Arnaud Bertrand is a geopolitical and economic commentator and entrepreneur, as well as the founder of the international businesses HouseTrip and Me & Qi.

“Nothing escapes gravity.” We hold this truth to be self-evident in the domain of physics, as we experience it every day.

Yet when we turn to geopolitics, we often behave as if will and rhetoric could somehow defy such forces. We celebrate leaders for their eloquence and charisma, mistaking the spectacle of power for power itself. But “leadership” cannot rewrite geography, nor can stirring speeches alter demographic realities or resource endowments. A gifted orator leading a strategically vulnerable state remains constrained by facts as immutable as the laws of physics. In an age dominated by narrative warfare and ideological positioning, we risk forgetting that beneath the noise of political communication lie structural forces—geopolitical gravity, if you will—that determine what is actually possible.

The gravitational pull of an infrastructure giant | Source: Sora
 

Consider the historical record. Why has the West dominated the world since the Industrial Revolution? Was this due to stirring speeches, or technological and manufacturing supremacy? Why did the Allies prevail in World War II? Because Roosevelt and Churchill were more eloquent than Hitler? Because the Allies’ values were morally superior to fascism? Or was it because the Allies possessed overwhelming advantages in industrial output and access to strategic resources?

American political scientist Samuel Huntington put it bluntly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” A harsh and oversimplified formulation, perhaps, but one that captures an uncomfortable truth about the primacy of raw power.

 

The Comfort of Hegemony

Europe seems especially vulnerable to forgetting such lessons. Hubert Védrine, France’s former Foreign Minister, repeatedly calls out this tendency, accusing Europeans of thinking they inhabit a “world of Care Bears” (bisounours in French) whereas the world remains very much “Jurassic Park.”

In all fairness, this European mindset was entirely rational—even advantageous—for decades. During the unipolar moment, when American hegemony went unchallenged, Atlanticism was the obvious course: bind yourself to the hegemon and reap the benefits of proximity to power. Preparing for American decline and renewed great power competition while living under American protection would have risked being counterproductive—a form of disloyalty that Washington would have hardly rewarded.

More fundamentally, American hegemony allowed Europeans to internalize Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis—the idea that liberal democracy’s triumph had rendered traditional geopolitical competition obsolete. Why invest in defense when great power struggles are over? Why think in terms of hard power when the future belongs to norms, institutions, and moral lectures? Atlanticism didn’t just provide physical security; it enabled an entire “world of Care Bears” logic.

There is an even deeper cognitive barrier. The West has been globally dominant since the Industrial Revolution. After two centuries, such dominance feels like natural law rather than historical contingency. Picture a European politician circa 2005—the moment when serious preparation should have arguably begun—campaigning on this platform: “We must ready ourselves for a world where America recedes and China surpasses the entire West technologically and industrially.” That obviously would have been electoral suicide. Yet that “unelectable” diagnosis proved precisely correct, and acting on it would have been the right thing to do.

Perhaps most importantly, no one alive—nor their parents, nor even their grandparents—remembers a multipolar world, particularly one with powerful non-Western poles. We lack not just policy experience but cultural memory of such an order. Little surprise, then, that the signals of such a world’s emergence went unheeded.

Yet the signals were unmistakable, if one bothered to look. From 2015 to 2023, I lived in China, and the chasm between Western narratives and observable reality was staggering. Our media portrayed China as a dystopian regime, a totalitarian anachronism that had missed the memo about history’s end and would inevitably collapse or liberalize. All European politicians could seemingly do about China—and this still largely holds true today—was performative, condescending moralism that satisfied domestic audiences while antagonizing Beijing and doing precisely nothing to address the material power shift underway. Indeed, this actively perpetuated the “world of Care Bears” mythology that prevented us from seeing such a shift clearly in the first place.

