Seifudein Adem
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Jan 21 2026
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Dependency idea has lengthy targeted on the structural subordination of the Global South to the industrialized North. Far much less consideration, nevertheless, has been paid to relations of dependency throughout the superior capitalist world itself. Ali A. Mazrui was one of many few thinkers to establish and theorize this uncared for dimension. Mazrui (1981, 329) argued that the publishSecond World War worldwide order was characterised not solely by NorthSouth dependency but in addition by a equally hierarchical type of dependency working contained in the Global North itselfone centered on the United States. He referred to as the latter macrodependency.
Mazruis intervention challenged a liberal framework in International Relations (IR) that was subsequently to turn into influential: the speculation of complicated interdependence related to Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (1977). While Keohane and Nye emphasised mutual dependence and reciprocal vulnerability amongst superior industrial states, Mazrui insisted and highlighted that this interdependence was deeply asymmetrical. In his view, postwar interdependence was structured round American dominance by which allies had been built-in into U.S.-led establishments that constrained their autonomy whereas reinforcing U.S. primacy. According to Mazrui (1976; 1981), macrodependency within the postwar worldwide order assumed three principal and mutually reinforcing varieties. Together, these varieties structured a particular hierarchy throughout the Global Northone that differed from classical imperial domination, but nonetheless produced sturdy patterns of dependence.
The first type was financial, institutionalized most clearly by the Marshall Plan starting in 1948. The European Recovery Program is commonly celebrated as a benevolent act of American generosity that enabled Western Europes fast reconstruction after the devastation of the Second World War. Mazrui didn’t deny the truth or significance of European restoration. On the opposite, he acknowledged that the Marshall Plan succeeded in stabilizing currencies, rebuilding industrial capability, and stopping political collapse. Yet, he emphasised that restoration got here at a structural price. Western Europe was reinserted into the worldwide economic system by establishments and guidelines overwhelmingly formed by the United States. Dollar hegemony, U.S. management within the Bretton Woods establishments, and American affect over commerce liberalization embedded European economies inside a U.S.-centered monetary and financial structure. Economic revival thus coincided with a reconfiguration of dependence, not its elimination.
The second type of macrodependency was navy, consolidated by the creation of NATO in 1949. Formally, NATO was a collective protection alliance amongst sovereign equals. Substantively, nevertheless, it institutionalized American strategic management over Western Europe. Security ensures had been indispensable, notably within the context of Soviet energy however they got here with limits on European strategic autonomy. Key selections relating to nuclear deterrence, pressure posture, and alliance priorities rested largely with Washington. NATO exemplified how dependence might be normalized and legitimized by multilateral establishments. Military safety diminished vulnerability to exterior threats, however concurrently entrenched reliance on U.S. management and constrained the emergence of impartial European safety doctrines.
The third type was technological and strategic, most clearly embodied within the U.S.Japan relationship following the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Japans postwar settlement built-in it firmly into an American-led safety system. Under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, Japan was in a position to focus on financial progress and technological improvement whereas sharply limiting its navy capabilities. Mazrui interpreted this association as a very revealing case of macrodependency: Japan gained safety and entry to superior know-how, however solely by accepting long-term restrictions on strategic autonomy. Japans financial dynamism and its navy dependence on the US thus superior collectively. Japans spectacular rise didn’t contradict dependency idea. It as an alternative illustrated a variant of dependency working amongst superior industrial states.
Taken collectively, these financial, navy, and technological preparations produced a hierarchical order throughout the Global North. Western Europe and Japan had been neither colonies nor peripheral economies. Yet neither had been they totally autonomous nice powers. They occupied an intermediate place: structurally dependent companions embedded inside a system managed, stabilized, and finally underwritten by the United States. This configuration essentially contradicts liberal narratives of postwar worldwide politics that emphasised concord, mutual profit, and equality amongst superior capitalist states. It was exactly this contradiction that led Mazrui to query the prevailing liberal idea of interdependence.While theorists of complicated interdependence emphasised rising mutual reliance as a pressure that diminished battle, Mazrui insisted that not all interdependence was created equal. As Mazrui (1976, 119) famous in considered one of his most theoretically prescient passages:
This formulation made clear that interdependence solely turns into politically equalizing when it produces reciprocal vulnerability. If one social gathering can soak up disruption extra simply than one other, interdependence turns into a supply of leverage fairly than mutual restraint. Dependence, on this case, doesn’t disappear underneath interdependence. It is merely redistributed. This perception locations Mazrui effectively forward of mainstream IR idea. Only a lot later, after the rise of Donald Trump, did Keohane and Nye (2025, 70) revisit their framework to acknowledge explicitly that uneven interdependence confers a bonus on the much less dependent actor in a relationship. Mazrui had already articulated this logic 5 many years earlier. What he grasped was that interdependence might simply as simply reproduce hierarchy as dissolve it. As he put it succinctly: interdependence might both create or destroy equality. The important issue considerations the exact nature of that interdependence (Mazrui 1975, 118).
