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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: joseph.dillard@gmail.com

Beyond Realism and Liberalism

Adaptive Reorganization as a Theory of International Relations

Joseph Dillard / ChatGPT

Frank Visser's discussion of Boekestijn and De Wijk provides a useful account of how an influential Dutch geopolitical perspective understands the transition from Western predominance toward a more multipolar international order. It identifies many of the developments that any serious analysis must confront: the rise of China, the persistence of Russian power, the increasing importance of India, uncertainty regarding American commitments, Europe's strategic dependence, technological competition, supply-chain vulnerability, and the conversion of economic interdependence into geopolitical leverage. Rob de Wijk's own description of China's rise explicitly emphasizes the possibility that technological and industrial leadership could enable China to reshape the international order, while his more recent work argues that Europe must become a geopolitical actor in its own right.1

I do not particularly disagree that these developments matter. My disagreement begins one level deeper, with the framework through which their significance is interpreted.

Much conventional geopolitical analysis begins from assumptions associated with political realism. States exist in a competitive international environment. They seek security, protect strategic resources, accumulate capabilities, cultivate alliances, reduce dependencies, and attempt to prevent adversaries from acquiring advantages that might later be used against them. From that starting point, China's industrial growth becomes a potential threat, Russian military power becomes a security problem, semiconductor manufacturing becomes strategic leverage, dependence becomes vulnerability, and European weakness becomes a problem of insufficient geopolitical capability. These propositions are not necessarily false. The question is whether they provide the most inclusive starting point. Realism asks how states survive competition. Liberal institutionalism asks how cooperation can mitigate competition. ART asks a prior evolutionary question: Does the organization produced by either competition or cooperation preserve the system's capacity to reorganize when conditions change?2

The Realist Objection

Realists might respond, “reorganizability is valuable only after survival has been secured. States cannot indefinitely enlarge adaptive space when competitors may exploit openness, dependency, restraint, or experimentation. China's industrial policy, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, American coercive power, and security competition aren't failures to imagine alternatives. They demonstrate why power remains the prerequisite for having alternatives.”3

Adaptive Reorganization Theory agrees. Defensive capacity can preserve adaptive space. The problem begins when mechanisms developed to protect adaptive space progressively eliminate it. ART asks what geopolitics looks like when human societies are understood as products and participants in evolutionary processes. That shift may initially sound abstract, but it changes the questions we ask. Evolution does not begin with American primacy, Chinese revisionism, Russian spheres of influence, European strategic autonomy, democracy, sovereignty, international law, economics, capitalism, socialism, or even nation-states. All of these are historically contingent organizational arrangements arising extraordinarily late in evolutionary history. From an evolutionary perspective, the deeper question is how living systems maintain enough organization to survive while retaining enough capacity to reorganize when their existing adaptations cease to work.4 That problem is much older—and much broader and foundational— than geopolitics. Realism describes important selection pressures but does not provide the ultimate criterion by which their consequences can be evaluated evolutionarily.

Power Is Real, but Power Is Not the Starting Point

Evolution certainly contains competition. Organisms compete for territory, food, mates, reproductive opportunities, and ecological niches. But evolutionary theory cannot be reduced to competition. Cooperation, symbiosis, mutualism, niche construction, variation, selection, developmental constraint, environmental change, redundancy, experimentation, and adaptation are equally important parts of the story.5

The ART question therefore differs from the classical realist question. Realism tends to ask, “How does an actor preserve its security and power in a competitive environment?” ART asks, “What increases or decreases the capacity of an actor and of the larger system in which it participates to reorganize successfully as conditions change?”

These questions sometimes produce similar answers. A state that cannot defend itself may not survive long enough to reorganize anything. Access to resources matters. Industrial capacity matters. Military capability matters. Borders matter. Technology matters. Power matters, but none of these constitutes the final evolutionary criterion.

A system can become extraordinarily powerful while simultaneously becoming less reorganizable. There are many historical examples where increasing power and decreasing reorganizability appear together. The important ART distinction is that declining reorganizability does not necessarily mean declining power. Indeed, the two can move in opposite directions for considerable periods. Here are several salient historical examples:

The Roman Empire in the third-fifth centuries. Rome retained formidable armies, taxation systems, administrative institutions, cities, infrastructure, and enormous territorial reach long after serious organizational problems had appeared. Responses to instability increasingly involved expanding bureaucracy, taxation, military expenditure, imperial centralization, and repeated political interventions by the army. Some reforms—notably those of Diocletian and Constantine—were substantial and temporarily effective. Yet the Western Empire ultimately became progressively less capable of reorganizing its fiscal, military, political, and territorial arrangements quickly enough to meet changing conditions. Rome illustrates an important ART possibility: a system can repeatedly reorganize while losing the capacity for sufficiently adaptive reorganization.6

Qing China in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, Qing China governed an enormous territory and population through institutions that had proved remarkably successful. Yet the very structures adapted to administering that order proved increasingly inadequate when confronted with industrialized Western military power, global commerce, population pressures, internal rebellions, and new technologies. The Self-Strengthening Movement demonstrates that Qing elites were hardly incapable of learning. They adopted arsenals, shipyards, Western weapons, translation programs, and technical education, but technological adaptation often proceeded more readily than fundamental institutional reorganization. In ART terms, innovation occurred without sufficient reorganization of the larger system containing the innovations.7

The British Empire. Britain offers an especially interesting comparative case because its history contains both rigidity and reorganizability. ART is not a theory predicting that successful systems become rigid and collapse. It is a theory predicting that successful adaptations generate pressures toward rigidity while systems differ in their capacity to reorganize before those pressures become catastrophic. At its nineteenth-century height it controlled an enormous empire, commanded global sea lanes, possessed extraordinary financial power, and benefited from early industrialization, yet some structures that produced British supremacy became less advantageous as Germany and the United States industrialized, technologies changed, nationalist movements strengthened, and maintaining empire became increasingly expensive. Britain nevertheless reorganized more successfully than many previous imperial powers: it relinquished much formal empire, accommodated American predominance, developed the Commonwealth, maintained important financial institutions, and repositioned itself within NATO and Europe. ART therefore need not predict that hegemonic decline ends in collapse. Loss of relative Western predominance need not constitute Western failure. Loss of relative power can itself be an adaptive reorganization. Indeed, this is a more likely outcome for the West than a complete collapse.8

