For Spotlight, FRANCE 24 François Picard is pleased to welcome Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Autocracy, Inc. According to Applebaum, the upheaval in American diplomacy and foreign policy transcends any one administration. She describes a full-fledged transformation in the way the United States exerts power, pivoting away from leadership of a democratic alliance and toward a transactional, mafia-style politics that fuses ideology, private economic interests, personal relationships and geopolitical leverage.

The consequences are already extending beyond Washington. Canada, for example, has begun taking a far more proactive approach to strengthening its economic and political ties with the EU, India and China, as Carney actively seeks to reduce the country’s dependence on its once-cozy, decades-long relationship with the United States.

That shift is not limited to the American continent either. European governments are now being forced to confront a far less predictable and increasingly adversarial ally. At the same time, far-right movements abroad are finding new opportunities for political alignment as the United States embraces a harder-line, populist and increasingly autocratic style of politics at home and abroad. The resulting uncertainty is pushing countries around the world to quietly explore alternative economic and security relationships that leave them less dependent on an increasingly combative and impulsive American partner.

What makes Applebaum’s argument particularly striking is that she presents these developments as both a revolution and the beginnings of a counter-revolution. Trump’s political model has imitators, she argues, but it is also provoking fierce resistance. As confidence in American reliability declines, governments are beginning to hedge their bets for the long term, diversify their partnerships and imagine a world in which Washington is no longer automatically at the centre of the geopolitical universe.

This may not be the “America First” that US President Donald Trump envisioned. In Applebaum’s telling, we are no longer navigating only the uncharted waters of what America itself might be becoming, both at home and on the world stage. We may also be witnessing the emergence of a new world order in which the United States occupies a diminished role, brought about, paradoxically, by a fiercely isolationist policy intended to reassert American dominance.

In seeking to make the world bend once again to American power and self-described exceptionalism, the United States may instead be accelerating the world’s search for ways to live without it.

In this edition, FRANCE 24’s François Picard speaks to investigative journalist Emanuel Maiberg, Co-founder of 404 Media. As we embark on AI's uncharted waters, Maiberg has made a most unexpected discovery: the mass acquisition, dismemberment and scanning of rare books for use as training data. His investigation reveals a globalised and deliberately opaque supply chain in which books purchased through anonymous marketplaces arrive at large-scale scanning facilities, where their bindings are removed so that pages can be processed at great speed.

Maiberg’s analysis reaches far beyond the striking dystopian image of books being destroyed. What happens when knowledge changes form, changing ownership and accessibility? A book can circulate between readers, libraries and generations. Once destroyed and absorbed into a proprietary AI system, however, its contents survive virtually, encoded within a model whose outputs and rules of access are controlled by a private company. The paradox is striking: an industry seeking to ingest ever more human knowledge may simultaneously erase the very sources of that knowledge.

Maiberg does not to portray this process as a diabolical campaign to rid society of books. His more unsettling interpretation is that the destruction is driven by something more mundane: indifference. In the race to build increasingly capable AI systems, books become inputs to be optimized, and their destruction becomes an acceptable operational cost. That logic, he argues, belongs to a broader concentration of informational power already visible in search engines and social media. And now AI is taking it to a whole new level.

The investigation raises a larger question in the world of culture and academia: as more of the world's accumulated knowledge is mediated through AI systems, who controls the infrastructure through which that knowledge can be accessed?

François Picard is pleased to welcome Andrew Weissmann, Author, Professor at NYU School of Law, and former General Counsel of the FBI. He argues that as political deception and deliberate falsehoods become normalized, and politically useful, it erodes any trust we have in our government and our institutions. Drawing on his book, "Liar’s Kingdom", Weissmann questions why political leaders are above the law in the United States, while ordinary citizens risk serious legal consequences for making intentionally false statements.

For Weissmann, repeated political deception can foment mistrust in the system, operating alongside an expansion of executive power precisely when traditional checks and balances are under strain. Looking comparatively at Brazil, Britain, France and Germany, he asks whether democracies can impose meaningful consequences for intentional political lies without sacrificing freedom of expression. Ultimately, we find ourselves facing a veritable constitutional crisis: when does protecting political speech at all costs threaten democracy and leave democratic institutions vulnerable to the whims of autocratic rulers who dismiss the rule of law?