Emma Ashford
An obscure academic term is suddenly back in vogue in international affairs. Multipolarity—the idea that there are many important global powers, not just a few superpowers—is being touted by leaders, CEOs, and pundits as the future. Headlines suggest the growing importance of middle powers, from Turkey and Brazil to South Korea and Australia.
But not everyone is convinced. As Jo Inge Bekkevold wrote in Foreign Policy last month, it “is simply a myth that today’s world is anywhere close to multipolar. … Today, there are only two countries with the economic size, military might, and global leverage to constitute a pole: the United States and China. Other great powers are nowhere in sight, and they won’t be anytime soon.” This also appears to be the opinion of the Biden administration, whose attempt to build a “networked security architecture” in the Pacific and to link European and Asian allies together feels very much like an attempt to rerun the Cold War playbook.
Both are mistaken. In a paper recently published by the Stimson Center, we set out to assess whether the world is indeed becoming more multipolar and how U.S. policymakers can best leverage the features of the emerging international environment to achieve U.S. interests. We came to a stark conclusion: The United States simply does not hold the level of military and economic power it did during the early decades of the Cold War. Nor does today’s China match the Soviet Union at its peak.
A multipolar system doesn’t require three powers of equal size; it just requires that significant power is concentrated in more than two states. Today, the middle powers—from Japan to India—are significantly more influential than they once were. This is the textbook definition of what scholars call “unbalanced multipolarity.”
Squabbling over definitions of polarity might seem petty and pointless, but the stakes are high. U.S. President Joe Biden’s strategy of containing China might well be possible in a bipolar world in which Washington and its allies control the lion’s share of economic and military power. In a more multipolar world, however, the United States runs the risk of becoming increasingly isolated from the middle powers it needs. Biden’s strategy—which leans into a U.S.-China competition—is profoundly unsuited to the emerging realities of world politics.
Polarity describes the distribution of power in the international system and how it changes over time. These changes—as states’ economies grow or militaries shrink—are key to understanding why states might compete or cooperate with one another.
Polarity typically takes on one of three forms: unipolarity (in which one state is by far and away the most powerful), bipolarity (in which two states are about equally powerful), and multipolarity (in which power is more diffused among several states). It’s a common misconception that multipolarity must involve many states of roughly equal capabilities (i.e., that it must be balanced). But in fact, multipolar systems are often unbalanced, with two or three big powers and several middle powers all jockeying for position.
For the last 30 years, the United States has been the undisputed global leader. But today, opinion is divided. Some argue that the United States will remain the global hegemon for the foreseeable future, others say we’re headed for a new bipolar competition with China, and still others believe that a multipolar era is dawning.
Theories about risk underlie all these arguments. There’s a long-standing assumption that bipolarity and unipolarity are safer for the United States than multipolarity; after all, the Cold War ended peacefully. This suggests that the United States should try to resist a multipolar world. But that’s another misleading assumption: Theory suggests that a multipolar world might be more chaotic—and even have more wars—but without the existential dread of superpower competition that characterized the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Which would you rather have: fewer small wars in East Africa or Central Asia under bipolarity or a world with less nuclear brinksmanship under multipolarity?
Ironically, despite how easy it is to describe polarity, it’s hard to measure. One could use any single military or economic indicator to make the case that one state is rising or another is declining; some other indicator might suggest the opposite. Bekkevold, for example, uses current military and economic indicators to suggest that the United States and China are so far ahead of other states that the comparison is meaningless. The scholars William C. Wohlforth and Stephen G. Brooks use military spending and technological metrics to argue that the world remains fundamentally unipolar.
Our study, in contrast, considered a dozen or so different metrics of power across time. On the whole, these indicators certainly show that the United States and China are out ahead of the pack. But they also show that economic and military power is accumulating elsewhere, from France to Australia.
Indeed, though the exact percentages vary by metric, perhaps the most important point is that unlike the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union controlled the lion’s share of economic and military power—even more when their respective alliance blocs were included—today, China and the United States together control a smaller share. One index of military and economic power, for example, suggests that that share has shrunk from around 40 percent in 1946 to only around 30 percent today.
The share of the global economy controlled by Washington, Moscow, and their two alliance blocs was a whopping 88 percent of global GDP in 1950; today, these countries only make up 57 percent of global GDP. That power has diffused elsewhere, moving away from superpowers toward a variety of capable, dynamic middle powers that will help to shape the international environment in coming decades.
The headlines only confirm that the middle powers are becoming more influential. Consider just the last few weeks: Ukraine stepped up its counteroffensive against its much larger neighbor; India played host to the world’s biggest economies at the G-20—where the assembled states rejected U.S. hopes for a strong denunciation of Russia’s war in Ukraine—and then sparked a diplomatic showdown with Canada over the killing of a Sikh dissident on Canadian soil. And as war between Armenia and Azerbaijan flared once again, it was not the major powers that exerted decisive influence in the conflict but rather neighboring Turkey, which has armed and trained Azerbaijani forces in recent years.