The Soviet Union. This may be one of the clearest modern examples. By the 1970s the USSR was a nuclear superpower with enormous armed forces, a vast scientific establishment, an extensive industrial base, a space program, control over much of Eastern Europe, and the ability to compete globally with the United States, yet many mechanisms responsible for producing that power—centralized planning, bureaucratic hierarchy, information control, production targets, political conformity, and institutional protection from criticism—also made accurate feedback increasingly difficult. Gorbachev's reforms are particularly revealing from an ART perspective. Glasnost and perestroika dramatically expanded adaptive space, but the Soviet system could not successfully select and stabilize a new organization before destabilization accelerated. This gives ART a crucial qualification: expanding participation and adaptive space does not guarantee adaptive reorganization.9

Kodak, although not a civilization or state, is almost a textbook organizational example. This is the sort of dilemma the West is generating that makes its adaptive reorganization less likely. How well does it permit alternatives to reorganize its center? Sanctions, tariffs, military interventions, and repression as tools for maintaining the status quo reflect a less-than-promising answer to this question. These examples demonstrate that a geopolitical system can become extraordinarily powerful while simultaneously becoming less reorganizable, because the structures that generate its power can become the very structures it has the greatest difficulty changing.10

The evolutionary danger of success is not merely that successful systems become complacent. It is that success selects, rewards, institutionalizes, and protects the very adaptations responsible for success. When conditions change, those adaptations possess more resources, legitimacy, expertise, identity, and institutional defenders than competing alternatives. Power can therefore continue increasing even as the capacity to reorganize the sources and uses of that power declines.

This also explains why peak power and peak reorganizability need not coincide. A civilization may reach its greatest territorial, military, economic, or institutional power after the processes reducing its future adaptive options are already well underway. One of the central propositions of ART is that success can itself become a source of adaptive failure. The adaptations that make an organism, individual, corporation, empire, or civilization successful encourage investment in the structures responsible for that success. Those structures accumulate resources, legitimacy, institutions, identities, expertise, and constituencies. They become progressively more difficult to question precisely because they have worked. Success therefore creates the possibility of an evolutionary trap: adaptation can increase while adaptability decreases.11

That possibility fundamentally changes how geopolitical power should be interpreted. The question is no longer simply who possesses the greatest power. It becomes whether the organization of that power preserves the capacity for future adaptive reorganization. ART isn't claiming realism doesn't observe rigidity. ART is proposing reorganizability as the organizing variable connecting rigidity, adaptation, institutional success, feedback failure, participation, selection, and collapse.

A Civilization Can Be Extraordinarily Innovative While Becoming Less Reorganizable.

Silicon Valley can produce extraordinary AI systems while Washington becomes institutionally less capable of changing foreign-policy assumptions. China can dominate manufacturing innovation while becoming less tolerant of information that challenges central assumptions. Russia can innovate militarily while constraining political feedback.12

The Question ART Asks of the New World Order

This is why I would frame the emerging international order somewhat differently from Boekestijn and De Wijk. The most important question may not be whether the world is becoming unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar. Those are descriptions of the distribution of power. The evolutionary question is whether the emerging international system possesses greater or lesser reorganizability.

A multipolar system could increase reorganizability because several relatively autonomous centers generate different experiments, institutional forms, technologies, economic arrangements, security structures, and interpretations of problems. From an ART perspective, this potentially expands the adaptive space of the international system, but multipolarity does not guarantee this result.

Five competing power centers locked into increasingly rigid security dilemmas could possess less collective reorganizability than a more cooperative system with fewer centers. Multipolarity could generate experimentation, or it could generate arms races. It could increase reciprocal learning, or it could produce mutually reinforcing propaganda systems. It could decentralize decision-making, or it could divide the world into hostile blocs. Consequently, ART neither celebrates nor condemns multipolarity. It asks what multipolarity actually does.

Does it expand the range of viable alternatives? Does it increase the participation of previously excluded interests? Does it generate information that existing centers could not produce themselves? Are competing arrangements behaviorally tested? Can failed policies be abandoned? Can institutions revise assumptions without requiring catastrophic defeat? Can competing centers accurately understand one another? Can agreements survive changes in leadership and temporary conflicts of interest? Those are questions of adaptive reorganization rather than simply questions of power.13

Europe's Problem Is Therefore Larger Than Strategic Autonomy

This brings us to De Wijk's argument that Europe must become a geopolitical actor in its own right. This diagnosis has considerable empirical support. Europe is attempting to close military capability gaps, expand joint procurement, strengthen its defense-industrial base, and increase its ability to operate under conditions of greater strategic uncertainty. The EU's current Readiness Roadmap explicitly calls for filling capability shortfalls by 2030 and increasing joint procurement and European defense-industrial capacity, but an ART analysis asks a further question: What would European strategic autonomy be for?14

If Europe becomes capable of independently reproducing the same security architecture, adversarial assumptions, arms competition, sanctions regimes, technological containment, resource competition, and bloc politics that characterize conventional great-power behavior, Europe may become more autonomous without becoming more adaptive. Autonomy is not synonymous with reorganizability.

This creates a difficult question for De Wijk's position. If Europe is to become genuinely independent of the United States while continuing to define Russia as a long-term military adversary and China as a systemic strategic competitor, what precisely is the feasible pathway?

One possibility is massive European rearmament combined with greater industrial self-sufficiency, technological independence, diversified resource supplies, integrated military command structures, and a much stronger European defense-industrial complex. This is approximately the direction in which current EU defense planning is moving. But it would require enormous and sustained investment, political coordination among states with different strategic interests, and the replacement of capabilities presently supplied or underwritten by the United States. Analysts have long disputed how feasible genuinely autonomous European defense would be without substantial American support.15 Another pathway would involve changing the relationships that generate the perceived requirement for such extensive military autonomy in the first place.