Meanwhile, the reality I was experiencing on the ground couldn’t have been more different: the China I saw was going through a genuine renaissance, a country advancing at breathtaking speed, progressively leapfrogging the West in critical domains. The asymmetry of knowledge struck me most: I was constantly meeting Chinese professionals who had studied at Oxford, Stanford, or Sciences Po, spoke fluent English or French and understood the West intimately. But during these extended travels across China, even in major metropolises, I would go weeks without seeing another Westerner. They had invested in understanding us. We hadn’t deemed them worth understanding.

The condescension was breathtaking. This is a country of 1.4 billion people, with a middle-class of hundreds of millions enjoying living standards comparable to—or sometimes exceeding—those in Europe. Yet our discourse remained stuck in nineteenth-century Orientalism, as if we were still cataloguing exotic tribes in need of Western tutelage. I entered China believing its citizens were indoctrinated by state propaganda. I left certain that we were far more propagandized, with our “world of Care Bears” thinking insulating us from reality. We committed a cardinal error: we started believing our own moral sermons constituted strategic analysis.
 

Partnerships in Multipolarity

What does this all have to do with gravity? Because that is a key characteristic of a multipolar world. This is a world where countries must navigate an order with several massive bodies, each exercising its own gravitational pull—a more complex choreography than the simple bipolar dynamics of the Cold War or the singular pull of unipolarity.

Old texts by Jesuit missionaries to China, such as Matteo Ricci, have always been extremely instructive. They provided a fascinating window into how we once engaged between civilizations before the power differential became so great that mutual understanding became optional. The Jesuits arrived in a China that was wealthier, more populous, and technologically comparable to Europe. That world, for all intents and purposes, was multipolar, and absent overwhelming power asymmetry, we had to engage with other “poles” on terms of rough equality, leading to genuine intellectual exchange. The missionaries learned Chinese, studied Confucian classics, and adapted Catholic theology to local contexts—not from a place of enlightened multiculturalism, but because it was a necessity. They understood what we have forgotten: that when you cannot impose your framework, you must learn to operate within another’s.

This is the logic returning to international affairs: a world where the West lacks the overwhelming power to impose its preferences, forcing a return to the older diplomatic arts of accommodation, translation, and interest-based rather than values-based negotiation.

Contemporary Asia already largely operates this way. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is perhaps the perfect exemplar. This organization consists of eleven countries—with the addition of Timor-Leste in October 2025—with radically different political systems. These include communist Vietnam, the Islamic monarchy of Brunei, military-influenced Thailand, the Christian and liberal Philippines, and single-party-led Singapore. They don’t agree on how societies should be organized, yet they cooperate extensively on trade, infrastructure, and security. Why? Because geography creates shared interests that override ideological differences. They all depend on the Malacca Straits for maritime trade. They all benefit from regional stability that enables commerce. They all want to avoid becoming pawns in great power competition. The ASEAN model isn’t some high-minded idealism—it’s geography-driven pragmatism.

Or take another large Asia-led institution as an example: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This is the world’s largest regional organization, accounting for 46 percent of the world’s population and roughly 40 percent of global GDP at purchasing power parity—nearly three times the economic weight of the EU. In their case, the ideological divide is even starker than in ASEAN, since the organization encompasses Asia’s archenemies, India and Pakistan, as well as China, which can hardly be called India’s best friend. Yet they all formed this organization anyway. Not because they resolved their ideological differences or are even seeking to do so, but simply because they share borders, energy corridors, and security concerns, and don’t have the luxury of ignoring each other. Geography doesn’t care about values or historical grievances.

The common denominator they landed on is interesting: the UN Charter, interpreted strictly. If you read their latest 2025 Tianjin joint statement, they obsessively reference it and its principles such as sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and non-interference in internal affairs. This works as a common denominator precisely because it demands no ideological alignment. The Charter doesn’t require political systems to converge. It simply establishes a minimal framework for coexistence: respect sovereignty, don’t interfere in internal affairs, apply rules equally. When no country has the power to impose its preferences and all countries must coexist in proximity, this minimal framework becomes the maximum achievable—and perhaps even the maximum framework necessary.