Debates about polarity are not just about laying claim to a new Davos buzzword—an understanding of polarity is the foundation of good strategy. The Biden administration, driven in part by its own fears about multipolarity, is pursuing what one might describe as a bloc-based strategy.
It hopes to handle a shifting global balance of power by building an anti-China coalition, emphasizing closer military and technical cooperation among allies across Europe and Asia, and attempting to build a global bloc of democracies—or at least of “like-minded” countries—oriented against authoritarian revisionists. This approach is then paired with economic statecraft to undermine Chinese access to key global markets and restrict transfer of advanced technology.
Under Biden, in short, the United States plans to rerun the Cold War playbook, attempting to contain China’s rise and hoping that the strength of allies and partners can compensate for waning U.S. power. Yet, in a more multipolar world, this approach is full of risk. By trying to organize a group of as many countries as possible in opposition to China, the Biden administration risks weak partnerships built on lowest common denominator interests.
The war in Ukraine highlights this dynamic in practice: States that are willing—even eager—to work with the United States against China have often been less willing to commit to supporting the U.S. position on Ukraine. India, for example, is a growing part of the U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific but continues to import energy and weapons from Russia. Meanwhile, in Europe, Germany remains a close trade partner of Beijing while cooperating closely with the United States on Ukraine. A range of middle powers with divergent interests are not likely to form into a coherent global bloc, no matter what Washington wants.
Another risk of this “with us or against us” approach is that the United States could be taken advantage of by its own partners. Sometimes this takes the form of alliance free-riding, where allies pay less than others for the common defense. We see this dynamic today in NATO, where the Biden administration has vacillated between reassuring allies and admonishing them for insufficient spending. If U.S. allies believe that the United States has no other options, they are less likely to take such admonishments seriously.
A bipolar mindset—and the building of blocs—also contributes to the mistaken assumption that any win for China would necessarily be a loss for the United States. During the Cold War, distasteful autocracies benefited from U.S. or Soviet largesse in exchange for extravagant promises of friendship; a few years later, the bidding between the two sides would start over. The Biden administration’s ongoing attempt to grant Saudi Arabia a security guarantee, motivated by growing Chinese influence in the Gulf, is a textbook example of this problem.
The place where multipolar reality and bipolar strategy are most in conflict is the economic realm. The United States no longer possesses the outsized economic might to convince countries to isolate China economically in return for promises of access to the U.S. market. Rather than cutting China off from the global economy, the neo-mercantilist approach of the Biden administration—which has been characterized by tariffs and export controls—has upset close allies such as South Korea and the Netherlands. Coercive measures such as sanctions and export controls may yield results now but risk diminishing U.S. economic power in the long term as states seek alternatives.
Much of what is wrong with the Biden administration’s approach to the global order is that it tries to do too much with too little. In a multipolar world, unlike the unipolar world of the last three decades, diminishing relative power suggests the U.S. government will be unable to enforce its will in every region of the world, particularly simultaneously.
Continuing to double down on the United States as the “indispensable nation” is likely to lead only to failure and overstretch. Indeed, academic research shows that those countries that respond to international shifts in the balance of power with appropriate levels of retrenchment and realignment typically do far better than those that refuse to adjust and end up exhausting themselves through overreach.
The United States should not retreat from the world stage but rather use the multipolar world to its advantage. Such a strategy would involve three core elements:
First, the United States should leverage, rather than suppress, the power of its allies. Instead of attempting to maintain the mind-bogglingly expensive military footprint of past decades, the Biden administration should stress burden-shifting, encouraging allies to take on a greater role in their own defense, thereby turning their economic power into military power that bolsters U.S. aims. Consider Eastern European countries increasing their military spending in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine: Managed properly, this transition could shift the distribution of power within Europe and leave the continent with a more sustainable defense—but at less cost and risk to Americans.
Second, in a multipolar world, flexibility and openness are highly valuable. The Biden administration should be more open to entering into mutually beneficial trade agreements. The failures of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership were not for lack of interest from the other participants but rather the U.S. drift toward trade protectionism. Rather than a race to the bottom in protectionism, what is needed now is a race to the top against China in trade.
Lastly, grand coalitions are far less likely to be effective in a multipolar world; the Biden administration should focus instead on bilateral and minilateral agreements centered on shared interests. The administration has already had some successes in this space, from the G-7 global minimum corporate tax agreement to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s infrastructure agreement.
Multipolarity does not render the United States powerless. In fact, it could be a boon to U.S. policymakers. By focusing on leveraging multipolarity to its advantage, the Biden administration can advance U.S. security and sustain America’s global role. Multipolarity should not be feared; it should be embraced.
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