Is European Autonomy Possible Without a Security Settlement With Russia?

This is where the Russian question becomes unavoidable. Europe can attempt to become an autonomous geopolitical pole while maintaining a structurally adversarial relationship with Russia, but doing so imposes enormous costs. Russia possesses nuclear weapons, territory, energy resources, minerals, agricultural resources, industrial capacity, and geographical proximity that cannot be removed by European policy. Europe and Russia cannot geographically disengage from one another.

The economic relationship has certainly been drastically reduced. EU-Russia goods trade fell from €257.5 billion in 2021 to €58.1 billion in 2025, while the EU has deliberately reduced its dependence on Russian energy. Russian gas fell from 45 percent of EU gas imports before the war to 12 percent in 2025. Those figures demonstrate that while substantial economic separation is possible, they do not answer whether permanent strategic confrontation constitutes an adaptive long-term European security architecture.16

ART would therefore take seriously a possibility that a conventional adversarial framework can easily push toward the margins: a negotiated European security settlement involving Russia might itself constitute one possible route toward greater European strategic autonomy.

That does not mean accepting Russian demands. It does not mean granting Russia a sphere of influence. It does not determine the disposition of Ukraine, nor does it require accepting Moscow's historical narrative. It means something considerably more basic: Russia is part of the European security environment whether Europeans like the Russian government or not.17

A durable European security system therefore has to discover some workable organization of Russian, Ukrainian, EU, British, Turkish, American, and other relevant security interests. If it cannot do so through negotiated reorganization, those interests will continue to be organized through deterrence, arms accumulation, coercion, proxy competition, sanctions, and potentially war.

ART regards that distinction as enormously important. When systems cannot reorganize voluntarily, environmental pressures eventually reorganize them involuntarily. War is one of history's most destructive mechanisms of forced reorganization.18

China Reveals the Same Problem From Another Direction

China poses a different version of the problem. De Wijk's earlier framing—China gradually acquiring the capacity to reshape world order—reflects a recognizable realist concern. Economic strength becomes technological strength; technological strength becomes military capability; industrial dependence becomes leverage; therefore Europe must reduce vulnerabilities and preserve strategic freedom.19

There is substantial evidence for European dependence on China in particular sectors. China accounted for 22.3 percent of EU goods imports in 2025 and remained the EU's largest source of imports.20 In 2025 it also supplied 46.8 percent of EU rare-earth imports by weight, but interdependence and vulnerability are not identical concepts.

Interdependence can generate vulnerability, but it can also generate reciprocity, specialization, efficiency, information exchange, incentives for restraint, and opportunities for mutual adaptation. Whether interdependence becomes adaptive or restrictive depends upon its structure. This is particularly relevant to the Netherlands.

ASML is a striking example. Its economic significance is European, but its customer geography reflects the actual structure of semiconductor manufacturing. ASML's 2025 country-by-country report shows enormous unrelated-party revenues in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States, while comparable European-country revenues were tiny.21 China alone accounted for roughly €9.5 billion of unrelated-party revenues, Taiwan €8.3 billion, South Korea €8.2 billion, and the United States €4.1 billion. Germany, by comparison, accounted for about €67 million and France €23 million.

So the claim that Dutch prosperity can be protected primarily through greater European interdependence immediately encounters a material complication: one of the Netherlands' most strategically important companies operates inside an overwhelmingly global and particularly Asian semiconductor ecosystem. Europe can attempt to reorganize that ecosystem, but it cannot simply declare geography irrelevant.

ART Is Not Arguing That Everyone Has a Valid Perspective

This also clarifies an important difference between ART and the Integral multi-perspectivalism with which Visser associates my argument. ART certainly values perspective-taking. Psychological geocentrism—the tendency of an individual or collective center to confuse its perspective with reality itself—is a serious obstacle to adaptation. A government that cannot understand how another government perceives its behavior deprives itself of information. Understanding Russian security perceptions, Chinese historical narratives, Iranian strategic calculations, Ukrainian interests, American security concerns, or European fears therefore expands the available informational field, but perspective-taking is only one stage of the process. ART does not conclude that because perspectives are understandable they are equally valid. While expansion of participation expands the adaptive space, it does not perform adaptive selection. That distinction is fundamental.

A Russian, American, Chinese, Ukrainian, Dutch, Iranian, or my own interpretation can be inaccurate and will most certainly be at least partial. It can misread evidence. protect institutional interests, rationalize failure, exaggerate threats, externalize costs, and be internally coherent and still produce disastrous results. The purpose of expanding participation to other states and geopolitical actors is therefore not to achieve perspectival harmony; it is to increase the variety of information and possible organizations available for selection. For example, for Israel and the world community to include the perspectives of Hamas and the Palestinians is not done to provide them with credibility but to increase the variety of information and possible organizations available for selection. To fail to do so handicaps decision-making because important, perhaps essential information is not included in the decision-making process. Including an actor in the adaptive space does not confer legitimacy, moral equivalence, political recognition, or decision-making authority. It means only that information generated by that actor is potentially relevant to understanding and reorganizing the system. A predator doesn't have to be morally legitimate for information about the predator to matter to the prey. An infectious organism doesn't deserve representation in an immune system. Participation in adaptive space means informational inclusion, not normative endorsement.22

For adaptive reorganization to occur the center must temporarily loosen its monopoly over the definition of the problem so that information excluded by its existing organization can enter. Eventually choices have to be made. Some hypotheses survive testing better than others. Some institutional arrangements produce better results. Some security policies reduce conflict while others intensify it. Some economic arrangements increase resilience while others generate brittle dependencies. So ART is not neutral regarding perspectives. Evolutionary processes differentially preserve organizations that remain viable under their selection environments, regardless of whether humans consider the outcome fair, moral, or desirable. For example, polycentrism without selection becomes relativism and selection without polycentrism becomes rigidity. ART requires both.

