How the rise of a multipolar world will affect contemporary international relations

Post-war methods of conducting international trade, communications, and finance are breaking down and leading the current globalist order down a path of uncertainty. More specifically what we are witnessing in international relations is an adverse reaction to the shortcoming of hyper-globalization over the past 30 years. Regionalization and protectionism are taking precedence in response to many contemporary international issues. A recent example is the United States’ onshoring of technological production capacity as well as restrictions on the export of semiconductors to supposed problem states, namely China. This paper seeks to explain some of the relative forces causing the emergence of a multipolar structure in the international order and to suggest means of navigating this new era in a secure, stable, and peaceful manner.

One of the problems the United States runs into with a changing world order is its inability to accept it. It has long been inconceivable for American leaders to not refer to their state as the steward of global leadership. Because of its persistence in hegemony over a rules-based order the United States views the security concerns of regional powers with contempt and remains unopen to accommodating non-Western interests. The triumphalism of the last 30 years has produced an aversion to diplomatic means-to-an-end. The folly of the polemic era is that American thinkers naively believed that rising non-Western powers did not harbor animosity toward Western privileges in their construction of a “rules-based order”. Encouraged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, the Global South has begun to quit the bandwagon of a liberalist “rules-based order” in favor of positions that reflect their own national security and economic interests. The memories of colonialism along with their potential to serve as long-term emerging economies reinforces their impatience with prodding by the West to choose sides in what they see as a false choice between great powers. The major trading partner of the world is China and states are not interested in breaking long-standing ties with Russia. States in the Global South see multipolarity as an opportunity to expand their strategic space in a new world order.

Institutional integration of sovereign states into multilateral structures such as the European Union, the UN, and NATO, has critically interfered with nation-states’ ability to pursue their own security interests or resist foreign influence. Such beliefs and values are espoused by the current regime of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin has presented the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an effort to free the world from Western domination of liberal international institutions dictating the terms of a “rules-based order” and that, “deny the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their autonomy, and uniqueness”. The irony of such claims is not lost on the global audience, but in one respect Mr. Putin serves as a barometer of a mood in the global order that is contrary to being pushed around by the United States’, “universal values” and its Western free market allies. People and revisionist states are looking for some other kind of leadership that does not propagate dollar supremacy, neo-colonialism, and impede on their sovereignty via the World Bank and the IMF. The BRICS intergovernmental alternative monetary solutions that skirt around Western-led sanctions on Russia showcases the sort of structures revisionism will attempt to take.

The increasing consensus that the world is veering toward a multipolar structure operates in tandem with another observation; the world is experiencing a rapid decline of globalization in favor of regional ties and protectionism. It is important to note here that a decline in globalization does not signify an inclination to ignore it outright. Both regionalization and globalization processes occur simultaneously and the precedence of one over the other is conditional on the ebb and flow of cyclical global structures. The COVID-19 pandemic was an unforeseen accelerant for the phenomenon of deglobalization. Trade, travel, and multilateral coordination to fight a common enemy suddenly stopped and it was every state for themselves. There are, however, signs of voluntary realignment along globalized themes, such as a revitalized transatlanticism that has occurred since Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is perhaps limited in scope and duration especially as support wanes from populations of European allied states that potentially face a long, dark, and cold winter.

Shannon O’Neil argues that globalization has never truly functioned like the omnipresent force upon the world that it is often described. Rather, it is purely a phenomenon that has given distinct economic advantages to only two dozen states since 1980. By comparison over 90 states during that same period have seen international exchanges stagnate or contribute much less toward their economic growth trends. The reason is that competitive advantages factored by states and non-state actors alike favor and are better able to profit through regional integration of supply chains and manufacturing capacity. This has long been the reality for the majority flow of goods and services between three key trading hubs: Asia, Europe, and North America. In that context, Europe and Asia are much better integrated, with nearly two-thirds of the EU and just over half of trade in Asian states being associated with their respective regions. Securing greater regional integration and prioritizing continental cooperation in supply chains and markets will be crucial in a competitive pluralistic world structure.

O’Neil also acknowledges there are many technological, demographic, and political factors affecting globalization’s decline. She suggests responses to global crises like pandemics and the climate crisis accelerate the reshaping of global trade and economic ties. New means of producing goods via automation and technological achievements in processes such as 3-D printing make the need for labor less important and enable onshoring of production capacities. Regionalization of productive capacity has an appeal to states and non-state actors alike because of China’s rising labor costs and anticipation of declining output brought by demographic changes. China’s preexistence of industrial plants and facilities allows it to continue predominating as the hub of global manufacturing although this is unlikely to persist. Multinationals that have already moved much of their production onshore or to India, Southeast Asia, and North America have discovered lower production costs. Deglobalization will ramp up as firms and states realize the opportunity for profiting from China’s industrial plants is in rapid decline. As deglobalization speeds up, so too will the uncertainty that a rising multipolarity brings to the international order.

