The Multipolar Delusion | Foreign Affairs

From Washington to Beijing and Moscow to New Delhi, a consensus is emerging that the world has entered a multipolar era. Political leaders, diplomats, and analysts routinely declare that unrivaled American dominance has ended and global power is now dispersed across multiple centers. The assertion has become so commonplace that it is often treated as a self-evident fact rather than a proposition to be examined. Even officials in the United States, long the principal beneficiary of the unipolar post–Cold War order, have adopted this language. At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Secretary of State Marco Rubio observed that Washington’s moment as the sole superpower was historically “not normal” and that the international system would inevitably tend toward multipolarity. Rubio’s statement appeared to echo the growing belief in China, Russia, and much of the developing world that the United States’ power is declining and its long-standing global primacy is unsustainable.

This seeming convergence obscures a difference in how the various players define “multipolarity.” For the Trump administration, acknowledging multipolarity doesn’t mean accepting limits on American power. Instead, it serves as a justification for abandoning the traditional U.S. conception of global leadership and the responsibilities that come with it. The idea of multipolarity allows Washington to pursue a narrower, more transactional foreign policy—one focused on extracting advantage rather than underwriting order, unconcerned with the maintenance of institutions or norms that do not serve immediate American interests. For China, Russia, and many developing countries, by contrast, multipolarity is not merely descriptive but aspirational. It is a political project aimed at constraining American dominance, eroding Western-led institutions, and constructing alternative models of governance, development, and security in which the United States is not the only country in charge.

The idea of multipolarity has been popular since the United States emerged as the sole dominant power at the end of the Cold War. After the 1990–91 Gulf War, which revealed the scale of American military superiority, French leaders warned of the dangers posed by the American “hyperpower.” China and Russia later transformed this critique into a strategy, seeking to organize resistance to U.S. primacy. They established what they declared to be a “strategic partnership” in the late 1990s and formed the multilateral BRICS alliance along with Brazil, India, and South Africa to coordinate among non-Western powers. They believed that such efforts could accelerate the transition away from American hegemony.

Trump’s return to office made the arrival of a multipolar moment seem inevitable. The United States was internally divided, economically unsettled, and weary of global commitments. China’s economy had grown to nearly the same size as that of the European Union, and the country had become a formidable technological leader in its own right. Russia’s war in Ukraine had demonstrated Moscow’s willingness to use force to revise borders in Europe. And BRICS had expanded to include new members in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, reinforcing the impression of a rising alternative system to counter American dominance. Many observers concluded that the multipolar world had arrived and that American unipolarity was living on borrowed time.

A year later, however, this conviction appears misplaced. The Trump administration has embarked on a forceful reassertion of American power by imposing onerous tariffs, intervening in other countries, and brokering peace negotiations and commercial dealmaking across the world. China and Russia have resisted Washington on select issues, but they have been unable to mount a comprehensive challenge to the United States’ effort to restructure global rules. Washington’s European allies have proved even less able to stand up to the United States. Facing Trump’s insults and pressure, they have wilted and caved.

The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.

POLE POSITION

Claims that the world is becoming multipolar rely on observable indicators of the growing strength of emerging powers, including shifts in relative shares of global GDP and the construction of new development and governance institutions headquartered outside the United States and Europe. These changes show that power is distributed more widely today than at the end of the Cold War. But they do not necessarily signify a transformation in the structure of the international system.

Defined narrowly, a pole is a state or bloc that possesses comprehensive capabilities to shape the international system. A pole is not merely influential in one or two domains, such as nuclear warfare or trade, but rather must be capable of projecting military power globally, sustaining technological and industrial leadership, anchoring alliances, shaping norms, providing public goods, and absorbing systemic shocks. When measured against this more demanding standard, the number of genuine poles in the world today is the same as it has been for the past 35 years: one. Only the United States has this global reach and power.