 

Mass vs Inconsistent Hegemony

There is a fascinating paradox at play here: the West spent decades promoting a “rules-based liberal order” as the evolution beyond crude geography and sovereignty, yet it is their own selective enforcement of these “rules” that is driving the world back to precisely that older framework. Every unilateral sanction imposed without UN authorization, every military intervention justified by elastic interpretations of international law, every instance of “rules for thee but not for me” undermines the entire premise of the order.

The irony is that this outcome was both foreseeable and foreseen. In May 2003, just two months after the invasion of Iraq, former U.S. President Bill Clinton gave a commencement speech at Yale University where he spelled out the choice with devastating clarity: “If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country’s future, there’s nothing inconsistent in [the U.S. continuing to behave unilaterally]. But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behavior that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military political economic superpower in the world, then you wouldn’t do that.” The implication was unmistakable: you cannot spend your hegemonic moment ignoring your own rules and expect those rules to protect you when your power wanes. Yet the U.S. chose that exact path—maintaining absolute freedom of action while promoting a rules-based order for everyone else. The irony is almost poetic: in refusing to bind itself to its own rules when it had the power to ignore them, it destroyed the credibility of those rules, as well as the U.S.-led global order in the process.

In the meantime, China spent the past few decades betting that the underlying importance of geopolitical gravity would apply regardless of any ideological superstructure. While the United States invested in military bases and its “soft power” apparatus, China focused on becoming massive—economically, technologically, infrastructurally. Mass creates its own gravitational field. A country of 1.4 billion people with the world’s largest manufacturing capacity and growing technological sophistication exerts pull simply by existing. You don’t need to share China’s political system to benefit from its markets, to connect to its infrastructure networks, or to participate in its supply chains. This is why China’s influence has grown even as its political model remains alien to many of its partners: gravity doesn’t require affection, only proximity and mass.

The best illustration of this is the attitude of Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who before getting elected swore that “not only [he] will not do business with China, [he] won’t do business with any communists.” In his own words, he is a man who couldn’t be more ideologically opposed to China. Yet after taking office, here is what he had to say in a November 2024 interview for The Economist: “Relations with China are excellent. They are a fabulous partner. They don’t ask for anything in return. All they ask is that I don’t disturb them. It’s fabulous. It’s fabulous. They are fabulous. I mean, I swear to you, they do not ask anything. Nothing. They want to trade calmly. And you know what? We have economies that are complementary. Therefore, the well-being of Argentines requires that I deepen my commercial ties with China. Why? Because they are complementary economies.”

What better illustration is there of how geopolitical gravity overrides ideology? Milei didn’t change his ideology, nor did China ask him to. Yet the relationship makes sense because it’s mutually beneficial. The pre-ideological logic is returning: you don’t need to share values to trade, only mutual benefit.

Oriana Skylar Mastro, formerly the Pentagon’s top strategic planner on China and now a professor at Stanford University, recently posed this rhetorical question: “The war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of 10 Belt and Road initiatives. So which one is more impactful on the world?” The question answers itself when we examine what has remained. Military bases can be withdrawn, occupations can end, interventions can be abandoned—as Afghanistan itself proved. But infrastructure creates permanent relationships. A Chinese-built port in Pakistan doesn’t care who is president in Washington or Beijing. High-speed rail connecting Thailand to Laos continues operating regardless of ideological winds. These physical connections make neighbors economically entangled in ways that outlast any particular political alignment.

This, incidentally, has always been China’s modus operandi. We often misunderstand its so-called “tributary system” as being similar to European colonialism, but it couldn’t have been more different. In fact, George Yeo, Singaporean cabinet minister for 21 years (of which he spent seven as Minister for Foreign Affairs), recently reminded us in a speech: “Tributary is the wrong translation. ‘Chaogong’ is to pay respect, in response to which you will enjoy China’s largess. It is not the tributary in which Dubrovnik pays the Ottoman sultan in order to keep menace at bay. That was protection money. When you use ‘tributary’ in the Western context you think of it as protection money when [in China’s case] it’s the opposite: you give China some trinkets, you get back gold. This is how it was. And that’s why Southeast Asian countries competed with one another [to be tributaries]. Japanese merchants were fighting for tokens to trade in China. China used their market, their economics to control behavior.” China today is simply applying the same logic at global scale: using economic mass and market access to create gravitational pull, making partnership more attractive than resistance.

