A Roaring Multipolarity

It is not the first year that people have been talking about the decline of unipolar hegemony of the United States and the emergence of a multipolar world order. In 2003, when the U.S. began its occupation of Iraq, the refusal of Washington’s European partners to support this adventure led to radically opposite opinions. While critics of American policy spoke of forming new ties and disagreement with the actions of the White House, apologists for world domination under the star-spangled flag argued the opposite. Charles Krauthammer, author of the concept of the “unipolar moment” outlined in an article of the same name in 1990, is issuing a sequel called “The Unipolar Moment Again,” where he says that all is well with American power, and the expedition to Iraq is direct proof of that position. “The new unilateralism is explicitly and unabashedly aimed at preserving unipolarity to maintain unrivaled dominance for the foreseeable future…The future of the unipolar era depends on those who govern America who wish to preserve, enhance, and utilize unipolarity to advance not only American but global goals, or whether America will be governed by those who wish to abandon it, either by condemning unipolarity to disintegration while retreating to Fortress America, or by taking the path of gradual power shift to multistoicism

Nevertheless, despite such rhetoric from the political science community serving US interests, 2003 served as a clear trigger for a progressive transition to multipolarity. First of all, from the process of denouncing unipolarity itself. Just a few years later, in February 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in Munich at a security conference, declared that “for the modern world, the unipolar model is not only unacceptable, but impossible at all.” In this, the sprouts of a future open confrontation between Russia, on the one hand, and the United States and its NATO satellites, on the other. In August 2008, during the operation to force Georgia to peace, Moscow showed that it was not going to be on the defensive when other states were trying to destabilize its borders and ignite conflicts. This gesture and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s subsequent statement about Russia’s zone of special geopolitical interests took place in the context of a series of color revolutions that the United States has staged in the post-Soviet space. Although the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 demonstrated the victory of Atlanticism in the historical Russian lands, the ensuing reaction resulted in the return of Crimea to Russia.

However, the U.S. itself is to blame for the loss of its power. Justin Logan, in his article “Unipolarity at Twilight” in 2021, pointed out that the U.S. has used its immense power recklessly, even though it entered the third millennium as one of the most powerful nations in world history.

“Between 2001 and 2021, the United States destroyed political orders in Iraq and Libya, prolonged civil wars in Afghanistan and Syria, and teetered on the brink of war with Iran. During the same period, by their own reckoning, their trade policies created a monster in the form of the far more powerful People’s Republic of China…The wars have poisoned America, from its policies to its policing to the way the government surveils Americans. No one has been held accountable for the failures of the era,” the author desperately summarizes.

The Canadian Institute of Global Affairs issued an analytical publication in May 2022 that outlined a number of developments that have led to tectonic shifts in global affairs.

First, the first decade of the 21st century saw the economic rise of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which created a new counterpoint to the power of the United States. This was predicted by Vladimir Putin in his 2007 speech at the Munich Summit, where he noted, “…the GDP of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – exceeds the combined GDP of the EU. And, according to experts, this gap will only widen in the future. There is no reason to doubt that the economic potential of the new centers of global economic growth will inevitably be transformed into political influence and strengthen multipolarity”. Notably, all BRICS countries refrained from condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Second, China’s entry into both a knowledge-based economy (some 30 years behind the United States) and a data-based economy (at the same time as the United States) in the second decade of the 21st century allowed China to compete head-to-head in the technological arms race for global dominance. While geo-economic tensions gradually escalated throughout the 2010s, the U.S. “satellite moment” came with the realization in early 2018 that China’s Huawei had taken a dominant position in fifth-generation (5G) telecommunications technology. This triggered a full-scale offensive by the Trump administration to undermine China’s technological progress using a set of unilateral tools not previously used in the WTO era.

Third, the United States has squandered the huge advantages it enjoyed when it reached its unipolar position through poor economic management (particularly the low-quality credit crisis) and the wanton use of its military might in endless wars, while neglecting its crumbling economic infrastructure and domestic cohesion. This has undermined their soft power – or, as the Economist delicately put it, “by violating and destroying [the principles of the rules-based international order] for 20 years, America has undermined their credibility as well as its own.” Its lack of discipline has also made it effectively bankrupt, with huge external and budget deficits… It has undermined its ability to sustain the new economic order – and even to sustain the old one, as evidenced by its withdrawal from various multilateral institutions under the Trump administration (and its rather tepid, indeed almost nominal, return under the Biden administration).

Fourth, the West’s split over Brexit and the growing internal divisions in the United States, sharply exacerbated after the January 6 storming of the Capitol, have weakened its cohesion.

Spanish researcher Federico Aznar Fernández-Montesinos adds that “the development of the Global South, which incidentally is part of the Russian narrative, began in the new millennium and materialized in the emergence of groups of states such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa), which seek economic cooperation and develop trade with each other, and they represent an alternative, or “post-American”, international order, as well as a mode of South-South cooperation.”

The world economy is becoming increasingly multipolar, and consequently the West’s dominance and ability to influence has diminished.

It is also believed in the West that the decreasing dependence on the US dollar is remarkable in that it is due to the different aspirations of the PRC as a major economic and financial power, whose leadership views the current moment in history as one in which the US is in a critical position of decline. Given this, Beijing naturally assumes that the days of the US dollar are numbered and that the yuan will be the natural successor. It is not surprising, therefore, that the PRC would like to see the yuan more widely used in international finance and for trade transactions, although it certainly seems to be in no hurry to do so, and for good reason.

At the same time, the Western position on global transformation is more articulate. Thus, it is said that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests one thing in particular: the global liberal order is under threat, and multiple centers of power have created vulnerable interdependencies. This raises the question of whether multipolarity is inherently linked to the ability to generate conflict, and whether multilateralism has ultimately led to its increasing prevalence.”

Of these multiple centers of power, the U.S. identifies great powers that it believes are hostile to the United States. These are Russia and China.

A Roaring Multipolarity