Recent shifts in U.S. international coverage underscore the persevering with relevance of Mazruis perception. The Trump administrations method to alliances and commerce will be interpreted as an attemptperhaps unintendedto unravel the very structure of macrodependency that the United States itself had constructed after 1945. By demanding larger protection spending from allies, renegotiating commerce agreements, and withdrawing from multilateral preparations that constrained U.S. autonomy, Trump is in search of to extract fast benefits from Americas place because the least dependent actor in uneven relationships. Yet this technique uncovered a deeper paradox. Macrodependency had by no means functioned solely by American energy. It depended equally on American willingness to behave as system managerabsorbing prices, supplying public items, and sustaining establishments that reassured allies and normalized asymmetry.
When U.S. management underneath Donald Trump appeared conditional, transactional, or unreliable, the political legitimacy of macrodependency started to erode.As a consequence, even long-standing allies started reassessing their reliance on Washington. Statements calling for strategic autonomy, protection independence, or diminished dependence on the United Statesonce unthinkable throughout the Cold Warhave turn into more and more widespread. Shortly earlier than assuming Germanys chancellorship, Friedrich Merz declared that his high precedence could be to realize independence from the USA (quoted in Sanger 2025). Similar views are murmured in Japan, too, the place considerations aboutalliance reliabilityhave fueled discussions about larger strategic self-reliance. In reference to the 1951 safety treaty between Japan and the US, Mazrui (1981, 330) described the consequence as a case of self-castration within the navy subject.
This second doesn’t signify a sudden collapse of American energy. Rather, it represents a delayed reckoning with the contradictions of macrodependency. The United States derived huge advantages from a system of asymmetrical interdependence, however that system required restraint, predictability, and a long-term dedication to management. Once the worth of that function started to be questioned by America itself, the hierarchical foundations of the postwar order and the self-love of the liberal optimism embedded within the idea of complicated interdependence had been uncovered. This doesn’t imply {that a} coherent post-American order has already emerged, nor does it indicate the approaching disappearance of U.S. affect. What is unfolding as an alternative is a chronic interval of recalibration. Allies are in search of to scale back vulnerability, diversify partnerships, and renegotiate their place inside a extra fluid and contested worldwide system. The erosion of macrodependency is uneven and incomplete, however it displays structural shifts that Mazrui anticipated way back.
The idea of macrodependency can thus be a helpful analytical software for comprehending why up to date tensions throughout the Global North can’t be diminished to management model, diplomatic missteps, or short-term coverage divergence. They stem from the long-term penalties of a hierarchical order whose asymmetries had been sustainable solely as long as the U.S. function remained mutually acceptable.
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (2025, 70) wrote:
Keohane and Nye could also be proper. Indeed, the disruption related to the Trump presidency shouldn’t be understood merely as an episode of nationalist populism or diplomatic eccentricity. It represents a late-stage rupture in an American-centered system of macrodependency primarily based on asymmetry and structural imbalance. For many years, U.S. hegemony rested not merely on energy, however on consent institutionalized by financial help, navy safety, and technological management. But this association was hierarchical interdependence fairly than real reciprocity. What Trump didoften seemingly haphazardlywas to strip this hierarchy of its legitimating language. By demanding that allies pay extra, commerce much less freely, and assume larger strategic autonomy, the Trump administration accelerated the erosion of the very dependencies that had sustained U.S. management.
The sign signifies a transition towards a extra fragmented and fewer centralized world order, one by which energy is more and more negotiated, an order akin to what Amitav Acharya (2025, 22) has referred to as the worldwide multiplex. In world multiplex, Acharya (2025, 348) famous new types of interdependence and interactions will form world order.
References
Acharya, Amitav. 2025. The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West. London: Basic Books.
Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye Jr. 1977. Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little, Brown.
Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye Jr. 2025. The End of the Long American Century: Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power. Foreign Affairs, July/August: 6879.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1975. The New Interdependence: From Hierarchy to Symmetry. In The U.S. and World Development: Agenda for Action 1975, edited by James Howe, New York, Washington, London: Praeger Publishers.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1980. Technology, International Stratification, and the Politics of Growth. International Political Science Review 1 (1): 6879.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1981. Micro-Dependency: The Cuban Factor in Southern Africa. India Quarterly 37 (3): 329345.Sanger, David E. 2025. Power, Money and Territory. New York Times, March 13, A5.
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- American Military Power and World Peace: A Strategic Paradox?
- Opinion Reassessing Military Misconceptions within the American-Japanese Alliance
- Opinion The Status of Chinas Confucius Institutes in American Universities
- Opinion Eulogy for American Exceptionalism
- Opinion Britain and the American South: A Special Relationship?
- Opinion Reflections on the American Revolution at Almost 250
About The Author(s)
Seifudein Ademis a visiting professor on the Institute for Advanced Research and Education at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He has taught at universities in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University, 198892), Japan (University of Tsukuba, 200005; Doshisha University, 201823), USA (Binghamton University, 200616), and China (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2017). Adem is Ali Mazruis mental biographer and has revealed ten books with, for, or about Mazrui, together with Postcolonial Constructivism: Mazruis Theory of Intercultural Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). From 2006 to 2016, he served as affiliate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University. More of his work will be foundhere.
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Dependency TheoryJoseph NyeMultiplexityUnited StatesUS Foreign Policy