Making Multipolarity Work How America Should Navigate a New Global Order

Emma Ashford

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Chinese and U.S. flags on a screen in Beijing, October 2025 Florence Lo / Reuters

Emma Ashford is a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center. She is the author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.More by Emma Ashford

The “unipolar moment” of American predominance is over. Long-term economic, demographic, and military trends have undeniably shifted global politics, and the United States now needs a strategy to manage this emerging world in a way that preserves at least some of its unipolar advantages without leaving it overstretched. Which strategy Washington should pursue, however, largely depends on the kind of world it believes is emerging.

The Biden administration envisioned a bipolar world, with the United States and China locked in a fierce competition. As a result, it assiduously built a strategy around a new cold war, and it sought to stitch together discrete U.S. alliances and reframe Washington’s adversaries as an “axis of authoritarians.” But a coherent democratic axis failed to emerge, and states chafed against a unified democratic policy: consider India, which is still an active participant in BRICs, a bloc it founded with Brazil, Russia, and China in 2009, or the tensions between the United States and the Netherlands over the latter’s export of critical chip-making technology to China.

This is because the Biden administration was wrong about bipolarity. With increasing economic interconnectedness; the rise of militarily capable regional powers such as Turkey, India, and South Korea; and economic and technological power less concentrated in the hands of the United States and China, it seems more likely that a fragmented and complex multipolar world will follow the unipolar moment.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, multipolarity is not a death sentence for the United States. In an era of declining relative U.S. power, it benefits Americans to let other capable countries handle some of the load of global leadership. If Washington embraces this fact, it can pursue a more flexible strategy—one that allows the United States to operate more efficiently and effectively in a rapidly changing world.