Michael O’Sullivan, author of The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization, suggests there are two possible scenarios that can come from deglobalization. The first (of low probability he notes) is a collapse of international interdependencies that is comparable to the outbreak of World War I, where trade and interstate diplomacy were aptly replaced with a breakdown in relations and the outbreak of destructive war. Current events, analysis, and advocacy for prevention by many of the foremost authorities on this possibility concur this unlikelihood. O’Sullivan claims the most likely outcome is the emergence of a multipolar world in which three or four distinct socio-economic and security structures develop. The European Union, the United States, China, and (depending on its development over the next decade) India. Some sources go further and claim the breaking down of the current world order suggests greater autonomy for an Indo-Pacific, South American, and/or African bloc to emerge and hold leverage over larger systems vying for their attention. The emergence of competitive regional blocs would be distinctly different from the multilateralism that defines the current world order because each pole will develop consistent alternatives to the way political and economic liberalism has structured the global order since WWII. Some of the ways this will manifest itself include trade tensions, onshoring of industry and productive capacities, competition for securing of scarce resources, and the regulation of technology.

While multipolarity suggests a new divergence of economic structures and organization into regionally homogenous blocs, it also manifests in complex military capacities, perceived political and cyber freedoms, technological integration (or lack thereof between blocs), financial systems and their institutional standards, and cultural prerogatives. This denotes an increased potential for misunderstanding, incompatibility between once common forms of exchange, and conflict in trade. Identity crises in a multipolarity are also a high probability for former or declining great powers that are left between the poles such as Japan and Great Britain. In this globally shared experience of deglobalization, there emerges a crisis of ambition: the desire by some states to possess great power and their lack of a capacity to do so convincingly under the emerging order.

Ian Bremmer recently responded to claims of deglobalization’s precedence by affirming that while the world appears to be decoupling on multiple fronts this does not suggest globalization is receding, but rather that states perceive there is much less to gain from pursuing the globalist strategy further. As a result, the international order is less coordinated and efficient with its various socio-economic integrations while participation in such processes binding interdependence remains exceptionally intact and nearly impossible to shirk due to a lack of viable alternatives. Bremmer points to the complex interdependencies between the world’s two largest economies to suggest it is much harder for them to decouple beyond areas of perceived national security importance. Despite recent geo-political and virus induced disruptions, heightened tensions over Taiwan, and trade wars, bilateral trade between China and the United States continues to grow. The open geopolitical relationship of the two states still lacks trust and is antagonistic, but it will not break down soon, Bremmer claims, because the interdependency is becoming more important to both state’s economic calculations going forward.

Upon the unipolar moment a consensus emerged in the West that an encouragement toward illiberal governments to operate and integrate into the liberalized economic order, such as the case with China’s accension into the WTO without any preconditions nor requested policy adjustments, would by association bring about some political liberalization. This policy of engagement turned out to not only be false but enabled China to rise in a relatively short timeframe. The United States’ late turn toward containment policy of a rising China, while passing over the possibility of peaceful coexistence, tries to ignore the reality of an emerging multipolarity. It persists in a Cold War-esque nostalgia that has long opposed the ascension of regional hegemons and incorrectly perceives China’s post-Qing grievances and ambitions as a threat. As John Mearsheimer has recently suggested in the magazine Foreign Affairs, China’s outstanding and swift rise could have been avoidable had the unipolar moment been conceived more from a realist power politics perspective than a liberalist “End of History” moment.

Mearsheimer goes on to suggest that the identity of social system(s) that poles organize into within the rising great power competition, whether it i’s a bipolarity or multipolarity, does not determine how states will act when the competition for power has always been a zero-sum game. The Biden Administration’s foreign policy doctrine that invokes an existentialist threat to democracies posed by the rise of illiberal autocracies is neither tailored to nor preparing the United States for the rise of a multipolarity. Recent rhetoric from the United States on that front lacks credibility, appears hypocritical to outside observers, and persists in the assumption that a neo-Cold War will appear by a continued rise of China. In China’s case Mearsheimer argues that they have always possessed revisionist goals as a rising power and the mistake of altruistic liberal internationalism during the unipolar moment was enabling them to rise to contend against the current order with alternative visions.

