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…
