Will the United States, Israel and their allies win over the Iranian terrorist regime, or will they have to resign themselves to a status quo that allows the regime to reconstitute its forces? To ask the question of the fate of weapons in this way is to confuse noise with history, stage with backstage. For the real winner of this war will be neither the United States nor Iran. It will be China.
To understand this, we need only recall a constant in geopolitical history: when a superpower is attacked by a rival, it is almost always a third power, which has stayed out of the conflict, that ends up winning.
Thus, when the France of Louis XIV, then that of Louis XV, exhausted itself trying to crush the United Provinces, then the leading Western power, warring over Spanish successions and squandering its finances, it was Great Britain, cautiously on the sidelines, busy trading, that picked up the inheritance and built the world’s first empire. A century later, when Wilhelmian Germany challenged Britain’s maritime and colonial dominance, it was the deliberately isolationist United States that took advantage of the situation to industrialize at breakneck speed and take over from the superpower. The logic is implacable: the power that fights uses up its resources, its youth, its creativity and its finances. The power that observes accumulates capital, technology, patents and influence.
And what about today? The war in Iran could be the final ruin of America. The first week alone of the conflict with Iran is estimated to have cost the federal budget around $7 billion, including $4 billion in munitions alone, without the American arms industry being able to produce as much as is needed. What’s more, most of the country’s financial resources are being monopolized to build giant data centers, which the White House claims, without proof, will guarantee “American dominance in artificial intelligence”.
While the United States embarks on a spending spree with no coherent plan and in the sole interest of a few billionaires, and wastes critical financial resources and materials in a war with uncertain goals, China is training engineers, building robots, installing solar farms, forging trade agreements on every continent and waiting for history to once again prove patience right and make it the world’s leading power.
And it makes no secret of the fact: in its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), it has just announced seven priorities, forming a genuine civilizational project that blurs the boundaries between civilian and military technologies: artificial intelligence applied to industry; humanoid robotics; brain-machine interfaces; quantum computing; advanced semiconductors; 6G; and finally, nuclear fusion and energy transition. Behind each of these pillars lie direct military applications: for example, humanoid robotics will enable the production of combat drones, autonomous land systems, mine-clearing robots and sentry robots. Quantum computing will play a decisive role in military cryptography and submarine detection. And the brain-machine interface, which already enables paralytics to control robotic arms, will soon enable a human being to control a machine, a fighter plane or a drone by thought alone, without language, without keyboard, without screen, using the fantastic potential of the human brain, which processes billions of pieces of information in parallel – something no current computer can simulate – and which will enable it to win the fantastic battle that is beginning to control people’s attention.
The United States, caught up in its fantasies of LLMs and data centers, is far removed from all this.
Europe still has the means to avoid being dragged into the American debacle: being close to the Ukrainian front line, it can develop far better than the United States the armaments needed for modern warfare, which the Americans sorely lack in the face of Iran. This means developing intelligent drones rather than the next generation of combat aircraft, and attention-control systems rather than nuclear weapons, which are already outnumbered.
It also has all the means to engage, in a serious and ongoing way, in the fields that China has just made its priorities, such as robotics and its interfaces with the human brain. To achieve this, China’s new five-year plan needs to be studied in all European universities, companies and administrations. Not to imitate China (its political model is neither exportable nor desirable), but to understand what a civilization strategy is, and to have the courage to build one.
Europe is also uniquely placed to develop essential strategic areas that China and the United States are neglecting: ecological security, healthy food and drinking water. Sovereignty and power in the 21st century will be measured in more than missiles, microprocessors and robots. It will be measured in liters of available drinking water per capita, in agricultural yields without dependence on nitrogen fertilizers, and in soil biodiversity. To win the war of the day after tomorrow, we need to care about health, food, water, biodiversity and life. If it does, Europe could transform these ecological challenges into jobs and industries of the future, such as intelligent water and waste management, soil regeneration, seeds adapted to climate change and circular food systems.
But we need a civilization project and a real mobilization to defend it.