Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary. Alternatively, you could buy me a coffee!
The following piece (for paid subscribers only) is a significantly expanded version of an article I recently published in Compact. In it, I argue that predictions about the inevitable rise of multipolarity might have been premature. US structural power has eroded, but it remains formidable and is actually growing in Europe, among its Asian allies and in Latin America. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s weaponisation of the dollar-centric system and use of raw military violence has seriously disrupted key links in the multipolar system and opened huge rifts among BRICS members, by pushing them into wildly different strategic positions. Thus far, non-Western countries have proven to be woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Western-led assault.
Under Trump it has also turned to raw coercion: Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, piracy on the high seas, Ukraine. BRICS has failed to respond, paralysed by members in wildly different strategic positions, including two that have effectively been at war with each other. Without a cohesive non-Western counterweight, which would itself risk global war, the world remains largely unipolar in military terms.
It has become almost conventional wisdom, across the political spectrum, that Washington has spent the past few years lurching from one blunder to the next, weakening its global position in the process. By antagonising Russia and China at the same time, it has pushed the two powers into precisely the strategic embrace that American strategists long regarded as something to be avoided at all costs. By weaponising the dollar and the US-centric financial system, and aggressively imposing tariffs on friends and foes alike, it has merely spurred the countries of the Global South to accelerate de-dollarisation and delink from the Western-controlled trade and financial architecture — strengthening BRICS and further eroding its own position. Its unconditional support for Israel and its open contempt for international law, now effectively official policy under Trump, have done lasting damage to its legitimacy and “soft power”. The attack on Iran is typically framed as merely the latest entry in this long list of blunders: the US, many claim, has suffered a strategic defeat, having failed to achieve regime change while sustaining massive, possibly irreversible, damage to its bases in the Middle East. Finally, there is broad agreement that Ukraine — and by extension NATO — has lost the war, dealing yet another devastating blow to American power.
All this is held up as evidence that the US has entered a phase of terminal decline, one that will inevitably force its elites to accept a diminished global role and accommodate themselves to the reality of multipolarity. The prospect elicits either panic or hope, depending on whom you ask. Those who favour a globally dominant America, leading the “free world” against “authoritarianism”, decry these developments — and, naturally, blame Trump for them. US critics, anti-imperialists and the pro-multipolarity crowd welcome them. Yet these two ideologically distant camps largely share the same diagnosis: Washington’s brazen attempts to defend its hegemony have failed, and indeed backfired. I have made this argument myself on more than one occasion. Lately, however — as someone who belongs squarely in the pro-multipolarity camp — I have started to wonder whether we have allowed our wishes to get ahead of reality. I don’t dispute most of the individual observations listed above. What I question is the conclusion drawn from them: that the US is being forced, by the sheer weight of its own mistakes, to make room for a multipolar order. The evidence of the past year points in a different direction, and nowhere more clearly than in the growing paralysis of BRICS itself.
When talking about multipolarity, it is important to distinguish between relative weight and relative power. Relative weight can be measured objectively, and in this sense — especially in economic terms — multipolarity is already a reality: the US accounts for a much smaller share of the global economy than it did even a decade ago, largely thanks to the rise of new economic powers, first and foremost China. But has this decline in relative weight been matched by a comparable decline in power, economic or otherwise? That depends on how one defines power, which is a far harder thing to measure. For the purposes of this argument, I will define it as the ability to bend others to your will. This can be achieved by structural or by openly coercive means: by controlling the structures within which others operate or by inflicting — or threatening to inflict — harm.
Structural power tends to enjoy a high degree of legitimacy because it operates within a system of generally accepted “rules”, such as laws — even though it, too, includes repressive tools to sanction misbehaviour. Openly coercive power, on the other hand, is generally considered illegitimate. A state exercises power over its citizens in structural terms; a crime syndicate mainly exercises power over people in openly coercive terms. Defiance is punished in both cases, but in the former, obedience derives not simply from fear of punishment but from the sense that following the established rules is the “normal” and “correct” way to behave.
The same distinction applies to international relations. Since the end of the Second World War, the US has enjoyed an enormous degree of structural power. Through its control of global financial, logistical and military infrastructure, and its unparalleled ability to project force around the globe (and to destabilise countries by covert means), it has been able to exact a high degree of compliance: from the client states of the collective West during the Cold War and from most of the world during the post-Cold War unipolar moment.
For most countries — or at least for the elites running them — abiding by US-dictated rules came to seem the natural and correct course of action. This was certainly true of the collective West. The countries of the Global South, meanwhile, felt they had little alternative, given Washington’s willingness to resort to economic punishment (sanctions, financial exclusion) and even mass violence against rule-breakers and non-aligned states, from Yugoslavia to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Crucially, the US managed to retain a degree of legitimacy even for these actions by framing them as necessary to uphold the so-called “rules-based order” — a political fiction, but one that exercised a powerful hegemonic sway, at least in the West.
So what has changed in the new multipolar phase? There is little doubt that US structural power — its ability to exact compliance simply by virtue of controlling the world’s material and immaterial infrastructure, and to impose severe costs on rivals without resorting to military force — has diminished over the past decade. This is not just a consequence of China’s rise to economic, industrial, technological and military superpower status. It also reflects the fact that Beijing has quietly been building an alternative global financial, economic and governance infrastructure that allows countries to trade and coordinate outside the US-controlled, dollar-centric system — a project that has gathered pace in response to Washington’s weaponisation of that system.
This is the main reason why the sanctions regime imposed on Russia, the most extensive ever devised, has failed to cripple the country: China and many non-Western countries refused to go along with it. This has arguably been one of the greatest achievements of the China-led BRICS: providing a concrete infrastructure through which to advance multipolarisation — not just by boosting the relative economic weight of non-Western countries, but by reducing the structural power of the US-led system and offering countries, at least potentially, an escape from the global matrix of American control. In this second sense, too, multipolarity is a reality in the making.
Yet the second Trump administration has also exposed the limits of this process. For starters, the structural power of the US, though waning, still remains formidable — and in some parts of the world it is actually growing. Over the countries of the US-led bloc, Washington arguably exercises greater control today than at any time since 1945. Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe, which is now more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to the US — or rather to the transatlantic imperial apparatus — than ever before. This is no accident, but rather, I would argue, the outcome of a deliberate strategy, in which the destabilisation of Ukraine and deliberate provocation of Russia was consciously used to force Europe to decouple from Russian energy, in favour of greater dependence on American supplies, and to drive a permanent wedge between the continent and Russia. The war has also served to expand NATO, which has always been a tool for subordinating Europe to US geostrategic goals. Far from producing greater European autonomy, rearmament is entrenching the continent’s subordination to a NATO command structure firmly controlled by Washington — one that will keep European countries locked in a standoff with Russia for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the West is extending its foothold in the Black Sea and Caspian regions, from Armenia to Azerbaijan, further encircling Russia.