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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Limits of Dillard's Geopolitical Diagnosis

Why Western Overreach Does Not Explain Everything, and Why Multipolarity Is No Guarantee of Progress

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Joseph Dillard's "Lessons From the Ukrainian and Iranian Wars" advances a recognizable thesis: the United States and its allies have become trapped in a system of strategic overreach, financial self-interest, and institutional rigidity. Their attempts to preserve Western dominance through military power, economic sanctions, and control over international financial infrastructure increasingly undermine their own objectives. Dillard brings John Mearsheimer's geopolitical realism and Michael Hudson's political economy together, then uses Adaptive Reorganization Theory (ART) to explain why powerful institutions struggle to learn from their failures.

There is much worth considering in this argument. Governments can pursue counterproductive policies, economic sanctions can produce unintended consequences, and institutions can become captive to their own interests. But Dillard's thesis becomes less convincing when these observations are assembled into a comprehensive explanation of Western decline.

The fundamental counterargument is this: Western strategic failures are real, but they do not establish that American hegemony is inherently self-defeating, that its adversaries are primarily reacting defensively, or that the emergence of a multipolar world will produce a more adaptive international order.

Dillard identifies genuine pathologies but risks turning them into a one-sided theory of world politics. A more balanced explanation must account for the agency of Russia, Iran, and China; the security interests of smaller states; the continuing attractions of Western institutions; and the possibility that Western power can adapt rather than simply decay.

1. The realist argument is not a complete explanation of war

Mearsheimer's offensive realism offers an important insight: states operate in an international system without a reliable central authority capable of guaranteeing their security. They therefore pay close attention to military capabilities, alliances, and the intentions of potential adversaries.

But realism becomes reductionist when it treats the security concerns of great powers as the principal key to understanding international conflict.

Russia's opposition to NATO expansion is relevant to understanding the Ukraine war. It does not follow that Russia's invasion was an unavoidable response to Western policy. States do not merely react to external threats; their leaders also pursue ambitions, exploit opportunities, misjudge opponents, and make ideological commitments.

The same applies to Iran. Its security concerns are real, but so are the security concerns of Israel and other regional states. An explanation that emphasizes Iranian vulnerability while treating the concerns of its adversaries primarily as instruments of Western domination is not a neutral application of realism.

Realism should apply symmetrically. If American leaders can be driven by prestige, domestic politics, institutional interests, and ideological assumptions, Russian and Iranian leaders can be influenced by comparable forces.

The decisive question is not simply whether a state has legitimate security concerns. It is whether its policies are proportionate to those concerns, whether alternative strategies were available, and whether its actions make its own long-term security more or less attainable.

A realist explanation that systematically emphasizes the fears of adversarial great powers while neglecting their ambitions is not realism in its strongest form. It is selective realism.

2. Western policy failures do not prove that Western hegemony is inherently dysfunctional

Dillard's argument tends to merge three different propositions: that American foreign policy has made serious mistakes, that American institutions sometimes reward counterproductive behavior, and that the American-led international order is therefore approaching an inevitable decline.

The first two propositions are entirely plausible. The third requires a separate argument.

The United States made serious strategic mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military superiority did not translate into the political outcomes its leaders anticipated. These failures exposed the limits of intervention, the difficulty of reconstructing political institutions from outside, and the dangers of confusing battlefield success with durable political legitimacy.

But a record of failure in some interventions does not establish that American alliances, security guarantees, international financial institutions, or diplomatic networks are necessarily dysfunctional.

Institutions should be assessed by their actual functions and outcomes. An alliance that deters an attack may be strategically successful even if it does not eliminate international conflict. A financial system may confer advantages on the country issuing the dominant currency while also lowering transaction costs for many of its users.

These benefits do not excuse abuses of power. They do, however, complicate the claim that American dominance persists primarily because powerful institutions are unable to recognize their own failures.

A system can simultaneously provide public benefits, distribute power unequally, and create incentives for abuse. Recognizing one feature should not require denying the others.

Nor is institutional rigidity an exclusively American problem. Russia's military and political institutions, China's party-state, and Iran's clerical and security institutions all face their own challenges of bureaucratic self-preservation, information distortion, and leadership accountability.

If institutional rigidity is a general feature of concentrated power, then Western decline cannot be inferred simply from the existence of Western institutional failures.

The relevant comparison is between competing systems, not between an imperfect West and an idealized alternative.

3. Ukraine is not merely an object of great-power competition

The strongest challenge to Dillard's treatment of Ukraine is the limited place it gives to Ukrainian agency.

A strictly great-power perspective tends to describe the conflict as a struggle between Russia and the West over the strategic orientation of a buffer state. This is a useful description of one dimension of the conflict, but it is not a complete account.

