Wrong Theories of National Success Are Still Strategic Facts

Diamond's thesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel is a demolition of racial essentialism: peoples diverged because of geography and environment, not because of anything intrinsic to the peoples themselves. It's tempting to file that away as a settled empirical matter. But Thayer's account of Chinese strategic perception shows why you can't — because whether or not essentialism is true, states that believe it act on it, and those actions have real consequences.

The Chinese view Thayer describes — that America was strong when it was culturally unitary and that multiculturalism is a "sickness" driving decline — is precisely the kind of theory Diamond spent a book dismantling. It attributes national trajectory to the composition of the people rather than to institutions, geography, or circumstance. But notice what happens when a rival power holds this theory: it becomes an input to their grand strategy. They will expect America to weaken on a schedule derived from demographic change. They will time their moves accordingly.

This creates an interesting asymmetry. If Diamond is right, the essentialist rival is operating with a broken model of how national power actually works — they're watching the wrong variables. A diverse society whose strength derives from institutions, scale, and geography won't decline the way the model predicts, and the rival's miscalibrated expectations become exploitable. Thayer's title says as much: the racism is a strategic asymmetry for the United States.

But there's a darker reading too. Theories of national success can be self-fulfilling. If Americans themselves come to believe the essentialist story — that cohesion requires homogeneity — the belief could corrode the institutional confidence that actually sustains the country. Diamond's argument, in other words, isn't just an academic corrective; it's a strategic asset. A society that correctly understands why societies succeed is harder to demoralize and harder to predict.

The synthesis: geography may be destiny in Diamond's long run, but in the medium run of great-power competition, beliefs about what makes nations strong are themselves a terrain — and being right about human nature is a competitive advantage.