emmanuel Macron – Jean-Baptiste Jeangène-Vilmer gives us a powerful analysis on the entry into a new geopolitical era.
“What happened to the war? It has become permanent, in a double sense. On the one hand because, contrary to the impression given by a certain number of works which until recently announced “the end of the war”, it has never ceased to be. It had not disappeared, it was persistent; the difference is that it becomes prevalent, resurgent – in the literal sense of rising to the surface. On the other hand, the war is permanent in the sense that it now affects everyone, everywhere, all the time,” he explains.
DR
Already recognized for his work on Chinese influence operations and the world of intelligence, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène-Vilmer paints an uncompromising picture of our era marked by the return of high-intensity conflicts at the same time as the arrival of ruptures increasingly accessible technologies. We saw in Ukraine the importance of drones and the digitization of the battlefield or in Israel the use of artificial intelligence to determine targets.
The observation is clear: the West fell asleep in the illusion of perpetual peace after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A dogmatic sleep brutally interrupted by the resurgence of international tensions and the emergence of new forms of conflict. Jeangène-Vilmer precisely dissects the mechanisms of this “permanent war” which is now being played out on all fronts: military, economic, informational and cybernetic.
Gone are the days of conflicts clearly demarcated in space and time, we have entered the era of this hybrid war where the boundaries between peace and conflict are blurred, where the adversary strikes without ever fully revealing itself. “In practice, this amounts to the weaponization of everything: the economy, energy, hunger, fishing, refugees, information, law, health, etc. Nothing escapes it. »
“Win the war before the war”
His expertise in the field of intelligence, demonstrated with Paul Charon in his work “The worlds of intelligence” (Ed. PUF), allows him to illuminate the gray areas of this permanent war by highlighting the crucial role of the services intelligence in the detection and neutralization of hybrid, but also terrorist, threats.
The “strategic awakening” that he calls for to “win the war before the war” – “If you want peace, prepare for war” – is not just a simple military rearmament. This is a global awareness, a complete overhaul of our approach to national and international security. Our democracies, founded on transparency and debate, must learn to defend themselves against adversaries who use these values as loopholes to exploit.
The work ends by mobilizing several experts such as Michel Goya, Alexandre Jubelin and Béatrice Heuser who imagine the world in 2029. It's tomorrow…
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