Ukraine is a political community with its own interests. Its desire for Western integration cannot be understood exclusively as the product of American influence. It also reflects Ukrainian political choices, historical experiences, and perceptions of Russian power.

A counterargument to Western policy must therefore answer a difficult question: what legitimate authority would the United States and Russia possess to determine Ukraine's geopolitical orientation without the meaningful consent of Ukrainians themselves?

Neutrality is not automatically an unjust proposal. Under appropriate circumstances, a neutral status backed by credible security guarantees could form part of a negotiated settlement. But neutrality imposed by a stronger neighbor, without credible enforcement, can also become a mechanism of subordination.

The difference depends on the terms, the parties' consent, and the reliability of the guarantees.

It is also important to distinguish between a policy that increases the risk of conflict and an action that directly initiates it. Western governments may have underestimated the risks of NATO enlargement. That does not remove Russia's responsibility for choosing a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Causal responsibility is not a fixed quantity that must be assigned entirely to one side. Multiple actors can contribute to a dangerous situation while retaining responsibility for their own decisions.

A more persuasive account of the Ukraine war would examine the interaction of Russian strategic ambitions, Ukrainian political agency, Western policy, and the security dilemma. It would not reduce the conflict to the consequences of Western arrogance.

4. Sanctions can backfire without becoming strategically meaningless

Hudson's critique of financial power identifies a genuine problem: economic coercion can create incentives for targeted states to develop alternative trading relationships, payment systems, and financial arrangements.

But the argument that sanctions encourage adaptation does not establish that sanctions are necessarily counterproductive.

A government may withstand sanctions while suffering substantial economic damage. It may develop new trading partners while losing access to more efficient markets. It may preserve its political objectives while becoming more dependent on a smaller group of external partners.

The appropriate assessment depends on what the sanctions were intended to achieve.

If the objective is immediate regime change, sanctions may fail. If the objective is to constrain military procurement, increase the costs of aggression, restrict access to sensitive technology, or strengthen the bargaining position of other states, the assessment may be different.

Even these objectives require empirical evaluation. The point is that failure to produce one desired outcome does not establish failure across all possible objectives.

The same reasoning applies to dollar dominance. The freezing of Russian sovereign assets demonstrated that access to Western financial infrastructure can carry political risks. Governments consequently have reasons to diversify their reserves and reduce certain dependencies.

Yet diversification is not equivalent to the collapse of the dollar system.

The IMF reported that the dollar accounted for 57.13% of allocated global foreign-exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 1.99% for the Chinese renminbi. The figures do not settle the future of international monetary arrangements, but they demonstrate the enormous difference between the dollar's current position and that of its most frequently discussed potential challenger.

The dollar's continued dominance does not prove that American financial policy is wise. Nor does it guarantee that this position will endure indefinitely. It does show why predictions of an imminent monetary transition require more than evidence that some governments wish to escape American influence.

A credible alternative must offer more than political independence from Washington. It must also provide sufficient liquidity, convertibility, institutional credibility, and access to deep financial markets.

Multipolarity is a geopolitical possibility. A viable alternative monetary system is a separate institutional and economic achievement.

5. The emerging multipolar order may reproduce the same pathologies

Dillard's account risks treating resistance to Western dominance as evidence of a more adaptive international system. But a decline in American predominance would not automatically produce greater rationality, justice, or stability.

China, Russia, and Iran have different political systems, strategic interests, and conceptions of sovereignty. Their opposition to particular American policies does not mean that they share a coherent vision of a better international order.

China's desire for strategic autonomy, Russia's determination to maintain influence in its neighborhood, and Iran's pursuit of regional security and influence cannot simply be merged into a common project of institutional reform.

Cooperation against a common rival is not the same as agreement on the rules of a future system.

A multipolar world might offer smaller countries more diplomatic options. It could also increase the number of competing centers of coercive power, complicate crisis management, and make it harder to enforce common rules.

The relevant question is not whether the international system should have one dominant power or several. It is whether the resulting distribution of power produces institutions capable of limiting aggression, managing disputes, and providing predictable rules.

A world with several competing hegemonic powers could be no more adaptive than a world dominated by one.

Indeed, if Dillard is correct that powerful institutions tend to defend their own interests, then his argument should apply to every major power, not merely to Washington.

There is no reason to presume that a Chinese-led or Russian-influenced order would automatically overcome the institutional rigidity he attributes to the United States.

The historical record provides ample reason to reject the assumption that opposition to one powerful state necessarily represents a commitment to greater freedom or better governance.