 

Is China Different?

This relates to one of the most hotly debated questions in geopolitics: if China had the capabilities, would it want to rule Asia the way the United States ruled its own hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine?

If you follow realist theorists of international relations like John Mearsheimer, you’d think the answer is obviously yes. After all, that’s what great powers supposedly always want: exclusive control over their neighborhood and recognition as a regional hegemon. Why would China be any different?

Zhao Long, deputy director of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, recently explained why China would in fact be different. Whereas Western realist thinking operates on win-lose logic, where great powers must dominate exclusive territories, China’s approach is fundamentally systemic—gravitational rather than territorial. It is focused not on carving out exclusive spheres, but on becoming a massive body that everything else must orbit around.

The metaphor Zhao uses is revealing: the human body, with China as the heart. Would it make sense for the heart to “win” against the lungs, liver, or brain? Should the heart carve up the chest cavity as its exclusive sphere of influence? Obviously not. The heart’s health depends entirely on circulation flowing freely throughout the entire system, nourishing every organ and enabling the whole body to thrive. Isolate the heart from the rest of the body, and both die.

As Zhao writes: “China’s strategic and economic rise is predicated not on regional containment but on global integration” and “Beijing’s influence grows when its regional partners are economically linked to a wider global system in which China plays a central role—not when those partners are locked into rigid blocs.”

This is precisely what gravitational centrality looks like in practice: influence derived not from excluding others, but from making yourself so economically massive and so central to critical networks that everyone must engage with you whether they want to or not. In that logic, an arrangement like the Monroe Doctrine actually undermines your objectives.

Additionally, a Yalta-style sphere of influence arrangement would betray the very principles China has championed for decades. In a 1974 UN speech, Deng Xiaoping himself warned that if China ever “changed her color and turned into a superpower” that “played the tyrant,” then “the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”

Strong words. And accepting a sphere of influence would be precisely the transformation Deng warned against. It would validate Mearsheimer’s arguments that China is no different from any other great power—just another player in the same old game of domination. This would legitimize anti-China alignments and destroy the moral authority China has carefully built with the Global South, which is drawn to China precisely because it offers an alternative to traditional great power politics.

There’s a historical parable that illustrates the trap perfectly. At some point during the Warring States period in Chinese history, China had two dominant states: Qin and Qi. Qin was brutal; Qi was more benevolent, and smaller states preferred Qi. The king of Qin proposed: “Let’s stop calling ourselves kings and proclaim ourselves emperors. I’ll be the Western Emperor, you’ll be the Eastern Emperor.” The king of Qi agreed. But immediately, the smaller states that had favored Qi turned against him. Why? Because by becoming co-emperor, Qi became complicit in Qin’s methods. The smaller states knew Qi could no longer protect them, so they obeyed Qin out of fear. Qi had isolated itself through association. Eventually, Qin defeated everyone, including Qi, and unified China.

The parallel today is that if China starts carving up the world into spheres of influence alongside America and Russia, it becomes a “co-emperor” in the very hegemonic system it criticizes. Countries that currently see China as offering a fundamentally different model would suddenly view it as just another imperial power playing the same old game. And if that’s the case—if China is going to be as hypocritical as the West about sovereignty and non-interference—why not stick with the devil you know?

This sphere of influence approach is also, incidentally, precisely what has driven the West’s relative decline while enabling China’s rise. The West’s bloc logic—carving the world into exclusive zones of control—has generated endless friction, drained resources, and ultimately accelerated the very multipolarity it sought to prevent. China’s gravitational model, by contrast, enabled its unprecedented rise. That’s the irony in watching some analysts predict that China will adopt spheres of influence: they’re essentially saying that China will abandon the approach that’s working in favor of the one that’s demonstrably failing.