Adaptive Space Changes the Meaning of Geopolitical Analysis

This is where the concept of adaptive space becomes particularly important. Every geopolitical strategy implicitly defines what alternatives are thinkable.

If the United States defines China as its principal strategic competitor, certain possibilities become more thinkable, such as export controls, military balancing, alliance strengthening, industrial reshoring, while others become less thinkable. If Europe defines Russia as an enduring existential adversary, military deterrence and economic separation become more thinkable while comprehensive security arrangements become less so. If Russia defines NATO enlargement as an existential encroachment, militarization and territorial buffers become more thinkable while integration with European security institutions becomes less plausible.23

These framings do not merely describe reality. They alter the space within which future organization can occur. ART therefore asks a question that realism generally does not emphasize enough: “What possibilities does this framing exclude before selection has even begun?”

That question does not imply that excluded possibilities would work, just as most acorns do not produce oaks. The point is precisely that one cannot adaptively select among possibilities that have been excluded from consideration beforehand.

Restrictive and Adaptive Precipitation

This distinction leads to another ART concept that is particularly relevant to geopolitics: the difference between restrictive and adaptive precipitation.

There is no doubt that institutions have to stabilize themselves. States need borders. Treaties need rules. Militaries need command structures. Markets need contracts. Governments need laws. Adaptive possibilities eventually have to become actual organizations. ART calls that movement from possibility into organization precipitation.

The problem occurs when yesterday's successful precipitation becomes today's constraint. NATO, the EU, the dollar system, the Chinese state, the Russian Federation, BRICS, international law, global supply chains, national borders, sanctions systems, and military alliances are all organizational precipitations. None is intrinsically adaptive or restrictive. Their evolutionary significance depends upon what they enable and what they prevent under changing conditions.

The critical question is therefore not whether an institution is Western, Chinese, Russian, liberal, authoritarian, capitalist, socialist, democratic, or multipolar; the question is whether it remains capable of receiving information that requires it to reorganize. My contention is that in significant but not all ways the West is blocking essential information it requires to reorganize.

Russia, China, and Iran Are Not Peripheral to the Transformation

This is also why I would modify Visser's observation that both De Wijk and I regard China as central to the transformation of the international system. China is certainly central, but so are Russia and Iran, as well as the choices being made by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Israel, India, Turkey, the Gulf states, and many other actors. There is no single protagonist or antagonist, and in fact framing geopolitics in that way does not reflect evolutionary framings.

From an ART perspective, this matters because evolutionary change is distributed. The emerging world order is not simply something China is doing to the West or something the West is defending against China. It is the emergent result of interacting adaptations by multiple centers responding to one another.

American sanctions change Russian behavior. Russian behavior changes European defense policy. European policies alter Russian incentives. Russian-Chinese cooperation affects American strategy. American technology restrictions alter Chinese industrial policy.24 Chinese industrial policy affects European manufacturers. European de-risking alters Chinese calculations. Iranian relationships affect Gulf security, Israeli strategy, Russian options, Chinese energy interests, and American military commitments. Each response changes the environment to which the others subsequently adapt. This is called “evolutionary recursion.” No actor stands outside the system directing it.

Beyond Spheres of Influence and Spheres of Security

For the same reason, ART should not be understood as choosing between Mearsheimer's emphasis on spheres of influence and Jeffrey Sachs's preference for arrangements that might be described as spheres of security. Both identify important dimensions of the problem.25

Realism correctly recognizes competition, insecurity, power differentials, geographical constraints, and the possibility that actors will exploit weakness. Cooperative and institutional perspectives correctly recognize reciprocity, interdependence, negotiated restraint, norms, international law, and the enormous benefits that can arise when actors escape security dilemmas.26

ART asks a different question: “Under what conditions does either arrangement remain capable of adaptive reorganization?”

A sphere of influence can temporarily stabilize relations while suppressing the autonomy of smaller states, accumulating resentment that later destabilizes the system. A cooperative security architecture can reduce conflict but become incapable of responding when one participant exploits the restraint of others. A military alliance can successfully deter aggression and subsequently become an obstacle to a different security architecture. A trade relationship can generate mutual prosperity and later create dangerous asymmetric dependencies. There is therefore no institutional formula that permanently solves the adaptive problem, and evolution does not provide one.

ARCR as Selection Infrastructure

This is where Autonomy, Reciprocity, Confirmation, and Reliability—ARCR—enter the geopolitical analysis. These are proposed conditions for improving adaptive selection, not moral commandments.27 They are scaleable, that is, similar conditions can be found in cells, individuals, and civilizations.

Autonomy asks whether the participating centers retain sufficient independence to generate meaningful information and alternatives. A system in which one hegemon determines what every participant may think or do possesses limited adaptive variety. For example, if China does not provide Europe and the US with autonomy it limits its own adaptability.

Reciprocity asks whether costs and benefits are being distributed in ways that permit continued participation. Arrangements that systematically externalize costs onto weaker participants accumulate pressures for reorganization. For example, if BRICS provides loans that exploit national borrowers it is limiting its own adaptability.

Confirmation asks whether actors can accurately understand what other participants are actually saying, fearing, requiring, and proposing. Confirmation does not mean agreement. Washington can understand Moscow and reject Moscow's demands. Moscow can understand Kyiv and reject Kyiv's demands. Beijing can understand Washington without accepting its premises. But a system that cannot distinguish understanding from agreement becomes increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic miscalculation.

Reliability asks whether commitments persist long enough for cooperation and experimentation to become possible. Agreements that can be abandoned whenever circumstances temporarily change provide weak foundations for complex adaptation. For example, the recent abandonment by the U.S. of the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that Trump signed in Versailles may undermine not only reliability in dealings with Iran but the perception of the reliability of the U.S. in the eyes of various observing countries.28

These four conditions constrain one another. Autonomy without reciprocity can become domination. Reciprocity without autonomy can become coerced conformity. Confirmation without reliability produces endless diplomacy without dependable outcomes. Reliability without confirmation can stabilize arrangements that no longer fit reality. The US needs to ask, “Does alliance discipline suppress European autonomy?” The EU needs to ask, “Does defining Russia as permanently adversarial unnecessarily contract adaptive space?” Russia needs to ask, “Does political centralization suppress information required to correct strategic errors?” China needs to ask, "Does information control reduce confirmation even while long-term planning increases reliability?!” Ukraine needs to ask, “Can wartime imperatives create institutional precipitations that later inhibit reorganization?” Israel needs to ask, “Do policies toward Palestinians reduce or expand the information and participation required for durable security?” Iran needs to ask, “Does ideological and institutional constraint suppress alternatives necessary for reorganization?” BRICS needs to ask, “Does increasing multipolarity actually produce polycentrism, or merely several competing centers of geocentrism?”