With an economy now at $30 trillion and growing between two and three percent annually, the United States remains the world’s foremost economic engine. Its defense expenditures—around $1 trillion in 2025—exceed those of the next several major powers combined. Washington retains a unique ability to project its power: it has an unparalleled network of alliances, military bases, and logistics infrastructure across the world. American firms dominate frontier sectors as varied as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotechnology. U.S. universities are central nodes in global innovation networks, and American cultural industries shape narratives and tastes worldwide.

The number of genuine poles in the world today is the same as it has been for the past 35 years: one.

Constraints on American power—high national debt, domestic political division, frictions with U.S. allies, and resentment against U.S. policies in the so-called global South—are real and growing, but they do not negate the United States’ position as the only credible pole in the system. Even Trump’s threats to cut the funding of domestic universities and research agencies, for instance, are unlikely to destroy their preeminence. The depth of the U.S. private sector and the strength of its civil society limit the damage that any president can cause. And the United States’ enviable geography, which includes ample natural resources and physical distance from the Eurasian landmass that has long been the main theater of global conflict, gives the United States a large margin of error in its foreign policy choices.

Many analysts argue that the world is evolving toward bipolarity as China continues to rise. In its 2025 National Security Strategy, for instance, the United States acknowledged that China is a “near peer.” China has become a major economic and technological power: its economy has reached about two-thirds the size of that of the United States, its nuclear arsenal is estimated to have tripled in size since 2020, and it is building up its military to counter U.S. influence along the first island chain stretching from Japan to the Philippines in the western Pacific.

Yet China remains some distance from being a true pole in the international order. Its growth rate is slowing and is likely to slow even further because of demographic decline and the outsize role of state-owned enterprises in its economy. Its currency lacks global reach: few international transactions are conducted in renminbi because of strict capital controls and a lack of financial transparency. China’s military has strengthened its position in East Asia but lacks the logistics networks, access to bases, and alliances required to project power worldwide. And its much-heralded development programs, most notably the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, have supplemented rather than replaced U.S.-anchored global governance institutions such as the World Bank.

Russia, often portrayed as a cornerstone of multipolarity, possesses even fewer of the attributes required to shape the international system. Although it has nuclear weapons and a good deal of conventional military power, its economy is narrowly dependent on natural resources, it has fallen far behind in developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, and, like China, it faces a declining population. The European Union, another potential pole, has economic clout but remains politically divided and dependent on the United States for its security. Europe is now trying to make amends by ramping up defense spending, but even in the best-case scenario, it will have to rely on U.S. military power for many years to come.

The so-called middle powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—are growing in economic weight and regional political influence, and are increasingly represented in global forums such as the G-20. Yet influence does not confer pole status. India, which has the size and potential to become a great power in the long term, has a per capita GDP of less than $3,000 (compared with about $85,000 in the United States). It faces deepening political divides and suffers from weak institutions, underdeveloped human resources, and entrenched bureaucratic resistance, all of which have stymied reforms to accelerate economic growth and improve governance. Facing conflict with Pakistan on one border and tensions with China on another, India will still need an economic and security partnership with the United States and its allies for the time being.

Efforts to build countervailing coalitions to the United States have also faltered. Despite China’s and Russia’s claims that they have a “no limits” partnership, their relationship rests on uneasy foundations and is shaped by historical mistrust and asymmetric dependence. In the early stages of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the “elder brother” on which communist China depended for political support; now, Russia is the junior partner, heavily reliant on China for imports of industrial and dual-use goods—those valuable for both military and civilian purposes, such as machine tools—and as a market for its energy exports. BRICS has also expanded, and the list of countries seeking to join is long. But BRICS is not a cohesive coalition, nor is it likely to position itself against the United States. Instead, most of its members are eager to strike deals to work with Washington. The inclusion of numerous pairs of regional rivals—India and China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia—also limits the effectiveness of BRICS as a geopolitical tool to pursue any particular strategic objective.