No, China is much more likely to keep that model—influence through gravitational pull rather than military dominance, attraction rather than imposition—not only because it has worked so far but also because it’s likely to continue doing so in a multipolar world. It’s logical: in a unipolar world, you have a monopoly on power—impose your terms and everyone else can take it or leave it. In a bipolar world, as George Kennan, the architect of U.S. Cold War strategy, wrote, the game is ideological competition. It involves demonstrating your “spiritual vitality [is] capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents” to win hearts and minds, like rival brands competing for loyalty. But multipolar competition is fundamentally different. When multiple major powers compete for influence, countries don’t have to choose teams anymore. They can partner with whoever offers the best terms on any given issue. This transforms international relations from demanding allegiance to earning partnerships. Multipolarity kills ideology through simple market logic: when customers have choices, sellers must compete on substance rather than brand loyalty.

 

Europe’s Ongoing Conundrum

Where does that leave Europe, our old continent stuck in its “world of Care Bears”? To call it ill-prepared for the present moment would be generous. There are two sides to this new multipolar coin: the first is whether Europe can generate gravitational pull itself, and the second is whether it can avoid being captured entirely by America’s gravitational field. These questions are related but distinct.

Europe could theoretically generate significant gravity—it has economic mass, technological capacity, and a large integrated market. But gravity requires more than size; it requires the willingness and capability to use that mass strategically. This means making decisions that might antagonize Washington: fostering independent energy relationships despite American opposition, engaging with China on European rather than American terms, developing independent military capabilities that don’t automatically align with NATO. Europe has consistently refused these choices, preferring the comfort of Atlanticism. The result is structural dependence: Europe relies on American security guarantees, American technology platforms, American financial infrastructure. In gravitational terms, Europe has potential mass but remains locked in America’s orbit.

In that regard, the recent Nexperia debacle is grimly instructive. After U.S. officials told the Dutch in June 2025 that this Holland-based semiconductor manufacturer must rid itself of Chinese ownership to avoid American sanctions, the Dutch government used a 1952 emergency law—designed for requisitioning critical supplies during wartime—to seize the company. China promptly retaliated by banning Nexperia’s Chinese operations from exporting anything, crippling a company that does 80 percent of its production in China. The result: Europe’s automotive association warned of industry-wide production stoppages within weeks, as Nexperia supplies critical chips to virtually every European carmaker. In effect, Europe is witnessing the destruction of one of its flagship tech companies and endangering its most important industry, all to comply with extraterritorial American legislation targeting Chinese ownership. The best framework for understanding Nexperia isn’t as a European company caught between superpowers, but as an illustration of what happens when you simultaneously lack gravitational mass and remain locked in another’s orbit: you’re not even valuable enough to be fought for; you’re simply collateral damage. Your interests end up beneath consideration in contests that consume you.

The irony is that Europe should excel at multipolarity. Its geographic position is nearly ideal: connected to both Asia and America, sitting at the crossroads of multiple gravitational fields, it should normally benefit from all poles—on top of being one itself. Yet far from exploiting this position, Europe is systematically severing itself from all gravitational fields except one, turning the continent into an isolated peninsula at Eurasia’s edge—disconnected from its natural hinterland, dependent on a distant predatory power, and increasingly irrelevant to the great games being played across the landmass it borders. This is all the more ironic given Europe’s own intellectual traditions: balance-of-power diplomacy, the Congress system, the intricate statecraft that once defined European politics—all born from the understanding that in a world of multiple poles, you maintain relationships with everyone and get captured by no one. But that wisdom has atrophied, replaced by the “world of Care Bears” logic that mistakes moral posturing for strategic thinking. Europe clings to ideology, while Asia practices the pragmatism and wisdom it once mastered.

It’s almost absurd: Europe, sitting at the perfect crossroads of multiple gravitational fields, finds itself paralyzed by the very multipolarity for which it had invented the tools to navigate. Europe should perhaps consider re-reading its own medieval Jesuit missionaries—they understood geopolitical gravity far better than those currently sitting in Brussels.

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