Pascal Lottaz’s essay is a leap forward for international relations. By discarding the outdated "billiard ball" model, the essay moves much closer to observing the mechanisms of power and geopolitics. I want to highlight some points:

The Nation-State Is Not the Highest Unit of Analysis:

The Realist billiard-ball model is rejected in favor of a civilizational body politic that operates above the level of individual states. I would add: the empire is not a country. It is a transnational class project that uses states as platforms. Likewise, what I call the Bunker State (as its latest iteration) is not a nation either, but a network.

Coordination Without Central Command:

The One West does not require a world government or a hidden master plan. Its unity is "organic," emerging from shared assumptions, institutional habits, and feedback loops. This is akin to my argument of "Planning, Not Masterplans": the imperial apparatus produces strategic coherence without a single author or a single document through continuous, iterative institutional planning guided by a shared "meta-ideology." The NATO Lessons Learned Handbook, the Brookings reports, the Naval Postgraduate School seminars—these are some of the institutional mechanisms that generate coordination without central command today.

The Hypocrisy Is the System:

Lottaz argues that Western double standards are an immune function of the civilizational body. Those inside the membrane are interpreted through the language of security and necessity. Those outside are interpreted through the language of aggression and barbarism. I delineate something similar with the Bunker State. However, I’d add that the membrane is not so much civilizational as it is class-based. The transnational ruling class protects its own, wherever they are, and pathologizes those who threaten its interests, wherever they are. Plus, treaties, international law, and human rights discourse are tactical weapons used to manage the imperial cage.

Internal Conflict Does Not Mean Collapse:

Lottaz notes that the One West has fought internal wars—Britain against Germany, France against Britain—without breaking the deeper civilizational continuity. Which also means that internal tensions within the imperial apparatus are not signs of imminent collapse but organs competing for resources within the same body.

The Functional Elite's Impunity:

Lottaz closes with a Bunker State insight: "Europe deindustrializing and harming itself doesn't matter much, as it's all still in the service of the larger project. Germany might lose. But what does Friedrich Merz care? He is part of the One West and even if his entire state burns, he'll have a cozy job somewhere with BlackRock in New York." This is the Bunker State in a sentence: the immiseration of the national population is acceptable to the functional elite because their class position is secured by integration into the transnational imperial apparatus. In other words, the ruling strata no longer rely on the material health of “their” domestic nation-states.

I would add and deepen some points that are sketched in this essay:

The Class Foundation: Whose Body Is This?

The One West is described as a civilizational body politic. But: whose body? Whose project? The "shared genetic code" is, I would argue, social class-specific. It is the shared assumptions, interests, and habits of a transnational ruling class formed through colonialism, slavery, capitalist expansion, and imperial competition. The masses of the One West are inside the body, but they are not its beneficiaries. In fact, any resistance to that project has been continuously suppressed and crushed time and again. The "One West" is the (historically formed) transnational capitalist ruling strata operating under a shared total ideology (à la Karl Mannheim: Elites act in synchrony because they are subject to the same institutional, ideological, and material framework conditions). The transnational elite has decoupled itself from the rest of the population. Parts of functional and ruling elites in the Global Majority are often more deeply integrated into this meta-framework than the working class itself. The true "membrane" runs not only and exclusively horizontally between West and East, but also vertically.

The Processual Character: The Body Is Being Restructured Constantly:

The organism metaphor is elegant but static. It describes the One West as it appears, with its functional differentiation and its membrane. But the organs are being actively restructured. Europe, described as a "regulatory and economic organ," is being stripped of that function right now. The US ruling strata (specifically its military and parts of the corporate wing) through the push for "interoperability," through the far-right parties that attack EU regulations, is dismantling European regulatory autonomy and reassigning Europe as pure military muscle. This is a coerced transformation (inside the same body, yes). If we consider the planning process, we can capture this processual character.

The Nervous System:

The United States is described as the "central military and strategic organ." The US is currently akin to the central nervous system, the node through which command, control, communications, and coordination flow. The placement of US personnel in allied military commands, the demand for technological interoperability, and the integration of allied forces into US-controlled software and standards are, in the language of anatomical metaphors, nervous system integration. The US retains the brain, the nerves, and the command. The allies will be providing the bodies. And when I say allies, I don’t mean only NATO, only Europe, but all the so-called allies in all the global “theaters.”

The Membrane as a Tool of Elite Capture, Not Just Exclusion:

Lottaz's membrane distinguishes self from non-self. It determines who is inside the body and who is outside. But your fragmentationist grand strategy reveals that the membrane is also a weapon. The empire actively works to bring its targets (or portions of it) inside, but on terms of subordination. The membrane is permeable, but only in the direction of portions of ruling elites who accept integration and subordination. Those who resist are targeted. Which means the membrane, too, is dynamic.

The Coercive Dimension:

Lottaz emphasizes integration, coordination, and shared civilizational DNA. He rightly rejects the search for a single controlling center. Yet, Europe is not becoming a military muscle solely because it shares a civilizational project with the United States (even though that is the fertile substrate). It is becoming a military muscle because it has been coerced into it slowly over decades. The US controls the security architecture, the financial rails, the technological standards, and the narrative. A European state that tries to break away would face sanctions, asset freezes, and the full spectrum of hybrid warfare. The integration is enforced through a multi-layered cage (through which parts of European elites benefit from and enforce, as well, there are no monolithic social classes). Essentially, the imperial anatomy is brutally hierarchical and processual (just like its meta-ideology, or “shared genetic code”), the US power elites are actively seeking to destroy European regulatory autonomy to force total market compliance.

The Bunker State as the Internal Form of the One West:

One could say The Bunker State is the structural logic of the One West's internal governance. As the external project of imperial extraction becomes more difficult—as multipolarity constrains the One West's ability to dominate the periphery—the internal project of elite consolidation intensifies. Populations are securitized. Welfare states are dismantled. The body turns inward, tightening its grip on its own populations.

The Total Ideology: How the Body Reproduces Itself:

Lottaz invokes a "shared genetic code" that allows the organs to function without central command. The concept of "total ideology" or "meta-framework" of the power elites provides what could be termed the content of that code. It is not just a civilizational inheritance, I’d argue. Instead, it is an actively maintained ideological infrastructure—think tanks, media platforms, academic disciplines, elite forums, cognitive warfare capabilities (of course, since the inception of capitalism and through colonialism, those tools of active maintenance of the ideological infrastructure were different, e.g., through tailor-made religion)—that socializes members into a shared worldview, reproduces threat perceptions, and legitimizes the hierarchy. The body does have an ideological apparatus that continuously produces and reproduces the distinction between self and non-self.

Thus, there is no natural evolution; the One West was forcibly forged through hard material interests, imperial wars, institution-building (IMF, World Bank, NATO,…etc.), and the violent but also slow and silent dismantling of alternatives. Dichotomous ideologies, imperial versions of religions, and capital are the architects. Or in the language of biology, are the oxygen, the hydrogen.

Lottaz has provided a valuable anatomy of the One West as a civilizational body politic. Still, there is a need to understand its physiology and reveal whose body it is.

Lastly, the "West" is a single, transnational organism. But this organism has an inflamed nervous system (currently, the US-led ruling strata) that is actively extracting the lifeblood from its own peripheral organs (e.g., Europe) while using the promise of integration (plus coercion) to spread a virus to the elites of those it perceives to be its rivals.