What’s so bad about a multipolar world?

The romanticising of unipolarity

However, multipolarity is here, whether we like it or not and, as Walt and others suggest, it is hard to see any US leader successfully recreating the primacy of the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, despite the panic of some Western alarmists, the new multipolar order may not prove more unstable than the era of US dominance.

Indeed, a closer look suggests firstly, that the 'unipolar moment' was less stable than its cheerleaders would argue, and secondly, that multipolarity offers several advantages, especially to non-Western countries.

The 'unipolar moment' was first coined by columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1990. He suggested that, with the Cold War over and the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse, the 'bipolar order' of the previous four and a half decades, when there were two global superpowers, was now over. In its place, the US was the uncontested 'pole' around which the world order would cohere.

During the 1990s this idea became the centrepiece of successive US administrations, with various National Security Strategy documents from the HW Bush, Clinton and W Bush eras calling for 'US primacy' in the world.

Many insisted that such American dominance was good not only for the US but also for the world as it would ensure the spread and maintenance of 'freedom.'

Yet such triumphalism disguised the reality that unipolarity was no more stable than the bipolarity of the Cold War. It is true that the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction receded and there were fewer nuclear scares like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the October War, or the Able Archer incident.

However, while Americans may have felt more secure, unipolarity did little to prevent some of the most horrendous conflicts of modern times. Indeed, the 1990s saw a surge in ethnic killing, such as in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and the Rwanda genocide.

Political Scientist Ariel Ahram, using data from the Peace Research Institute, Oslo/Uppsala Conflict Data Project has shown that there was no notable reduction in the number of global conflicts during the 'unipolar era' of 1990-2015. Indeed, this period saw roughly the same number of wars across the globe as the bloodiest era of the Cold War, the 1980s, and saw far more conflicts than most of the bipolar era.

Arguably the United States' dominance contributed to this — especially its invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Advocates of US primacy point to positive American interventions in the 1990s, such as the liberation of Kuwait, the enforcement of the Kurdistan no-fly zones and stabilisation efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia. However, critics argue that these were overshadowed by the decision to topple Saddam Hussein, a conflict that, according to the British journal The Lancet, caused over 600,000 deaths in the first three years.

Read more: How the fall of Baghdad changed the world

It had a hugely destabilising impact on Iraq and its neighbourhood, contributing to a rise in sectarian violence, the regional empowerment of Iran and the flourishing of jihadist terrorists like the Islamic State (IS).

In many ways, the 2003 invasion was the byproduct of unipolarity. It is hard to imagine the US having the hubristic confidence to launch a similar invasion during the Cold War, fearing how the Soviets might react, nor dare to do something similar in today's multipolarity.

Arab uprisings attached great hopes on US intervention which never came

The damaging impact of unipolarity was revealed once again in the Middle East a few years later during the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings.

In Syria, for example, rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad, as well as several of the foreign states supporting them, expected the United States to intervene on their side. After all, the US had intervened repeatedly in the Middle East in the past, and successive leaders like George W. Bush and his father had insisted they were defenders of the 'freedom' that Syria's rebels insisted they were fighting for.

This expectation of eventual American intervention led the Syrian rebels and their foreign backers to adopt a maximalist approach. As Bassma Kodmani, spokesperson for one rebel organisation, later recalled, regional powers assured al-Assad's opponents that, "it is coming definitely, the intervention is coming."

But US President Barack Obama, famously, declined to send US forces directly against Damascus, allowing al-Assad — with Russian and Iranian help — to eventually pick off and destroy most of the rebel forces.

Read more: Obama's hesitation in Syria: The red line that never was

Here American dominance and the expectations it brought impacted the behaviour of Syria's rebels and their regional allies, with damaging results.

Finally, unipolarity was not as great a deterrent to Washington's rivals as some now say it was. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, some US commentators argued that Moscow only dared attack Kyiv because Russia feared the US less than in the past.

Yet even during the unipolar moment, in 2008, Moscow was not deterred from launching a war of aggression against Georgia. Similarly, it annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Some could argue that America's inaction on these occasions was an indicator of the waning of US dominance, but it is yet more evidence that unipolarity was far from the stable era that some advocates now romantically claim.

