The world is going multipolar, is that because the US is in decline?
With the country’s most popular politician embroiled in a legal drama about his eligibility to stand for the presidency in an election year, parliamentary deadlock with government funding deadlines coming up, and several ongoing wars the country is helping allies fight it might look as though the USA is in decline. Possibly terminal decline. How did the world’s most powerful country lose control over the world’s conflicts to the point that Russia dared invade Ukraine on an obviously false pretence and random militias in the Middle East dare fire rockets at US ships and soldiers? Is the US to blame for all the conflicts that have started in the last couple of years? Did the global policeman fall asleep at the wheel?
The process of going from the ‘unipolar moment’ in the nineties when the US was the world’s most powerful state with such a margin that no other could challenge it to today’s ‘multipolar’ world where there are three great powers and an assortment of regional powers all competing for power, profits, and prestige is a long one. Pinpointing when the decline began or to what extent the US’ power has declined is futile. What is important is the fact that power in international relations is always and everywhere relative. How strong exactly a state is does not matter, only whether it is stronger or weaker relative to another state; power only matters if it can be used.
Tempting as it may be to blame the US for its own decline and harken back to a previous imagined golden age, that is only partly the issue. As much as the US has made bad choices like pursuing long and costly military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan while also suffering economic disasters like 2008 a major reason why it is relatively weaker is that its rivals have gotten stronger. China developed economically on a very rapid time frame while also centralising executive power in Xi Jinping which allowed him to start massive anti-corruption campaigns to make the country more stable and effective. Meanwhile Boris Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin was able to put down two independence wars in Chechnya and salvage the economy somewhat after the messy transition from communism to capitalism following the fall of the USSR. North Korea was able to more or less complete its nuclear weapons programme and Iran recovered after the decade long war with Iraq. Rises and falls are always relative in international relations, and the current bout of US weakness is as much a product of its rivals rising as it declining.
Unipolarity, the time when there was one unassailable superpower in a tier of its own, could never last. Reversions to the mean are inevitable. Just as inevitable that historical great powers like China and Russia would recover as superpowers come back to earth. The reason why the world has seemed so chaotic of late, why so many conflicts are starting up is that there is a real chance of winning again for many parties with scores to settle. War is famously politics by other means, and for the first time in some thirty odd years other means have a chance at achieving political goals for many states. Before, any conflict could be ended almost instantly by the US declaring for one side. No one had the power to stand up to the US so the risk of them getting involved was so high as to make war prohibitively costly for most countries. Now that Russia is showing that in spite of all the military support and economic sanctions the US and its allies can bring there is still chance of not just resisting but actually winning a war when the US is against you the flood gates have opened.
Now that there is no longer a grown up around to break up fights and adjudicate disputes, we should expect more wars. And while that is certainly tragic and depressing the bright side is that long running proxy wars like in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are going to be less common. Now that there is no one true enemy whose ideology must be combatted everywhere in the vein of domino theory we should expect wars to be quicker, though not necessarily less destructive.
The increase in conflicts lately then, is not because the global policeman is asleep at the wheel. How frequent conflict is, is to a certain extent determined by the structure of the international system. In a time period with many different great powers competing the risk of conflict is greater than in a time of a single dominant, hegemonic power. But conflicts are also likely to be more contained and less intense than in times where there are two competing great powers with an ideological conflict. Ultimately, the world is the way it is due to a confluence of interacting factors. That is the thing about zero-sum games, one party’s loss is by definition another party’s gain.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about the Houthi attacks here, or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Antonio Quagliata from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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