The Epstein affair is not what most people think. The Fortitude of the 21st century does not fabricate decoys: it lets the enemy’s wave strike, in order to capture its signature and turn its force back against its author. The other possibility is one I’m not ready to contemplate for now.
It has become a cliché in the media narrative to claim that Donald Trump knowingly profited from the “email affair” that weighed so heavily on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign—especially since he maintained a formal denial despite evidence of Russian interference. Yet this interpretation is misleading.
At its core, the episode was not of domestic origin: it was orchestrated by a foreign power—Russia—which exploited a genuine vulnerability and turned it into an informational weapon. Trump was not the architect. At most, he found himself in passive connivance, absorbing and leveraging the political fallout to his advantage, without controlling either its origin or its mechanisms.
Russia, for its part, could thus believe it held an advantage: a U.S. president, partially compromised by the wave, whom it could instrumentalize over time.
Seen cynically, history might conclude that democracy is structurally fragile, vulnerable to manipulation. But another interpretation—one embraced by this analysis—is possible: that of a strategic metamorphosis. America, endowed with rare institutional and technological intelligence, has not merely the capacity to endure, but to absorb.
Like certain ductile materials in physics, it can offer a penetrable pliancy: allowing the hostile wave to pass, integrating and analyzing it, to ultimately transform it into an instrument of detection and counterattack.
The so-called Epstein affair fits perfectly into this framework. Legally, the case is now virtually empty: Epstein’s death ended the prosecution, accessible legal documents remain fragmentary, and the evidentiary structure rests on snippets of testimony and partial archives. Yet the emotional weight is maximum: sexual exploitation of minors is an absolute trigger, impervious to nuance in public opinion.
This hypersensitivity makes it ideal fodder for a cognitive war.
This dynamic has been amplified by the QAnon movement, whose conspiracist ideology—by certain aspects often converging with Kremlin narratives (denouncing “corrupt elites” and the “Deep State”, exalting the fight against occult forces, rejecting democratic institutions)—has strongly conditioned a segment of the Republican electorate.
The success of the film Sound of Freedom, widely instrumentalized within these circles, has sacralized the theme of pedocriminality as a political totem. It is precisely this framing that is reactivated in the Epstein affair: an already primed public was mobilized to see, not Trump as champion of the fight, but as a target ripe for vengeance.
How to defeat—assuming that some level of the state is sufficiently vigilant to identify and comprehend the complexity of maneuvers deployed against it—a scheme so pernicious unless by being even more pernicious, even more permeable, even more devious, even more fanciful and caricatural, and—most of all—even weaker than the weakness his or their enemies attribute to him?
In this light, peripheral elements—Elon Musk as the free electron and his hold on X, the spectacular spat with Trump, the politico-media psychodrama, and the repeated calls to publish the Epstein’s files—function as stimuli and catalysts. They sustain the noise, but also produce the raw data necessary for cognitive seismography: measuring the tremors, locating the centers, identifying the orchestrators.
What at first appears as a weakness in American democracy can thus be understood as an opportunity: transforming a hostile wave into a tool of detection, and returning to its authors the very signature of their operations to banish them, for good, from the community of nations.
Doctrinal Consequences:
Toward a 21st Century Fortitude
The Epstein affair illustrates a fundamental strategic principle: a hostile wave can be turned if it is absorbed, analyzed, and restituted within a controlled framework. This calls for envisioning a doctrine of cognitive warfare not only in defensive terms, but in counter-offensive terms. America, if it agrees to “lend its surface” to the wave, can make it the equivalent of an inverse radar: let it strike in order to better locate the enemy.
This is precisely what Operation Fortitude was in the 20th century. In 1944, the Allies created, out of nothing, a phantom army with inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, and double agents in order to mislead Nazi command about the landing site. Fortitude relied on the art of the simulacrum.
But in the 21st century—in the cognitive sphere—the equivalent does not lie in manufacturing a falsehood; it lies in making visible what is hidden behind the falsehood: amplifying not the simulacrum, but the signature of the interference.
In this perspective, a cognitive Fortitude must be timed to the clock of the attack. Adversarial informational operations are rhythmic—they feature peaks (coordinated triggering), plateaus (organic amplification), and aftershocks (normalization). America can synchronize its response to that tempo, using its sensitive plates (Trump, Musk, or other high-resonance figures) as sensors.
The goal is not to avoid the tremor, but to record it with precision and exploit its data.
Three practical applications follow:
- Detection and Attribution: mapping in real time the networks that activate during an “Epstein peak” or equivalent; identifying foreign relays, proxies, and suspicious ideological convergences (e.g., QAnon / Russian narratives).
- Preemption and Inoculation: using the wave to publicly demonstrate the method; “break the spell” of manipulation by exposing its mechanics.
- Strategic Redirection: redirecting the charge of the wave back at its initiator by showing the public that it is hostile powers exploiting its fears and anger.
Thus, the cognitive wave that was meant to weaken democracy becomes the raw material of strategic superiority. Cognitive warfare, like conventional war, is also won through illusion and reversal. But the illusion here is no longer in the manufactured object (Fortitude and its inflatable tanks); it lies in the mirror held up to the adversary: making them believe they manipulate, while they are revealing themselves and leaving traces of their crime everywhere.
It is, according to this analysis, the most probable scenario: America possesses the elements of the chain of custody of this assault on cognitive sovereignty. It is not impossible that its seismographs have already recorded other surprising interferences, warranting attentive and critical reading—even from a historic ally caught with its fingers in the cookie jar.
In this context, Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative proposal says something very precious between the lines. Neither Beijing nor New Delhi can—of that I am convinced and confident—tolerate a world in which war takes this perverse form, no longer as the continuation of politics by other means, to borrow Clausewitz, but as the annihilation of all politics in favor of ontological and political chaos.
The UN General Assembly is likely to spark fireworks. If it does not do so there, with the fates of Ukraine and Palestine on the agenda, it never will. It is time to ignite sparks.
En attendant la Renaissance 