ART therefore treats ARCR as a possible selection infrastructure rather than as a geopolitical ideology. It also does not assume these are the only or best conditions determining the quality of participation. Instead, it only argues that they are important and relevant.

The Evolutionary Critique of the Dutch Perspective

Seen from this angle, the weakness of the Boekestijn-De Wijk framework is not that it recognizes power. Power is obviously real. The problem is that beginning with geopolitical competition risks converting historically contingent relationships into apparently permanent structural realities. These are the same risks that political realists like John Mearsheimer take.29

If China is first conceptualized as the central challenge, then Chinese industrial capacity becomes threatening. If Russia is conceptualized as the enduring European adversary, Russian power becomes something Europe must counterbalance. If American protection becomes unreliable, Europe must accumulate sufficient independent power to substitute for it. Each conclusion follows reasonably from its premise. ART asks whether the premises themselves should remain inside the adaptive space.

Perhaps they should survive; perhaps European experience with Russia demonstrates that deterrence must remain central. Perhaps Chinese industrial policy creates dependencies that Europe cannot safely tolerate. Perhaps American disengagement really does require enormous European military expansion.

While ART does not know the answers in advance, evolution gives us enough information to reasonably predict what choices are more likely to generate restrictive or adaptive precipitation. Those predictions are hypotheses to be tested against alternatives, consequences, feedback, failures, and changing circumstances rather than assumptions that should silently determine which futures can be considered.

The Hard Test: Applying ART When We Have Strong Commitments

Can ART expose restrictive precipitation in actors and causes with which we ourselves sympathize? For example, ART notes that psychological geocentrism leans toward restrictive precipitation and eventual collapse because it excludes from participation perspectives that are required for its ongoing adaptation. This is why the premises underlying both Palestine and the Israeli state are unlikely to achieve their respective goals unless they apply autonomy, reciprocity, confirmation, or reliability to perspectives that broaden its adaptive space.30

What Would an ART European Strategy Look Like?

An ART-informed European strategy would therefore be difficult to classify conventionally as Atlanticist, Eurasianist, realist, liberal, pro-Russian, anti-Russian, pro-Chinese, or anti-Chinese. It would seek greater European autonomy because adaptive systems require differentiated centers capable of generating independent responses, but it would simultaneously resist converting autonomy into isolation or bloc formation.

It would maintain credible defensive capabilities while treating negotiated security arrangements with Russia as an adaptive possibility that should remain open to behavioral testing.

It would reduce catastrophic dependencies on China without attempting to eliminate economically productive interdependence merely because dependence can potentially be weaponized.

It would preserve relations with the United States while increasing Europe's ability to disagree with Washington when European and American interests diverge.

It would seek relationships with India, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, not merely as pieces in a balancing strategy against China or Russia, but as autonomous centers capable of generating information, relationships, resources, and organizational alternatives. Most importantly, it would treat policies as experiments rather than identities.31 That is a very different posture toward geopolitics.

The Longer Time Horizon

There is another reason for beginning with evolution. Political institutions naturally operate within short time horizons. Governments think in electoral cycles. Corporations think in quarters and investment horizons. Militaries plan against identifiable threats. Bureaucracies protect budgets and mandates. Nations organize memory around events measured in decades or centuries. However, evolution operates without regard for any of these preferences, and that difference in temporal scale matters.

A policy can be successful for five years and disastrous over fifty. An empire can expand for centuries while progressively destroying the conditions that made expansion possible. A civilization can become extraordinarily efficient while becoming increasingly unable to reorganize. A security architecture can suppress conflict for decades while accumulating the conditions for a much larger conflict later.

Psychological geocentrism, the assumption that reality orbits around how I and my nation define it, has a temporal dimension. We privilege not only our own perspective but our own time horizon. ART attempts to correct for both.

What observations distinguish high reorganizability from low reorganizability?

A geopolitical system is becoming less reorganizable when contradictory information is increasingly suppressed, failed policies become harder to reverse, adversary models become less corrigible, institutional alternatives become unthinkable, sunk costs determine future commitments, agreements become less reliable, experimentation declines, decision-making centralizes, and correction increasingly requires crisis.

Reorganizability increases when actors can detect mismatch early, admit failed assumptions, generate competing responses, preserve differentiated centers, test alternatives at limited cost, incorporate feedback from adversaries and affected populations, and stabilize successful innovations.32

ART does not tell us what borders ought to exist, whether Ukraine should join NATO, what political settlement Israelis and Palestinians should accept, whether Taiwan should declare independence, what level of European military spending is sufficient, whether capitalism or socialism is preferable, or whether multipolarity is inherently better than unipolarity. Instead, ART proposes criteria for examining whether the processes through which such choices are generated, tested, corrected, and institutionalized preserve or diminish future adaptive capacity.33

Evolution Will Have the Last Word

This is why I regard evolutionary theory as an important supplement to realism, liberalism, Marxism, Integral Theory, economics, sociology, psychology, religion, spirituality, and philosophy rather than as a replacement for them. Each sees something evolution itself does not tell us.

Economics helps explain incentives and exchange. Psychology helps explain perception and identity. Sociology helps explain institutions and social organization. History reveals path dependence. International-relations theory illuminates security dilemmas and power structures. Philosophy clarifies concepts and values. International law creates mechanisms for negotiated restraint. Religion and spirituality address dimensions of meaning that evolutionary theory neither explains nor replaces. ART does not render these perspectives obsolete. Insstead, it places another question beneath them: “Does the organization they recommend increase or decrease the capacity of the system to adaptively reorganize?”

