Can Western unity survive the new multipolar world?

A consolation for Washington and its allies has been that the war has served to unify the West.

While its non-Western allies have mostly declined to take sides in the confrontation with Russia, the United States, Europe, and other 'Western' states have overcome past tensions caused by Donald Trump's presidency and Brexit to unify over Ukraine.

But how long will this last? While the Ukraine war may be a unifier for now, multi-polarity tends to divide more than unite, and even over Ukraine tensions have bubbled under the surface of the Western alliance.  

From multipolar to bipolar world

Multipolarity is not new and, in fact, has been the dominant form of international order for most of history.

Until the end of the Second World War global multipolarity was the norm. Power, whether military or economic, was not concentrated in the hands of just one or two states but distributed among several leading international players.

At times, one ambitious state might seek to dominate others, especially in Europe, like France under Napoleon or Louis XIV, or Germany under the Nazis, but others had sufficient wealth and military strength to combine to defeat or deter them.

At a global level, even though regions might be dominated by one local superpower, such as China in East Asia or the US in the Americas, they lacked the resources to extend this dominance across the world.

This ages-long system changed during the Cold War, when just two international players dominated global politics. For the first time, the global order was 'bi-polar', with the USA and USSR having amassed more power than most other states combined.

By constructing two rival defence alliances – Nato and the Warsaw Pact – they managed to align most of the world's powerful states within their own camps and the few that fell outside, such as China and the Third World Non-Aligned Movement, lacked the resources to challenge either.

It was this system though, that was ending when George HW made his 'New World Order' speech. The decline of the Soviet Union left the US unchallenged, and Washington's policy makers began to speak of a 'unipolar moment.'

The US was now spending more on defence than the rest of the world combined, establishing new international bases that gave it a truly global reach, and expanding Nato to absorb several former Warsaw Pact countries. Dominance arguably bred over-confidence, leading to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Read more: How the fall of Baghdad changed the world

This conflict, ironically prosecuted by HW's son, President George W Bush, marked the beginning of the end of unipolarity.

It created an unwillingness from the US public and several subsequent leaders like Presidents Obama and Trump to deploy large numbers of 'boots on the ground' abroad and exposed the limits of America's power to its enemies.

Read more: The credibility of American deterrence in the Middle East

Compounding this were global shifts: the 2008 economic crash and the shift of economic power to Asia, the rise of China, and Russia's increased military activism.

Return to multipolarity

The decline of unipolarity and the return of multipolarity came in stages, but the Ukraine war exposed it most starkly.

While the US retains by far the world's most powerful militarily – it still spends more on defence than the next 10 states combined – this has no longer proved enough to deter all others from challenging its dominance, as seen by Russia in Ukraine.

Arguably more important than military power, which states are often reluctant to use, is the shift in economic power. The diversification of the world economy and the rise of China meant that the prospect of Western sanctions did not deter Russia from launching its invasion. 

The growth of a significant non-Western world economy meant that, provided Moscow could keep Beijing on side, Putin's economy would be hit, but not devastated by a Western economic retaliation.

Equally important has been the growth of other non-Western, 'middle' powers. Brazil, India, South Africa and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have all declined to join the Western-led sanctions on Russia, despite being allies of the United States.

This is both the product and a reinforcer of multipolarity. In the unipolar world, and even the bipolar world of the Cold War, these global allies of the US would have been put under significant pressure to join international sanctions on Washington's enemy.

This proved the case, for example, in their joining the US-led UN sanctions regime of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1990s. But today, they have not done the same with Russia, insisting instead on neutrality.

On the one hand, this is a sign of the power they themselves have accumulated in recent years as the world has become more multi-polar.

Their militaries, while still diplomatically allied with the US, have been diversified and different sources of arms been sought, including from Russia and China to avoid being overly dependent on Washington.

Likewise, their economies have flourished, giving them greater economic independence form the West than in the past.

On the other hand, the growth of China and, to a lesser extent Russia, means these states have alternative superpower allies to look to other than Washington.

The US is less able to cajole its allies to toe the line when they might end up getting closer to Beijing or Moscow as a result. It gives these 'Middle powers' far more freedom to pursue their own interests than either the unipolar or bipolar eras. 

