It's not a multipolar world.

It's not a unipolar world either.

Photo by Kayla Kozlowski on Unsplash

What is the current distribution of power in the world? There used to be an easy answer to this question. During the Cold War, most international relations scholars agreed that it was a bipolar world, with the United States and Soviet Union comprising the poles. After the Cold War ended, most international scholars agreed that it was a unipolar world, with the United States left as the last superpower standing.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, there has been considerable dispute on this question. I argued in The System Worked that the United States remained the hegemon despite elite perceptions to the contrary. That book came out in 2014, however, and it is a different world now. The fact that both the Trump and Biden administrations have embraced the notion of “great power competition” suggests that even the former hegemon believes there are other great powers in the world.

Recently, Foreign Affairs surveyed a bunch of international relations scholars on this question, asking them whether “the global distribution of power today is closer to being unipolar than it is to being bipolar or multipolar.” The scholars’ answers were all over the map, although those who thought the world was still closer to unipolar were less certain in their convictions.

Writing at World Politics Review, Paul Poast considers what we would see in a multipolar world (a balkanizing global economy, multiple powers intervening on all sides in civil wars) and concludes that we’re no longer in unipolarity:

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.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts only partially agrees with Poast. No doubt, there are deep trends – democratic recession, geoeconomic fragmentation, and the greatest number of state-based conflicts since the end of the Second World War – demonstrating just how badly the liberal international order has frayed. Poast is no doubt correct that this implies a shift away from unipolarity.

My issue is whether this means it really is a multipolar world or just a bipolar world in which the U.S. pole is a heckuva lot stronger than the Chinese pole. An awful lot of actors seem to prefer the multipolar schema. As I noted a few months ago, however, I’m not sure that dog will hunt:

I’m still enough of a realist to ask whether the world is as multipolar as Brazil, India, and other members of the Global South think it is…. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue that, “the United States has become less dominant over the past 20 years, but it remains at the top of the global power hierarchy—safely above China and far, far above every other country.” At worst, it’s a world of emerging bipolarity, in which maybe China is a peer competitor. What it is not is a polycentric or multipolar world.

The more I think about it, less convinced I am of multipolarity. The United States and China as autonomous great powers? Sure, absolutely. Is Russia an independent great power? I don’t think so — great powers should be able to operate in their sphere of influence without incurring exorbitant costs — and that does not describe Russia. Is the European Union a great power? No, it lacks cohesion and is far too reliant on the United States for its security. This applies to Japan as well. Is India a great power? Not right now, no — maybe in the future.

Great powers usually have allies, and this is an area where the United States stands apart. NATO members and the Pacific Rim treaty allies add an awful lot of strategic support to the United States. China has… North Korea. For all the talk about Russia and China’s new friendship, the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor threw some cold water on that notion in a recent column:

The irony is that, despite Washington’s embrace of great power competition with the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing, China and Russia aren’t ironclad allies. Goldstein recently conducted a research mission in China, interviewing numerous Chinese experts on international affairs at multiple leading scholarly and policy-focused institutions. The impression he came away with of the Chinese view was one of pessimism: Many of his interlocutors were disappointed, even surprised by the clumsiness and overt aggression shown by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, but also recognized that total Russian failure and the collapse of Putin’s regime may not be in China’s interest.

While Russia, squeezed by Western sanctions, wants to make good on its supposed “no limits” friendship with Beijing, Chinese officials and analysts speak of the ties between the two countries as not a full-fledged alliance. Even over the course of the war in Ukraine, China, to a certain extent, has kept Russia at arm’s length and won’t send finished arms and weapons to buttress the deeply depleted Russian war machine.

China wants to attract more support from the Global South, but they are serious when they talk about hedging: they do not want to be allied with China any more than they want to be allied with the United States.

The truth is, the world is bipolar now. There are reasons, however, why so many observers want to say that it is a multipolar world. For one thing, multipolarity affords all these actors a lot more agency. For another, many equate bipolarity with the Cold War. Those with memories of the last bipolar era would prefer not to see China and the United States in a state of constant nuclear brinksmanship.

If India continues to rise, true multipolarity might be a thing in a decade or so. For the rest of this decade, however, it is a bipolar world. Any expert who tells you differently is selling you something.