6. Adaptive Reorganization Theory needs a symmetrical test

Dillard's Adaptive Reorganization Theory proposes that organizations can become trapped by the very structures that once enabled their success. They preserve their established identities and interests rather than adapt to changing circumstances.

This is a plausible general hypothesis. But its value depends on whether it can explain differences among institutions and generate predictions that can be tested against evidence.

Consider the application of ART to four cases: American foreign-policy institutions, Russian military and security institutions, China's party-state, and Iran's political and security establishment.

Each system may exhibit bureaucratic inertia, self-protective behavior, and resistance to unwelcome information. Yet each also possesses different mechanisms for policy correction, institutional competition, and leadership accountability.

A useful theory should help explain those differences. It should identify the conditions under which institutions recognize errors, the incentives that facilitate or prevent correction, and the observable consequences of successful adaptation.

If ART simply identifies institutional persistence wherever a policy fails, it risks becoming a retrospective description rather than a predictive theory.

The same problem arises if every challenge to Western power is interpreted as evidence that the international system is reorganizing adaptively. Political change is not synonymous with improvement. Organizations can adapt in ways that make them more effective at coercion, repression, or military competition without becoming more responsive to the public interest.

Adaptation is a descriptive concept. Whether the resulting changes are desirable is a separate normative question.

Dillard therefore needs to distinguish between institutional adaptability, strategic effectiveness, and political legitimacy. A regime may be highly adaptive in preserving itself while remaining oppressive. Another may be slow to react yet possess institutional safeguards that prevent disastrous decisions.

ART becomes genuinely useful only when it can distinguish these possibilities rather than treating reorganization as inherently progressive.

7. The West can learn, although it may do so imperfectly

Dillard's diagnosis also underestimates the possibility of institutional correction within Western societies.

Democratic systems possess mechanisms that can expose and challenge policy failures: electoral competition, legislative scrutiny, independent journalism, public protest, academic criticism, judicial review, and changes in government. These mechanisms do not guarantee sound decisions. They can be weakened, manipulated, or overwhelmed by powerful interests.

But they matter when comparing political systems.

A government that can publicly debate a failed war, replace its leaders, revise its military doctrine, and reconsider its alliances possesses potential correction mechanisms that are not equally available in every political system.

The existence of these mechanisms does not prove that Western institutions will use them effectively. Nor should democratic accountability be confused with strategic competence. Democracies can make catastrophic decisions, while authoritarian governments can sometimes implement effective long-term policies.

The relevant issue is whether the institutional environment permits credible criticism, independent assessment, and peaceful correction when leaders fail.

This is precisely where a symmetrical application of Dillard's framework could become productive. Rather than presuming that Western institutions are trapped while their adversaries represent the emerging future, ART could investigate how different political systems process bad news, reward dissent, and revise unsuccessful policies.

Such a comparison might reveal serious weaknesses in the West. It might also reveal important strengths that a theory of inevitable Western decline overlooks.

Conclusion: critique the West without turning its rivals into the solution

Dillard's essay raises an important warning about the relationship between power and institutional learning. Military superiority does not guarantee political success, economic coercion can produce unintended consequences, and organizations can become more concerned with preserving themselves than achieving their stated purposes.

But these propositions do not establish his broader geopolitical thesis.

Western policy failures do not make Russian or Iranian decisions inevitable. The strategic interests of great powers do not erase the agency of smaller states. The development of alternative financial arrangements does not prove that dollar dominance is collapsing. And the emergence of a multipolar order does not guarantee a more rational or equitable international system.

The most serious weakness in Dillard's argument is its tendency to move from a legitimate critique of Western power to a general interpretation of international politics in which Western dominance is the principal source of systemic dysfunction.

A more rigorous analysis would test the same institutional hypotheses against all major powers, distinguish strategic failure from institutional persistence, and identify the conditions under which competing political systems can actually correct their mistakes.

The question is not whether the West deserves criticism. It plainly does. The question is whether that criticism is sufficient to establish the superiority of the alternatives.

It is not.

The central counterargument is that Dillard risks confusing the weakening of one dominant power with the improvement of the international system. A more fragmented distribution of power may constrain American overreach, but it may also create new opportunities for coercion, rivalry, and institutional self-preservation.

If Adaptive Reorganization Theory is to make a genuine contribution, it must explain how all powerful institutions can become trapped by their own success—and how any of them can escape that trap. It cannot merely explain why the American-led order is failing.

The future of international politics will not be determined simply by whether Western hegemony survives. It will depend on whether states and institutions, Western and non-Western alike, can develop credible mechanisms for limiting power, correcting strategic mistakes, and accommodating the legitimate interests of others.

That is a much more demanding test than the replacement of American primacy by multipolarity.

And it is the test Dillard's own theory should be required to pass.