The advantages of multipolarity

As well as unipolarity not being that stable, there are also advantages to multi-polarity that US-focused observers might overlook.

As noted, Washington's great power rivals like Russia and China obviously see believe they have more freedom of action than in the unipolar era and are less constrained by a dominant US.

But they are not the only ones.

Non-western 'Middle Powers' can also take advantage of the changing regional order. Medium-sized powers that retain friendships with the US as well as Russia and China can leverage these relations to maximise their benefits.

As medium powers, the 'great' powers usually want something from them — such as raw materials, commerce, or military alliance. In the bi-polar and unipolar eras of the Cold War and post-Cold War, global power dynamics limited how much manoeuvrability the middle powers had and what concessions they could extract.

Turkey, Ethiopia, South Africa examples

Turkey is a great example of a middle power making good use of multipolarity. During the Cold War, Ankara had little choice but to align with the US, given it felt threatened by the Soviet Union.

After the Cold War, it similarly largely followed the US' lead internationally, joining the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 and getting closer to America's regional ally, Israel in the 1990s.

However, in recent years, as the US has retreated, Turkey has had much more freedom to pursue its own agenda. This was seen in Syria. Though Ankara remains a close US ally and a member of Nato Turkey cooperated with Washington's rival, Russia, to strengthen its hand in northern Syria.

Such a situation would have been unthinkable in the bipolar or multipolar era. However, now Washington is only one of several global powers and knows that if it punishes Turkey for its closeness to Moscow, Ankara has alternative allies in the form of Russia and China. As a result, Turkey can maximise concessions from Washington, while maintaining ties with Russia.

The same dynamic has played out with regard to Turkey's approach to the Ukraine war. It has been able to stay neutral without facing expulsion from Nato. Indeed, it has used its position in the alliance to squeeze concessions from Western allies over the membership of Finland and Sweden.

Read more: A look at Turkey's geopolitics through the lens of the war in Ukraine

Some Middle powers, like Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Canada are too deep in the US' orbit to pull off similar feats. However, other non-Western powers are already doing so.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have skilfully maintained a position of neutrality in the Ukraine war, denying US requests to produce more oil. Both are also growing closer to China, joining the Belt and Road Initiative. Yet this has not damaged Riyadh's or Abu Dhabi's close ties to Washington, which remain robust.

Read more: Washington concerned but not alarmed over growing Saudi-China cooperation

In Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa are similarly benefitting. Ethiopia remains a close US ally, receiving military support from Washington, but retains extensive economic ties to China – a major investor in Ethiopian infrastructure.

The Biden administration recently informed Congress that Addis Ababa was no longer committing human rights violations, something it had declared during Ethiopia's Tigray War, paving the way for the US to resume aid.

Fears of losing influence to its great power rivals in the state with the biggest African army have likely influenced this decision, despite evidence of ongoing human rights abuses, showing how Ethiopia, like Turkey, is taking advantage of the new global structure.

Likewise South Africa, despite remaining a US ally, recently took part in an Indian Ocean military exercise with the Russian and Chinese navies. Though Washington was critical, it did little beyond this.

A non-western world order?

In short, the multi-polar world, as it is currently emerging, is not as negative a development as some Western — especially pro-US — commentators are making out.

The Ukraine war has been gruelling, but wars with similarly unpleasant outcomes broke out during the era of US dominance as well. Indeed, a worldwide look at the 'unipolar moment' reveals that it was no more peaceful or stable than the bipolar order of the Cold War, even if Americans and those living in the West may have felt more secure.

How the new multipolar order develops remains unclear, and that naturally brings with it a sense of foreboding, especially for those in the West who are seeing their former dominance subside.

However, there is no guarantee it will be more unstable or violent than the unipolar era and, in many parts of the world, it has the potential to be more advantageous.

Already several non-western 'middle powers' have taken advantage of the new global order to gain more freedom of action in their international affairs, and this looks set to continue.

Arguably these states have been quicker to adapt to the new world order and it is their western allies that now need to accept that the unipolar age is over and shift their expectations and behaviours.