By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Making Multipolarity Work

The “unipolar moment” of American predominance is over. Long-term economic, demographic, and military trends have undeniably shifted global politics, and the United States now needs a strategy to manage this emerging world in a way that preserves at least some of its unipolar advantages without leaving it overstretched. Which strategy Washington should pursue, however, largely depends on the kind of world it believes is emerging.

The Biden administration envisioned a bipolar world, with the United States and China locked in a fierce competition. As a result, it assiduously built a strategy around a new cold war, and it sought to stitch together discrete U.S. alliances and reframe Washington’s adversaries as an “axis of authoritarians.” But a coherent democratic axis failed to emerge, and states chafed against a unified democratic policy: consider India, which is still an active participant in BRICs, a bloc it founded with Brazil, Russia, and China in 2009, or the tensions between the United States and the Netherlands over the latter’s export of critical chip-making technology to China.

This is because the Biden administration was wrong about bipolarity. With increasing economic interconnectedness, the rise of militarily capable regional powers such as Turkey, India, and South Korea, and economic and technological power less concentrated in the hands of the United States and China, it seems more likely that a fragmented and complex multipolar world will follow the unipolar moment.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, multipolarity is not a death sentence for the United States. In an era of declining relative U.S. power, it benefits Americans to let other capable countries handle some of the load of global leadership. If Washington embraces this fact, it can pursue a more flexible strategy—one that allows the United States to operate more efficiently and effectively in a rapidly changing world.

The good news is that the Trump administration appears much more comfortable with the idea of multipolarity than the Biden administration was. Instead of trying to force the world into a false us-versus-them dichotomy, it has taken some early, positive steps toward embracing a more multipolar strategy. In particular, the push for U.S. allies in Asia and Europe to bear more of the defense burden is a significant shift from traditional U.S. foreign policy.

But the Trump administration is still bungling the opportunity to make multipolarity work for U.S. interests. By destroying the international economic system and alienating other countries with its aggressive unilateralism, the administration’s mixed-bag strategy for multipolarity will raise more risks and reap fewer rewards.

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The good news is that the Trump administration appears much more comfortable with the idea of multipolarity than the Biden administration was. Instead of trying to force the world into a false us-versus-them dichotomy, it has taken some early, positive steps toward embracing a more multipolar strategy. In particular, the push for U.S. allies in Asia and Europe to bear more of the defense burden is a significant shift from traditional U.S. foreign policy.

 

Agree To Disagree

Scholars still fiercely debate whether the unipolar moment is giving way to a bipolar, multipolar, or even nonpolar world. The answer boils down to power—which countries have it, how they exercise it, and how others perceive it. But power is a notoriously slippery concept, consisting of some combination of wealth, military might, population size, natural resource endowments, and political will. Varying definitions of power lead to starkly different conclusions about which world order is emerging.

If power is defined only by military prowess, for example, then a bipolar order seems plausible, pitting China and the United States against each other. Add economic data, however, and East Asia, Europe, and the Gulf states enter the mix, which suggests a markedly more multipolar world. And if it turns out that China is falsifying its own economic data and is closer to internal chaos than its military parades suggest, then unipolarity once again becomes likely.

If power is defined more broadly, it seems plausible that the world is shifting toward what scholars have labeled “unbalanced multipolarity.” In such a system, there are a few great powers—the United States and China in this case—and a larger number of second-tier powers, including Australia, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Russia, among others. These second-tier powers are weaker than the superpowers but still more than capable of shaping regional dynamics.

Many second-tier powers have already started to jockey for position within this emerging system. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, shocked European leaders in 2023 when he declared that Europe should seek to become a “third pole” in the new world order. Meanwhile, Fernando Haddad, Brazil’s finance minister, told journalists that São Paulo will not lean toward either Beijing or Washington and is “too big to be choosing partners.”

Clearly, these states do not want to get shoehorned into some new American-led anti-Chinese coalition. They remain unconvinced about a new Cold War–style bipolarity. Indeed, this was a key problem with the Biden administration’s grand strategy, which tried to rerun the Cold War playbook and engineer bipolar competition with China, networking U.S. alliances and lumping Russia and China into an “axis of autocracies.”

What the Biden administration found was that many countries were no longer willing to concede to this black-and-white view of world politics. Washington’s closest allies welcome trade and investment with China, even if they do not agree with its ideology or repressive governance model. States such as India are eager to buy American weapons and engage in military cooperation, but at the same time, join Chinese military exercises and buy Russian hydrocarbons. Middle powers act, in other words, in ways that suggest they see a multipolar world in the near future.

 

Reality Check

Underneath this seemingly esoteric debate over polarity and the new world order is an often unstated but high-stakes assumption: that a multipolar world will be worse for the United States than a bipolar one. The general thinking is that multipolarity will increase the likelihood of instability around the world, strain alliances, and leave Washington vulnerable.

But recency bias plays a role here. Because the Cold War ended peacefully and the interwar period preceding it did not, bipolarity is often associated with stability and multipolarity with danger. But some multipolar systems have been stable and long lasting, such as the Congress of Vienna in 1815, an entente between Europe’s great powers that held for nearly a century. The idea that the United States is better off in a bipolar world, rather than a multipolar one, is theoretical at best.

