Jennifer Lind
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.
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