Peter Zeihan rejects the notion that China poses a long-term threat and has spoken at length about the unlikelihood the state will ascend beyond this decade by emphasizing two problems the state faces. The first is Xi Jinping’s cult of personality approaching an extreme that threatens to go beyond any historical comparison of myopic centralized power, from Secretary Stalin’s Socialism in One State to Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Mr. Xi’s insistence on maintaining “Zero-Covid” and the threat that a re-opening of China’s economy and society poses to the CPC regime serves as an excellent example for how myopic policies threaten the state’s rise. The second is the increasingly noticeable shift in demographics for the state. China is likely to become the fastest aging society in history which dooms their economic model and will significantly affect the globalized world. The billion workers China introduced to the world are what created a globalized and interdependent system and that factor is now disappearing fast.

Barry R. Posen was among those whoforesaw the global trend toward multipolarity’s emergence over a decade ago and attempted then to make sense of the global structure in a piece for the journal Current History. Polarity and the wide-ranging realist consensus of its importance originates from structuralist theories depicting how international relations work. Posen claims that the passing unipolarity of the United States along with the preceding bipolarity of the Cold War era are equally rare and uncharacteristic structural conditions when juxtaposed against the history of international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia. The unipole, or hegemony of the United States, emerged out of an observation of great military power and economic superiority of a liberalist social system that was unchallenged after the fall of the Soviet Union. The distribution of capabilities was skewed in favor of the United States and assuming security as the preeminent concern in the anarchical system, lesser powers bandwagon-ed toward the liberal internationalist/globalist structure. Realism observes that the structures of world power that constrain and incentivize state behavior are cyclic and follow various historical patterns.

Posen adds that today’s statesmen have little experience with a multipolar system compared to historians and theorists. As such, he claims diplomacy should play a greater role in international relations and that it ought to be pursued with insight from academia elevated to a higher respect. Isolationism is a dangerous play in a multipole and security of resources along with allyships will become more preeminent concerns. The appeal of isolation and protectionist policies will be a more pronounced struggle for the United States due to its geographic (two coasts) and strategic advantage (abundant natural resources) compared to other states. States in a multipolar world will pay much closer attention to the building of coalitions; trying to improve their own and erode others. As the Neorealist theorist Kenneth Waltz put it, attraction to poles is defined by a “distribution of capabilities”. Multipolarity does not denote a parity of power among poles, nor does it suggest equal capabilities along military and economic capacities. History shows that unaudited assessments of perceived power threats by states and statesmen define the existence of polarities. As contemporary analysis on the Cold War suggests, the United States maintained greater economic capacities throughout the bipolarity, and it was only because the Soviet’s distilled a greater percentage of their economic power toward military might that a bipolar world order was maintained.

Posen continues to elaborate that a multipolar world will likely create a diffusion of power. This concept suggests a narrowing gap between great powers’ military capabilities and those of small states as well as non-state actors. This is demonstrated in the high premium of the United States’ war in Afghanistan that effectively exacerbated the problem it had sought to resolve. The diffusion of power also suggests central governments of small states are weakened by crises of legitimacy in the face of rising non-state threats and domestic political factionalism and polarization. The diffusion of power invites intervention by great powers upon the irredentist pursuits of aggressor states. Observance of costs and failures associated with those adventures thus serves to deter further expansionist pursuits by other rising powers.

Amitav Acharya makes a constructivist argument that claims the emerging multipolarity will take a much different form than notable and historically unstable structures. He argues we ought to view the construction of a new international order as a complex structure that has a lot less to do with great power competition. The preferential phrase he suggests for this rising structure is a “multiplex” which visualizes a pluralistic and decentralized world order due in part to the growing significance of non-state actor’s roles within it. Multipolarity, in Acharya’s view, is an outdated Eurocentric perspective that suggests inevitable conflict. Today the world is a much more economically and functionally interconnected order that is made not just by states, but by several sorts of actors that all possess material and ideational means to influence the structure. A multiplex structure implies diversified management of a world order that places greater emphasis on a network of regionalized blocs to maintain interdependencies with each other and vie for an ever-shifting soft power persuasion over non-aligned actors.

Stability and peace in a multipole are yet to be demonstrated in a contemporary respect. Realists feel assured in their assumption that bipolarity is more stable, but historians point to the relative peace of the multipole between the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of WWI. No great power war broke out during the Cold War bipolarity yet the era was still marked by high military spending, uncomfortably close calls for conflict, destructive proxy wars, and a nuclear arms race. Unipolarity is historically the least understood of the structures. Liberals that seek to revitalize the current unipole are wary of the perceived difficulty of identifying rational actors within a multipole. The competitiveness and complexity of a multipolarity could lead itself toward opportunist and expansionist threats against peace, but historical trends of fluctuating stability and peace within all prior global power structures suggests this threat is relative and impossible to foresee. Adjusting to a structure of power politics in a contemporary era of permanent global crisis management will require greater cooperation, bold new visions on diplomacy, and restraint along an ethical realist approach to conducting international relations.

“We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nonetheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgement.” Hans Morgenthau