Western alliance strengthened

While the Ukraine invasion exposed the limits of the US' global influence in the new multipolar world, it did firm up the Western alliance — 46 countries joined the anti-Russia sanctions regime, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore joining most European states and the US.

This was not guaranteed, given the tensions within the Western bloc in the previous few years, notably divisions between Britain and the EU over Brexit and between the US and many of its allies under the fractious presidency of Donald Trump.

Indeed, Joe Biden later stated he believed Putin underestimated Western resolve to support Ukraine when he planned his invasion, but this miscalculation was likely based on observing recent Western clashes.

Read more: Pentagon leaks show Western resolve in Ukraine war

Alongside unity on sanctions has been Western willingness to send vital military and economic aid to Kiev, enabling its sustained war effort.

Exceptions: Hungary and Turkey

That said, not all Western states have embraced support for Ukraine. Hungary had been especially critical of Western policy.

It has refused to send any military equipment and has recently blocked the latest tranche of military support being sent by the EU's European Peace Facility. Budapest has also been highly critical of sanctions on Moscow, but reluctantly endorsed them.

Turkey has been even more hesitant. Despite having the second largest military in Nato, Ankara has refused to join others in the Atlantic Alliance in condemning Russia, opting for neutrality in the Ukraine war.

These cases are outliers born of multipolarity.

Hungary's premier, Viktor Orban, is close to Putin and therefore reluctant to endorse the Western campaign against him.

Such a situation would have been impossible during either the bipolarity of the Cold War or the unipolarity that followed it, when states aligned with the US would not entertain such close relations with Washington's enemies.

But in the multipolar world, alliances are more fluid and flexible, allowing states to court several global powers at once. 

In the same way as the Gulf states see no contradiction in being close to Washington while also joining China's Belt and Road Initiative and welcoming exiles from Russia, Hungary believes it should be able to be a member of the EU, Nato and enjoy close ties with Moscow.

Turkey, similarly, sees no contradiction in being a Nato member, while declining to join in the US anti-Russian sanctions.

While in the Cold War's bipolarity Turkey was fearful of the USSR and aligned with the US to avoid being absorbed by Moscow, today's multipolarity dispels any such fears: Ankara can be close to both Russia and the US, without feeling the need to pick sides.  

A sign of things to come?

Yet while Hungary and Turkey may be outliers on Ukraine, the multipolar system could yet lead to further fractures in the Western alliance in the future.

While only a few states had close ties with Russia that made them doubt the West's Ukraine policy, China is a far more divisive issue.

Most eastern European countries, along with Italy, Austria, Luxembourg and Portugal have signed up to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This contrasts sharply with Western European states, Britain and, especially, the US, which are urging a more hostile approach to Chinese economic growth.

Again, such developments come from multipolarity, whereby the Western signatories of the BRI didn't see China as a threat in the way they almost certainly would have done during the Cold War. While these tensions may avoid fractures for now, they will prove hard to contain should Washington's confrontation with Beijing escalate, over Taiwan or other issues.

Similarly, divergent economic policies could divide the allies. The Biden administration is responding to the rise of China that multipolarity has brought on by adopting a pseudo-protectionism that has worried the EU.

Under new plans, the US is seeking to 'reshore' the production of certain goods such as electric car batteries, that are currently mostly manufactured in China. However, the EU is concerned that Biden's plans will ultimately benefit American companies and exclude European manufacturers.

This is a long way from the free market globalisation of the unipolar moment, where the US was leading the charge to drop global trading barriers and could pave the way for low level US-EU trade wars.

Such tensions do not mean the Western alliance will fall apart any time soon. It survived differences in the Cold War, such as France reducing its role in Nato and West Germany embracing Ostpolitik, as well as in the unipolar moment, such as the divisions over the 2003 Iraq War.

However, in the bipolar era there was no fear of France or West Germany leaving the Western alliance to join the Warsaw Pact, while in the unipolar moment there was no superpower rival to join.

What makes the multipolar era more threatening to the Western alliance is that it doesn't divide the world into clear camps, but rather into a world of independent states that can glide in and out of fluid alliances when it suits them. 

For now, enough Western countries have been galvanised by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine to stand firm together against Russia, but that may not be the case in future crises. Next time, more countries may dissent.

While Washington, Brussels and others will no doubt work hard to retain unity, the nature of multipolarity makes it harder for a united 'Western bloc' to survive.