The US-Centrism Fallacy

The US habit to understand World Politics as a function of its foreign policy is about to hit a new reality.

It recently dawned on me just how deeply even scholarly thinking in the US is rooted in the idea that everything begins and ends with the “indispensable nation.”

Take Professor John Mearsheimer—a man whom I deeply admire not only for his analysis but for the moral and intellectual courage to stand by his theories. And I would really like to stress this point. Mearsheimer displayed tremendous courage when publishing together with Stephen Walt their now classic work on the Israel Lobby. They took in great heat for their thesis, but they never retracted a word. Mearsheimer also vehemently opposes the Gaza Genocide in unequivocal terms, and keeps speaking out about it in writing and on YouTube.

Mearsheimer also constantly dares to make predictions based on his realist theory of international relations. He has accurately predicted, for instance, the catastrophe that would follow from constant NATO enlargement or the failure to keep Ukraine neutral. He is through and through a realist, even in the sense that he tries to understand the actual military capabilities of the US and the asymmetries between offence, defence, and other factors that all impact military outcomes, leading him to oppose most US wars of the recent past.

American Quintessentialism

However, even in his thinking, there is this one aspect that strikes me as quintessentially American. Or let me call it “American Quintessentialism”, if I may, which (ironically) is a bad habit coming straight from Europe—the idea that, at the end of the day, whatever happens in international relations harks somehow back to what the US does, positively or negatively.

Take the following extract from a recent video (around min. 4) by the fantastic YouTube Channel India and Global Left. Here, Mearsheimer explains his view on how China became a Great Power. Pay particular attention to who he credits with China’s rise:

In the early 1990s, when China was still a developing country and was not a great power, the United States pursued a policy of engagement, and that policy was designed to make China a wealthy country and to integrate it into the international economy, to integrate it into international institutions, and the assumption was it would become a liberal democracy and we would all live happily ever after.

I argued—and this was one of the central arguments in my book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which was published in 2001—that China could not rise peacefully, and that in fact, by turning China into a wealthy country, the United States was in effect, turning China into a great power and more powerful China became the more difficult it would be for the United States to deal with China.

China, only a Function of US Foreign Policy

This is the line of thought that later leads him to argue in the same interview (as he has done many times before) that the most rational course of action for the USA is to try to “contain” China and work with asian allies to achieve this. He also argues that without the USA, the other regional powers will simply not be able to stand up to Beijing’s might.

It is very important to point out that Mearsheimer humbly admits that he thinks his theory would lead him only to roughly 75% of valid predictions and that he has been wrong in the past and will probably be wrong again. He is even “realist” when it comes to realist theory, which is very laudable. This level of self-awareness is fantastic. But that, at the same time, he still views the rise of China as essentially the outcome of a misguided US foreign policy—rather than the result of Chinese ingenuity and perseverance—is fascinating to me.

We see this kind of argument in many different variations from people much less self-aware than Professor Mearsheimer. We see it reflected in most (if not all) of Donald Trump’s rhetoric as anything good happening in the world being due to the US doing things right, and everything bad happening due to the misguided policies of previous administrations. We see it in conservative news shows about the tariff wars and all over the Twitter-sphere.

It is this American Quintessentialism—a West-Atlantic version of bad old Eurocentrism—that distorts much of the IR thinking in the Collective West and blinds the Euro-American discourse to emerging patterns of non-Western developments or fatalistic conclusions about the inevitability of great power war. This is also partially the case for Professor Mearsheimer’s argument about an unavoidable “security competition” between the USA and China.

Will China behave like the USA?

Again, I must point out that Mearsheimer is not a war hawk. He does not believe that war between the US and China is set in stone. Only “security competition,” which can play out even without kinetic war, he views as unavoidable. But since his theory holds that states seek to maximise security—and Great Powers do so by creating neighbourhoods that they dominate as much as possible—he really just follows his conclusions logically.

However, that assessment is just as much rooted in the assumption that the American/European approach of doing international politics is universal, and other civilisations will necessarily behave in that way, too. It takes the rise and fall of Western empires as models from which to judge the mechanisms of global politics.

This is one of the main takeaways for me from this illuminating discussion between Professor Mearsheimer and Professor Jeffrey Sachs from a few months ago. While Mearsheimer universalised the European/US experience of world politics in the last 500 years, Sachs refuses to judge the Chinese based on a behavioural pattern that they have not yet displayed.

Maybe one could call it a form of projection—this propensity to universalise the own experience and map it onto others. Then again, in the case of Mearsheimer, this view is, of course, founded in decades of research and reasoning about the functioning of the international system. And there is the chance that he’s right. Yet, I can’t escape the impression that there is just too much American Quintessentialism at the root of the argument.

Call me an optimist, but I have the hope that China will, in fact, behave differently than the USA once it finally surpasses the hegemony of the Atlantic empires for good. My hope is rooted in some of the observations presented by Jyotishman Mudiar of India and Global Left in the previously cited video (linked here below), when he stresses the fact that China and India have been very successful at managing their border disputes over the past decades. Asia simply does not do great power politics the way the Euro-Americans do.

The New Order: A World that doesn’t Care

And maybe this will be the greatest shock of all to both old continents. We are nearing a point where the rest of the world does not conspire against it, does not try to form alliances to counterbalance it, and does not try to defy it. We are nearing a world that just doesn’t care anymore. BRICS, as several of my interlocutors on Neutrality Studies told me, is not anti-Western. It’s simply non-Western. It’s a club of countries that will do whatever they choose to do, not in defiance, opposition, or circumvention of the West. They will just do their thing without the West. In the end, American Quintessentialism, just like Eurocentrism, will be nothing but post-imperial memories—mental remnants of powers long gone.