AMERICA UNLEASHED

The first year of Trump’s second term has punctured the narrative of American decline and the rise of multipolarity. Trump’s assertive use of economic, diplomatic, and military power to push U.S. interests highlights the extraordinary freedom of action the United States enjoys. The weak international response to Washington’s aggressive trade policies, its interventions in Latin America and the Middle East, and its threats to take new territory have exposed how difficult it is for any coalition to mount effective resistance to the United States. Power is spread more widely across the international system than it was at the end of the Cold War, but that diffusion makes it harder to channel collective action against Washington.

When Trump began dismantling the multilateral trading system by imposing across-the-board tariffs in April 2025, most major trading powers did not push back. The European Union, for instance, chose accommodation over confrontation. Invoking the need for U.S. support in the war in Ukraine, EU leaders accepted Washington’s tariff demands with little protest—an episode that the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis compared to the Qing dynasty’s submission to unfair British treaties in 1842 that launched China into what became known as its “century of humiliation.” Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, agreed to invest $550 billion and $300 billion, respectively, in the United States while granting Washington leeway over how to spend the money and manage the returns. India, which was hit with a 25 percent reciprocal tariff and an additional 25 percent penalty for purchasing Russian oil, refused to yield on many U.S. demands but was careful to avoid any public argument with Washington.

Only China retaliated. Beijing’s decision to restrict exports of rare-earth elements, which the United States depends on for many advanced manufacturing components, forced Washington to the negotiating table and led to an agreement to de-escalate the tit-for-tat tariff war. Although Beijing’s power play showed its growing leverage over Washington, China has been unable to force the United States to lift many of the onerous economic and technology sanctions it has imposed over the past decade, including curbs on Chinese companies’ access to U.S. chips.

The main constraints on U.S. unipolarity are in the United States itself.

Trump’s military actions have shown that the United States can discard its own longstanding positions and ignore international outcry with little consequence. In the Middle East, Trump intervened in the June 2025 Israel-Iran war by attacking three Iranian nuclear sites with 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs, which only the United States possesses. Then, after many Arab countries had spent two years denouncing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, Trump persuaded them to endorse his plan to resolve the war in Gaza with an arrangement that prioritizes Israel’s immediate security demands. Trump also pushed the UN Security Council in November 2025 to adopt a resolution on Gaza that conditions Palestinian statehood on reforms to the Palestinian Authority, the governing body currently in charge in the West Bank. China and Russia criticized the resolution’s lack of emphasis on Palestinian self-determination but declined to veto it because they did not want to jeopardize a cease-fire.

In Venezuela, Trump’s decision to launch a stunning military operation to seize the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and bundle him off to face trial in New York was met with some public outcry but little opposition. Europe, usually a champion of the importance of international law, seemed to accept Trump’s unilateral action to avoid a confrontation with the United States. China and Russia condemned the U.S. assault as a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, but neither could meaningfully respond as Washington moved swiftly to reorient Caracas away from its ties with Beijing and Moscow. But unlike its prior interventions during its unipolar heyday, the United States expressed no desire for regime change, nor did it try to justify its actions under the guise of democracy promotion. Instead, Trump quickly partnered with the remnants of Venezuela’s authoritarian order to ensure U.S. influence and promote American energy interests.

For now, no other power can stop the United States. The main constraints on U.S. unipolarity are in the United States itself. A major domestic political shift toward the Democratic Party in the 2026 midterm elections or a significant foreign policy quagmire could temper some of Trump’s unilateralism. But Trump has avoided many of the problems that befell the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan by setting narrow strategic objectives and being open to working with dictators and democrats alike. Even more important, the forces supporting the United States’ assertive unilateralism extend beyond Trump. An American foreign policy establishment accustomed to the ease of unilateral action will likely continue to pursue it no matter who is in the White House.

