Today I introduce my readers to a very important analysis by American political scientist and international relations scholar Professor John Mearsheimer, which he recently presented on his Youtube channel. Professor Mearsheimer, 77, is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at University of Chicago. Over the last few years, I have frequently printed here in ++Watani++ insightful and balanced perspectives voiced by the Professor on global affairs.
Professor Mearsheimer brought up a crucial issue that has been taking shape for some time: “The unipolar world is over — History has turned against the West”. I am printing here the main highlights of this long-overdue eye opener.
Prof. Mearsheimer said: “What we are witnessing is not a crisis of leadership. It is the end of an era. The illusion of western supremacy born in empire and sustained by arrogance has reached its limit. For 250 years, the world was ordered by European and later American dominance. From the voyages of Columbus and Vasco Da Gama to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was assumed that history flowed from the west outward, that Europe and the United States could define the terms of progress, security, and civilization itself. That assumption has now collapsed. The unipolar world proclaimed after 1991 was the last act of this illusion. The West mistook the Soviet Union’s demise for the triumph of its own ideology. It called itself the international community, and mistook obedience for consensus. Yet beneath the celebration of globalisation, a new world was already forming; not in Washington or Brussels, but in Beijing, Delhi, Moscow, and Brasilia. Power was dispersing even as the West convinced itself it was eternal. That contradiction between a world changing and a West in denial defines our age… The so-called liberal world order comprising the US, the European Union, and their allies represents barely 12 per cent of humanity. The remaining 88 per cent live outside its orbit, increasingly unwilling to accept its rules. The BRICS nations, now stretching from Brazil to China, from Egypt to Indonesia, command nearly half the global GDP and population. They are not anti-western. They are post-western. Their rise is not rebellion but normalisation. The return of balance to a world distorted by centuries of empire.
“Yet in Washington, London, and Brussels, the rhetoric remains unchanged. Leaders still speak as if they can dictate outcomes, issue ultimatums, and enforce obedience by sanction and force. They lecture China on trade, Russia on security, India on alignment and the global south on morality. They do not see that the world no longer listens. Power has shifted not only militarily and economically, but morally. The West once ruled through authority, now it governs through inertia. Its diplomacy has become performance, its sanctions routine, its wars cyclical. It still behaves like the centre of gravity long after gravity has moved… The western delusion of primacy survives precisely because it cannot accept equality. It speaks of a rules-based order, but those rules change whenever the West breaks them. It condemns aggression in Moscow, but excuses it in Gaza. It warns against spheres of influence while defending its own.
“The empire that once expanded through confidence now clings to power through fear… The world is moving toward multi-polarity, not by ideology, but by necessity… The United States can veto resolutions, but it cannot veto reality… The illusion of dominance has entered its terminal stage. The end of the western era does not mean the victory of its rivals, it means the return of equilibrium, the recognition that civilisation is plural. That no single culture can command the world’s conscience… The challenge for America and Europe is not how to preserve power, but how to adapt to its loss without destroying themselves.
“Unipolarity is not a system but a transition. No power in history has maintained uncontested global dominance for long, because the very exercise of hegemony breeds resistance. The more Washington asserted its primacy, the more the rest of the world organised against it. Russia rebuilt its military, China expanded its influence, the global south began forming economic alliances beyond western reach…It mistook dissent for danger and competition for betrayal. Any challenge to US dominance was labelled revisionism… Washington refused to adjust. It continued to expand its military commitments, promising protection to allies it could no longer defend without risking global war. It built networks of bases across continents, but no strategy for peace.
“The new order was forming quietly through trade corridors, energy partnerships, and regional security pack. By the time Washington noticed, it was too late to reverse. Unipolarity was never a destiny, it was a phase between balances of power. The tragedy is that America believed it could defy the laws of history. Realism teaches that no system is eternal and that arrogance always invites correction. The world is not turning against the United States out of hatred but out of necessity. Nations act according to their interests, and those interests now require a world not ruled but shared.
“The world has learned to live without American permission. Europe’s position within this shift is equally fragile. The continent that once colonised the globe now struggles to define its own sovereignty, dependent on US protection and Russian energy. It oscillates between loyalty and despair. Its economy shrinks, its populations age, its unity fractures.
“The multipolar reality is not a victory for any single State but a correction for all. It reflects the simple fact that the modern world cannot be governed from one capital nor coerced into one ideology. The West will resist this truth until the costs become unbearable… America cannot stop this transformation because it is not an act of defiance; it is an act of evolution.
“The West remains wealthy, but it has lost its monopoly. It remains loud but it has lost authority. The erosion of western power is not a catastrophe; it is an adjustment… The realist warning is clear: Decline denied becomes decline accelerated. The West still has the capacity to reinvent itself, but only through humility, through recognition that leadership is earned by example, not inherited by history. Yet arrogance persists. The United States still speaks as if it commands the world, and Europe still acts as if it can hide behind it. This is how empires end, not with defeat, but with disbelief in their own mortality. Every empire imagines itself permanent, a force of history rather than a phase within it. But all empires unravel the same way.
“Every empire reaches the point where illusion meets consequence. For the West, that reckoning has begun. The narratives that once sustained its authority, moral superiority, military invincibility, economic inevitability are collapsing under the weight of facts. Reality has returned and it is not negotiable. The world no longer conforms to western expectations. It exposes them for the first time in centuries… Europe faces a parallel reckoning. Once the crucible of enlightenment and modernity, it has become a museum of its own past.
“The United States can remain a great power if it ceases to act as an empire. But to achieve this, they must first abandon the fantasy that the world awaits their direction. Leadership in the 21st century will belong not to those who dominate, but to those who cooperate. The age of command is ending. The age of coexistence has begun.”
Watani International
7 November 2025