That question applies equally to Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, Tehran, Kyiv, London, Jerusalem, and The Hague. No civilization possesses an exemption from evolutionary dynamics. This is therefore not fundamentally an argument for Russia, China, Iran, the West, Eurasia, multipolarity, spheres of influence, spheres of security, realism, cooperation, or Integral multi-perspectivalism. It is an argument for taking evolution seriously as part of geopolitical analysis.

Evolution does not care whether an institution calls itself democratic or authoritarian, Western or Eastern, liberal or conservative, capitalist or socialist, spiritual or secular. It does not care whether a geopolitical theory is elegant, whether a civilization regards itself as exceptional, or whether a policy conforms to the worldview of the people who designed it. It does not care if motivations are moral, immoral, or amoral. Organizations encounter changing environments. Mismatches accumulate. Alternatives arise or are suppressed. Selection occurs. Successful structures persist. Unsuccessful structures reorganize, collapse, or disappear.

Humans possess one extraordinary advantage over most of evolutionary history: we can become partially conscious of that process.34 We can expand participation before catastrophe forces expansion upon us. We can deliberately enlarge adaptive space. We can compare competing perspectives without pretending they are equally accurate. We can behaviorally test alternatives. We can preserve what works while reorganizing what does not. We can attempt negotiated reorganization before war imposes involuntary reorganization. Whether we actually do these things is another matter.

That, from the perspective of Adaptive Reorganization Theory, is the deeper question behind the so-called New World Order. The decisive issue is not merely who will possess power in the emerging international system; it is whether the international system we are collectively creating will retain the capacity to reorganize itself before circumstances reorganize it for us.

These geopolitical controversies, whether between academic schools of thought regarding international relations or between actual nations, are not going to be resolved until and unless the basic life processes that finally determine outcomes are understood and taken into account. Is any life or nation an exception to the principles of evolution? As Carl Sagan famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”35

Conclusion

The question confronting Europe, the United States, Russia, China, and the emerging multipolar order is therefore not simply who wins. Winning can itself create the conditions of later failure, nor is the question simply whether cooperation replaces competition. Both competition and cooperation can become adaptive or restrictive. The deeper question is whether the arrangements produced by either preserve the ability to detect mismatch, generate alternatives, incorporate excluded information, test competing organizations, abandon failures, and reorganize before crisis makes reorganization compulsory.

Power determines what a system can do. Reorganizability determines whether it can become something else when what it is doing stops working. The emerging world order will require both. History gives us little reason to assume that possessing the first guarantees the second.

For additional information about ART see AdaptiveReorganizationTheory.com.

Notes

1. Rob de Wijk's De nieuwe wereldorde explicitly presents China's technological and industrial development as potentially transformative of the international order. The publisher's synopsis summarizes De Wijk's argument that if China successfully navigates global power competition and becomes a leader in technologies associated with the new industrial revolution—including artificial intelligence and advanced technological systems—it could become a principal architect of world order. This framing should be distinguished from the broader Boekestijn en De Wijk podcast, in which Arend Jan Boekestijn and De Wijk discuss European and international geopolitics from perspectives that are not necessarily identical.

2. The contrast here is necessarily schematic. Structural realism emphasizes anarchy, uncertainty concerning other states' intentions, offensive capabilities, survival, and self-help; Mearsheimer's offensive realism further argues that these conditions create incentives for great powers to maximize relative power. Liberal institutionalism does not deny anarchy or self-interest but investigates circumstances under which institutions, repeated interaction, reciprocity, information, and converging interests can facilitate cooperation. ART's proposed focus on reorganizability is the distinctive theoretical addition being made in this essay, not a proposition derived from either school. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

3. The “Realist Objection” is a reconstruction of a strong realist argument rather than a quotation from a particular realist. It follows closely from Mearsheimer's premise that survival is the primary goal of great powers because achievement of other objectives presupposes continued survival. Offensive realism consequently treats uncertainty about intentions and the absence of a supranational enforcing authority as powerful incentives for self-help and accumulation of relative power.

4. ART's formulation is broader than standard evolutionary terminology, but it overlaps with several developments in evolutionary biology emphasizing plasticity, environmental feedback, developmental constraint, symbiosis, and niche construction. Niche-construction theory is especially relevant because it rejects an exclusively one-way conception in which organisms merely adapt to pre-existing environments: organisms also modify the environments that subsequently exert selection upon them. Human culture greatly amplifies this recursive capacity. See Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Marcus W. Feldman on cultural niche construction.

5. Contemporary evolutionary biology cannot adequately be characterized simply as a theory of competition. Research addresses cooperation at levels ranging from genomes and cells to organisms and societies; mutualistic and symbiotic relationships can affect niches and evolutionary transitions; developmental constraints limit the range of viable evolutionary change; and niche construction emphasizes reciprocal causation between organisms and their environments. ART draws upon this enlarged evolutionary vocabulary while developing its own concept of adaptive reorganization.

6. The late Roman case is more complicated than a simple story of uninterrupted decline. Diocletian substantially reorganized administration, taxation, military organization, frontier defense, and imperial government, and the fourth-century empire remained formidable. The Cambridge Ancient History describes Diocletian's stabilization as having come with an expanded army and bureaucracy and a more burdensome taxation regime; Oxford scholarship similarly emphasizes his extensive administrative and military reorganization. The Eastern Empire subsequently survived for centuries, while the Western imperial government disappeared in the fifth century. ART therefore interprets Rome not as evidence that “power causes collapse,” but as an example in which extensive reorganization can coexist with longer-term difficulty maintaining viable organization under changing pressures.

7. The Self-Strengthening Movement followed the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion and involved sustained efforts at military, industrial, educational, and technological reform. Qing initiatives included arsenals, shipyards, improved military training, translation and foreign-language institutions, modern enterprises, and selective adoption of Western science and technology. Historians disagree over why these reforms ultimately proved insufficient and caution against reducing the outcome simply to Confucian conservatism. The ART interpretation—innovation without sufficient reorganization of the encompassing institutional system—is therefore offered here as an analytical hypothesis rather than as the settled historical explanation.

