[SS from essay by Jennifer Lind, ssociate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is the author of Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny.]

The churn of great-power politics shapes the world and touches, for good or ill, the lives of people everywhere. Wars among great powers have killed millions of people; victorious great powers have also set up international orders whose norms and rules affect global peace and prosperity. Great powers also intervene in other countries’ politics, covertly and overtly, sometimes violently. In other words, great powers matter.

Polarity—how many great powers there are—matters, too. Consider the past three decades of U.S.-led unipolarity. Freed from the constraining effects of a great-power rival, Washington deployed its forces around the world and conducted military actions in multiple countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. The dangers of bipolarity, however, are different. Superpowers in a bipolar structure compete obsessively, creating spheres and buffers by cultivating protégés and installing puppets. Multipolarity, meanwhile, in which three or more great powers are present, is said to be the most prone to war because alliances are precarious and the fluidity of alignments makes the balance of power harder to estimate.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/multipolar-mirage

Posted by ForeignAffairsMag

3 comments

  1. A lot of multipolar-themed discourse revolves around great powers but if anything there has been a rising up of regional powers (look at Turkey and the UAE) that are often overlooked.

  2. The scary part should be that China only spends 2% of GDP while being the manufacturing center of the world.

    Maybe they are just not satisfied with their old designs so they didn’t built much of the outdated stuff to have later. Imagine if China gets happy with J-36 new subs and ships and then triple defence spending to 6% for mass production.

  3. The reason why it’s called multipolar instead of bipolar is because the two poles are very weak in relation to the rest of the world

    Back in the cold war, you could make the case that almost every geopolitical action happened because of the US or USSR, but now, while China and the US are very powerful, the minor powers and the other countries have a larger share of the pie

    Europe is increasingly taking actions that go against what the US wants (look at how the US wants to now weaken the EU too), Russia can act independent of both China and the US, India has a lot of leverage to play geopolitics

    Basically, the share of geopolitical power not in the big two is much much higher today than it was when the world was truly bipolar, so while there are no third poles that are similar in magnitude to the big two, global power is shared more evenly than it used to be

    The 3 minor great powers of India, Russia and the EU have no equivalent to the cold war (maybe China vs the USSR, but the Chinese gdp used to be 10x smaller than the soviet, not comparable to today)

    Edit: this reminds me of when European politics in the 19th century was basically 3 major great powers the UK and France and Russia with the UK being the greater of the two, with 3 smaller great powers (AH, Prussia and the ottomans), that even at their time were described as “Great powers in courtesy only”

    Of course this comparison is not very good but Noone would argue that the world back then was tripolar, even though there were 3 great powers significantly above everyone else

Comments are closed.