WITH GREAT POWER COMES NO RESPONSIBILITY

The revised world order is one in which the United States sheds the responsibilities of a unipolar power but remains the sole force that can shape the international system. Over the past decade, China and Russia have used their military advantage to alter territorial realities: China has aggressively reclaimed land in the South China Sea, for instance, and Russia has conquered and annexed large swaths of Ukrainian territory. The United States, which previously criticized such actions, now also openly employs force to advance its interests. But whereas the leaders of previous U.S. administrations cloaked interventions in liberal rhetoric, Trump frames them explicitly in terms of American power. In a remarkable interview with CNN after the operation to capture Maduro, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller bluntly articulated the administration’s worldview: we live, he said, in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power: these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Trump’s seemingly uncompromising demand for ownership of Greenland is the most explicit case of this new paradigm. He has indicated that full control of the lightly inhabited island is more important than preserving NATO, which has been the bedrock of the U.S.-European alliance for eight decades. Europe, long accustomed to NATO and the U.S. security umbrella, is struggling to adapt to the end of its friendly relationship with Washington and the shattering of its much-vaunted role in moderating U.S. behavior.

But Trump’s assertiveness does not imply that the United States will grant China and Russia similar latitude in their regions. Threats to Greenland or intervention in Venezuela do not mean that the United States will allow China or Russia their own spheres of influence. American military power remains decisive in Europe and Asia and will continue to limit Chinese and Russian action even as Trump brooks no opposition to his strategic plans. The United States is also increasing its own power at the expense of collective organizations. The November UN resolution on Gaza granted unprecedented power to the United States by establishing the so-called Board of Peace, chaired by Trump, to oversee the cease-fire and rebuilding process in the enclave. Trump now seeks to expand the board’s mandate from Gaza to conflict resolution worldwide, which could potentially undercut the authority of the UN Security Council and further allow Washington to shape the global order.

U.S. hostility toward multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization is pushing other countries to seek multipolarity, but true rebalancing is a long way off. Major economies want to retain access to the U.S. market, still the world’s largest, but are simultaneously hedging against U.S. pressure by expanding trade pacts among themselves. Canada, for instance, has signed trade agreements with China and Indonesia and resumed trade talks with India. But these countries will struggle to divorce themselves from the United States. Russia plays a limited role in global trade flows, and China’s export-led model makes it an unrealistic destination for others’ trade surpluses in the near term. Hopes that China could replace the United States as the world’s primary consumption engine remain distant.

Aspirations of multipolarity have contributed to a new order of unfettered American power.

Doubts about the reliability of the United States as a security provider are also encouraging U.S. allies in Europe and Asia to strengthen their own defenses. NATO countries have pledged to raise their overall defense spending to five percent of GDP by 2035, and Japan’s defense spending has reached its target of two percent of GDP this year. There is high and growing public support in some allied countries, such as South Korea, for developing their own nuclear weapons. Yet building credible conventional and nuclear deterrents will take time. During this transition, these allies will continue to depend on U.S. support and cooperation because neither Tokyo nor Seoul trusts China or Russia to protect their security.

Despite the widespread claims of its imminence, then, multipolarity is nowhere close to being realized. If anything, aspirations of multipolarity have contributed to this new order of unfettered American power. The first Trump administration and the Biden administration identified China and Russia as threats to U.S. dominance, and those two countries have talked up American weakness and been more assertive in their own foreign policies. In his second term, Trump has welcomed the drumbeat heralding the arrival of multipolarity not as a challenge but as a message that the United States no longer needs to be responsible for global order. In Trump’s multipolar vision, every country can exercise its power as it sees fit—but given the gaps in market and military power between the United States and everyone else, only Washington gets to exercise its power unconstrained. The United States is outwardly accepting the shared premise of multipolarity but reaping the benefits of continued unipolarity.

The world today has transformed dramatically since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States became the sole superpower. But now, as then, there is little prospect for a credible challenger to U.S. hegemony. The unipolar moment never truly ended; it has merely changed. Unlike just after the end of the Cold War, the United States today feels the need to vigorously assert itself with no qualms about the consequences of exercising its dominance. That is what the Trump administration is doing. And for the foreseeable future, no other country or coalition can stop it.

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