During a gala this week at the Russian Embassy in Washington, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, assured representatives from a host of African nations that, despite the war in Ukraine, Moscow remained “firmly committed to developing strategic partnership with our African friends.” Through their joint efforts, he added, “the continent will become one of the leaders of the emerging multipolar world order.”
There is much to unpack in Antonov’s statement, but it rests on a key idea: that the world is becoming multipolar. Is that indeed the case?
A term widely used among scholars and analysts of international politics, “multipolarity” refers to an international system dominated by multiple major powers. The Cold War, dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was clearly a period of bipolarity. The era immediately following the Soviet Union’s collapse, in which the U.S. emerged as the world’s sole remaining major power, is commonly referred to as Washington’s “unipolar moment.”
Is that moment over? Some claim that multipolarity has been with us for some time. As long as 15 years ago, Tom Fingar, then the chairman of the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council, had already declared the “unipolar moment” over. A few years later, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry remarked that the presence of multiple powers capable of pursuing their interests globally meant “we live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries, not the superpower rivalry of the Cold War.” The 2017 National Security Strategy released by the administration of then-President Donald Trump declared a return to “Great Power Competition,” while that of current President Joe Biden recognized China as a “strategic” competitor.
The terminology might vary, but the message is the same: The United States’ time of being the sole global power following the end of the Cold War is over.
Others are not so sure. Some argue that multipolarity is a “myth,” noting, for instance, that China’s power is “overhyped” and may already be declining. Such arguments point to the relative size of the U.S. economy as measured in current U.S. dollars, though that gap could close in the next decade. They also highlight the vast sums the U.S. spends on its armed forces relative to all other countries. While China and India are the world’s largest countries by population, the U.S. is the world’s third-most-populous state and is far wealthier on a per capita basis.
Of course, even if the U.S. remains the predominant military and economic power compared to any other country, it may still well exist in a multipolar world. To claim otherwise would be to adhere to a strict definition of polarity, by which only countries with relatively equal power can be considered “major powers”, or poles, in the global order. But even during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age widely viewed as multipolar, the relative power of states granted the status of major power varied greatly. Britain ruled the seas and had by far the world’s largest economy, but Germany was catching up, and Russia loomed in the distance. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Japan were rising non-European powers, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the decline. The participants at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles included Italy in the grouping of “Great Powers,” even though it was treated as a secondary player to the “Big Three” participants of Britain, France and the United States.
The debate over whether the world is now multipolar may seem like an academic matter. But in many respects, it goes to the heart of understanding how and why political events unfold globally.
All of this may seem like an academic matter, the height of ivory tower naval-gazing. But it’s not. In many respects, it goes to the heart of understanding how and why political events unfold globally. This can be seen by considering how multipolarity will impact the world system politically, militarily and economically.
Politically, multipolarity can affect the prospects for international cooperation, particularly if the major powers view one another as competitors or rivals, in which case international institutions can become dysfunctional. This already seems to be happening. Think about the inability of the United Nations Security Council to take action on the war in Ukraine, as Moscow and even Beijing have blocked its efforts to condemn Russia’s actions. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, the World Health Organization was completely paralyzed by the inability of the U.S. and China to cooperate on investigating the pandemic’s origins and responding to the global health crisis it triggered.
There is also the potential for a multipolar system to fracture into competing blocs. The embryonic form of such a fracturing can be seen in the standoff between the U.S. and the emerging Russian-Chinese partnership, as well as in BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa taking on growing significance relative to the G-7 grouping of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and Japan. Such fracturing has in turn created space for illiberal and authoritarian leaders to find external supporters, further contributing to the erosion of democracy around the world.
Militarily, multipolar systems can provoke conflict and undermine efforts to preserve peace. To be sure, war is historically pervasive no matter the polarity of the system, and some multipolar systems have been stable. But if, in a system with multiple major powers, those powers seek to dominate their regions, it creates the dangerous potential for major war. One can see this desire for regional hegemony as a key driver of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and of China’s increasingly bellicose behavior in the South China Sea and its dealings with Taiwan. Additionally, multipolarity means there are more powers that might be willing and able to use military interventions to foment and sustain conflict within third countries. It can also create an unwillingness among other powers to step in to stop such conflicts. It is no coincidence that the long-running civil war in Syria has coincided with a time of growing assertiveness among both great powers and regional powers, as multiple countries intervene and seek to support competing sides in this conflict.
Economically, multipolar systems are inherently more volatile. Years ago, the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that “for the world economy to be stabilized, it requires a stabilizer, one stabilizer.” A country plays this role of stabilizer by taking actions such as offering a stable and widely useable currency or keeping its market open as a destination for other country’s goods. In theory, any state could play this role. In practice, however, multipolarity makes it difficult for a country to take on that role, as it creates incentives to free-ride, with each power waiting on one of the others to take the lead.
For now, the U.S. remains the stabilizer for the world economy when it comes to the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. But China’s efforts to begin “globalizing” the yuan, even if they remain rudimentary, are a sign that the U.S. cannot count on dollar dominance forever. The regularly recurring disputes in Washington over raising the debt limit, without which the U.S. risks a catastrophic default on its sovereign debt, are another.
But competitive interests in a multipolar system can also balkanize the global economy, leading to the formation of various economic blocs. And this is precisely what we are witnessing today, with the U.S. and other Western powers beginning to decouple their economies from China’s out of fears that Beijing will utilize its economic leverage for coercive purposes as it grows in power.
All of these examples point to both the fact that the global order is already multipolar and why that matters. Far from being an academic abstraction, it captures the reality of anyone operating in the international system, be they world leaders, diplomats or the heads of multinational corporations. Every global order’s dynamics are greatly shaped by polarity, and today’s is shaped by multipolarity.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.