8. British decolonization was neither simply voluntary retreat nor straightforward collapse. It resulted from nationalism within the colonies, two world wars, changing international norms, economic and military pressures, and a global redistribution of power toward the United States and Soviet Union. Britain nevertheless transformed important imperial relationships into a postcolonial Commonwealth and retained significant diplomatic, financial, military, and institutional influence. This makes Britain useful for ART precisely because relative geopolitical decline did not entail civilizational or state collapse. See Sarah Stockwell's discussion of Britain's decolonization in the context of global geopolitical change and Philip Murphy's study of the monarchy, government, and postwar Commonwealth.

9. Gorbachev's glasnost expanded freedom of information and public criticism, while perestroika attempted political and economic restructuring. Political democratization, economic decentralization, nationalist mobilization within Soviet republics, bureaucratic resistance, economic deterioration, and the weakening of Communist Party authority interacted in ways Gorbachev could not stabilize. The Soviet case therefore illustrates an important qualification to the ART model: increasing openness and variation does not by itself ensure successful selection or restabilization.

10. Kodak is frequently used in management literature as an example of technological innovation failing to produce successful organizational adaptation. Kodak developed and patented important components of digital photography, yet its established film-based business model and organizational structures impeded successful adjustment to the technological discontinuity. The case is consequently more subtle than the popular claim that Kodak simply “failed to see digital coming.” It saw the technology; the greater problem was reorganizing a successful organization around a technology that undermined its existing sources of profitability.

11. This ART proposition has close parallels in organizational-learning research on “success traps” and “competence traps.” Such research finds that past success can reinforce exploitation of existing capabilities while reducing exploration of alternatives, thereby producing organizational inertia when environments change. The parallel should not be treated as proof of ART's broader cross-scale evolutionary claim, but it provides an independently developed organizational analogue. See Mooweon Rhee and Tohyun Kim, “Great Vessels Take a Long Time to Mature: Early Success Traps and Competences in Exploitation and Exploration,” Organization Science 26, no. 1 (2015): 180-197.

12. These examples should be read as hypotheses rather than established equivalences. There is evidence for each component: scholarship has examined the persistence of U.S. grand-strategic assumptions despite major environmental changes; China is simultaneously a world-leading manufacturing power and major technological innovator while maintaining extensive political information controls; and Russian forces have demonstrated significant tactical and technological adaptation during the Ukraine war. Whether these combinations constitute declining reorganizability in the ART sense remains an empirical question. China entered WIPO's global innovation top ten in 2025 and ranked first in knowledge and technology outputs, while UNIDO estimated that China produced roughly 32% of global manufacturing output in 2024.

13. International-relations scholarship has long recognized that a larger number of power centers does not automatically generate either peace or conflict. The security dilemma describes the possibility that measures taken by one state to increase its security can reduce the perceived security of others, generating mutually reinforcing competition even where neither side initially seeks war. Whether multipolarity expands experimentation or multiplies security dilemmas is therefore an empirical question rather than something determined by the number of poles alone. See Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 167-214.

14. The European Commission's Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 calls for EU member states collectively to close critical capability gaps by 2030, expand joint procurement, increase procurement from the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base, scale production, reduce critical supply dependencies, and develop several pan-European defense projects. The Roadmap therefore provides strong evidence that greater European defense capability and industrial capacity have become explicit EU policy objectives.

15. Estimates of what autonomous European defense would require vary substantially because they depend upon assumptions concerning U.S. withdrawal, Russian capabilities, nuclear deterrence, force structure, readiness, and time horizon. A 2025 International Institute for Strategic Studies study estimated that replacing key elements of the U.S. military contribution to European defense could require approximately $1 trillion in investment. Earlier scholarship has likewise questioned whether Europe could readily replace American capabilities. These studies do not establish that European autonomy is impossible; they establish that it would entail substantial military, industrial, financial, and political reorganization.

16. European Commission data report that EU-Russia goods trade fell from €257.5 billion in 2021 to €58.1 billion in 2025. The Commission's REPowerEU summary reports that dependence on Russian gas declined from approximately 45% of EU gas imports before the full-scale war to 12% in 2025. A separate Commission market analysis places Russia's 2025 share at approximately 13%, reflecting methodological/data differences. The essay can retain 12% if it cites the REPowerEU series consistently.

17. This is a geographical and strategic observation rather than an endorsement of any particular Russian security claim. Russia remains a nuclear-armed state occupying a large portion of the Eurasian landmass adjacent to the European security system. The policy question—whether that reality is best managed primarily through deterrence, containment, negotiated security arrangements, or some combination—is disputed. ART's claim is narrower: excluding negotiated reorganization a priori contracts the available adaptive space.

18. The characterization of war as “forced reorganization” is ART terminology rather than a conventional proposition in international-relations theory. Conventional scholarship nevertheless recognizes that major wars can transform institutions, alliances, borders, distributions of power, and expectations governing subsequent cooperation. Jervis, for example, argues that major anti-hegemonic wars have historically altered actors' expectations and incentives in ways that can facilitate postwar security cooperation.

19. The strategic use of economic networks has been theorized by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman as “weaponized interdependence.” Their argument shows how states occupying central positions in global financial and informational networks can exploit asymmetric network structures for coercive purposes. This provides an important qualification to older assumptions that economic interdependence necessarily promotes cooperation: interdependence can simultaneously generate efficiency, mutual benefit, vulnerability, and coercive leverage. Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42-79.

20. Eurostat reports that China supplied 22.3% of the value of all extra-EU goods imports in 2025, making it the EU's largest source of imported goods. Separate Eurostat data show that China supplied 46.8% by weight of EU rare-earth imports in 2025, followed by Russia at 25.9% and Malaysia at 23.1%. The latter figures concern the specific Eurostat category of rare-earth elements and should not be generalized to all critical raw materials.