In practice, both world orders have advantages and disadvantages. A multipolar system, for example, may heighten certain risks, such as the potential for low-level conflicts between small states, but a bipolar system could heighten others, including arms races that could escalate to great-power war. Likewise, both systems offer benefits. Under bipolarity or unipolarity, a great power may be able to prevent conflicts through increased leverage on client states. Under multipolarity, free-riding and passing the buck on collective security commitments become more difficult, which in turn lowers the costs of defense and the risks of forward deterrence for the great power.

This is not a purely academic debate: polarity is a description of the distribution of power in the international system rather than something states get to choose. But administrations can lean in to either the bipolar or the multipolar aspects of the system in their strategy. The Biden administration tried to emphasize bipolarity by elevating U.S.-Chinese competition, promoting strategies of “allied scale,” and creating a new Western coalition against an “axis of upheaval.” These strategies identified a unitary bloc of opponents in China, Iran, Russia, and others and then sought to assemble a new “free world” coalition to combat it. But this approach failed because it did not match reality—other countries remain skeptical about a bifurcated world and refuse to take a side.

Instead of artificially cleaving the world in two, the United States should choose to embrace multipolarity and craft a strategy accordingly. The benefits would be significant. By leaning into the more multipolar characteristics of the international system, such as open trade and cooperation, for instance, the United States could retain many of the economic and political perks it has enjoyed for the last 70 years. By pushing allies to take on more of the defense burden, meanwhile, and redirecting U.S. military and economic resources toward pressing security concerns, it could reduce some of the risks of a more confrontational approach to the world and avoid overextension and exhaustion. And by emphasizing flexible, transactional partnerships with states on specific issues and portfolios, a multipolar strategy would enable Washington to hedge against rising competitors such as India. In the end, this approach to security would be far cheaper than the trillions of dollars required to sustain U.S. military primacy against all potential challengers.

 

The Trump Problem

ww3-last.html To successfully compete in a multipolar world, the United States will need to shift its strategy. The Trump administration has taken some initial steps in this regard. It has, for instance, encouraged its allies, especially in Europe, to share more of the burden of collective defense and turn their latent economic power into stronger military capabilities. The administration has pulled back from funding further weapons shipments to Ukraine, effectively transferring that responsibility to European states. As a result, Washington can shrink its current global military posture and concentrate its resources where they are most needed—the Indo-Pacific and the United States’ own backyard in Latin America. Both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance have suggested the U.S. military will likely draw down troops in Europe and the Middle East to better prioritize its resources for the Indo-Pacific.

The administration is also trying to maintain flexibility in the United States’ bilateral and multilateral partnerships. Rather than building formal, closed alliance structures as it did during the Cold War, the United States needs to form flexible, issue-specific partnerships with a variety of states. President Donald Trump has been willing to criticize allies, often gleefully, when dealing with them and to emphasize U.S. interests over shared values. He has also engaged with adversaries such as Iran and Russia, whereas prior administrations might have balked at the prospect, fearing political blowback. Although these conversations have produced limited results, this diplomatic openness—and rejection of a black-and-white worldview—is exactly the kind of flexibility needed in a more multipolar world.

Unfortunately, other U.S. policies seem to directly contradict that worldview in favor of an aggressive unilateralism that increases some of the worst risks of multipolarity, leaving allies unsure of whether the United States is friend or foe, and even making China appear a more reliable and consistent partner. Just as President Joe Biden’s attempt to divide the world into “us” and “them” risked alienating many potential partners, so, too, does Trump’s willingness to come out swinging as a hostile lone actor in a changing world.

In a multipolar world, Washington should attempt to preserve global economic openness by resisting the use of coercive economic statecraft and instead bolster the resilience and diversity of global markets. But Trump has relied heavily on economic and political coercion, using tariffs, sanctions, and other forms of U.S. leverage to wrest concessions from friendly and unfriendly states alike. The unipolar moment after the Cold War allowed the United States to build a substantial arsenal of coercive tools to weaponize interdependence. Trump has shown himself willing to pull the trigger on those weapons for even the most minor reasons. If Washington continues on its current course, defined by unilateralism, transactionalism, and mercantilism, the consequences will be grim.

A final problem with the Trump administration’s approach has been the voluntary destruction of American tools of soft power and open hostility to the multilateral structures that act as a safety net against the worst outcomes of an anarchic world. It’s undoubtedly true that American aid and diplomatic institutions need reform; the same is true of the United Nations and other multilateral forums. But a United States that cannot engage diplomatically is a fundamentally less competitive and less capable global actor. And a world in which basic lifesaving services such as disaster relief and humanitarian assistance do not exist is a world in which everyone is worse off.

 

In Limbo

This confused approach leaves the United States in limbo: partly able to navigate a multipolar world, yet risking alienation and—more importantly—undermining the open global economic order that has served Washington so well for so long. Even as the Trump administration makes positive moves to rebalance its security commitments, it is undermining the United States’ economic and diplomatic standing. From imposing draconian tariffs and sanctions to conducting seemingly random military strikes in Iran and off the coast of Venezuela, the administration has approached friends and foes alike with self-serving aggression—even though successfully navigating a more multipolar world will require strong, lean global partnerships. Ultimately, this half-baked strategy for multipolarity may be just as bad as no strategy at all.

 

 

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