21. ASML's 2025 Public Country-by-Country Report is the appropriate primary source for the country figures used here; its annual-report portal separately provides the underlying country-by-country report. These data illuminate the geographical distribution of reported revenues, but they should not automatically be equated with the physical location of semiconductor fabrication or ultimate technological dependence. The larger point remains that ASML participates in a deeply transnational semiconductor ecosystem extending across Europe, East Asia and the United States.

22. This distinction is central to the ART argument and does not require an external authority: informational inclusion is being distinguished from legitimacy, endorsement, equality of truth claims, or political authority. A useful parallel exists in scientific inquiry, where a hypothesis must be represented accurately enough to be tested without the investigator thereby endorsing it. In ART terms, increasing the number of represented perspectives expands variation; subsequent discrimination and behavioral testing perform selection.

23. These examples describe framing effects rather than claiming that any one threat perception is objectively false. Official EU policy, for example, simultaneously describes China as a partner, economic competitor, and “systemic rival,” while explicitly pursuing “de-risking” rather than complete decoupling. U.S. semiconductor export controls explicitly seek to restrict Chinese access to advanced computing capabilities on national-security grounds. The ART question is therefore not whether such concerns are legitimate, but what alternative possibilities become harder to consider once a particular threat representation becomes institutionally dominant.

24. Niche-construction theory offers a useful evolutionary analogue for what ART calls evolutionary recursion. Organisms do not merely respond to environments; their activities modify environments and thereby alter subsequent selection pressures. In human societies, cultural and technological activity enormously amplifies this process. Geopolitical actors similarly alter the strategic environments to which other actors subsequently respond. This analogy does not establish that geopolitical change operates identically to biological evolution, but it provides a well-developed evolutionary precedent for reciprocal environment-actor causation.

25. Jeffrey Sachs explicitly distinguishes a “sphere of influence,” in which a great power claims authority over weaker states' internal or foreign-policy choices, from a “sphere of security,” in which a great power seeks protection from potentially hostile military deployments in its immediate neighborhood. Sachs proposes neutrality as one possible way of reconciling great-power security concerns with smaller-state sovereignty. This is Sachs's normative and geopolitical argument, not a settled principle of international relations. Mearsheimer's offensive realism approaches the issue differently, emphasizing the incentives great powers have to maximize regional power under conditions of anarchy and uncertainty.

26. Jervis's classic security-dilemma analysis is especially relevant here because it demonstrates that competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive theoretical universes. Security competition can arise among actors with compatible underlying goals when defensive measures appear threatening to others; under other conditions, expectations, institutional arrangements, and offense-defense characteristics can reduce the severity of the dilemma. Keohane and Axelrod similarly emphasize reciprocity, expectations about future interaction, perceptions, and institutions in explaining cooperation under anarchy.

27. ARCR—Autonomy, Reciprocity, Confirmation, and Reliability—is an ART hypothesis, not an established four-factor model in evolutionary biology or international-relations scholarship. Individual components have substantial analogues in existing research: evolutionary cooperation requires mechanisms limiting exploitation; IR scholarship emphasizes reciprocity and repeated interaction; institutional theories emphasize credible commitments and information; and evolutionary systems require differentiated units capable of generating variation. The stronger ART proposition—that these four conditions form a cross-scale selection infrastructure—is therefore properly presented as a hypothesis requiring comparative empirical testing rather than as an already demonstrated law.

28. The White House documents President Donald Trump signing a Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran at Versailles on June 17, 2026.

29. The comparison with Mearsheimer should be carefully formulated. Offensive realism does not claim that every adversarial relationship is immutable; rather, it derives recurrent great-power competition from structural assumptions about anarchy, uncertainty, offensive capabilities, survival, and rationality. Mearsheimer argues that these conditions generate fear, self-help, and incentives for power maximization. ART's disagreement is therefore best stated as a disagreement about whether these structural pressures should be treated as the deepest explanatory level, not as a claim that realism simply assumes permanent hostility toward particular countries.

30. ART therefore hypothesizes that neither Israeli nor Palestinian political projects can achieve durable security if their institutional arrangements systematically deny relevant opposing populations sufficient autonomy, reciprocity, confirmation, and reliability to permit continuing adaptive reorganization.

31. Treating policy as revisable experimentation has parallels in organizational-learning literature distinguishing exploration from exploitation. Exploitation refines established capabilities; exploration searches among alternatives. Excessive exploitation can produce competence or success traps, whereas excessive exploration can prevent successful arrangements from stabilizing. ART extends this problem into its distinction between precipitation and continued reorganizability.

32. These proposed indicators constitute an important step toward making reorganizability empirically testable. Several have precedents in adjacent literatures: organizational research associates success traps with reduced exploration and organizational inertia; scholarship on U.S. grand strategy has examined path dependence and the exclusion of alternatives from policy debate; authoritarian information controls provide examples of institutional suppression of corrective information. ART's research task is to determine whether these variables can be operationalized together into a reliable measure of reorganizability across scales.

33. This qualification is theoretically important. ART is being proposed as a framework for evaluating adaptive processes, not as an algorithm that mechanically generates policy prescriptions. In this respect it resembles evolutionary theory itself: evolutionary theory can explain mechanisms producing variation, selection, persistence, constraint, cooperation, and extinction without supplying moral or political answers about which human institutions ought to exist. Keeping this distinction explicit protects ART from converting the descriptive concept of adaptive persistence into a hidden political morality.

34. Human cultural evolution differs importantly from purely genetic evolutionary processes because humans can transmit acquired information socially, deliberately modify environments, construct institutions, anticipate some consequences, and intentionally alter selection environments. Cultural niche-construction theory specifically emphasizes how human culture magnifies organisms' general capacity to modify the environments and selection pressures affecting themselves and subsequent generations. ART's stronger claim is that humans may be able to make this recursive process itself an object of deliberate inquiry and intervention.

35. The formulation “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” was famously popularized by Carl Sagan, particularly through Cosmos, although the underlying principle considerably predates him and related formulations can be found in earlier skeptical and scientific writing.