Polarity Is What States Make of It
Bilahari Kausikan
Brooks and Wohlforth argue that the United States, though not as dominant as before, is still unquestionably at the top of the international order. Almost all the world’s “real alliances,” they contend, “bind smaller states to Washington, and the main dynamic is the expansion of that alliance system.”
These claims are correct but beside the point. The United States will, indeed, remain dominant in many, perhaps most, economic and military metrics for quite some time. Yet to conclude that multipolarity is a myth is to conceive of multipolarity in superficial, overly formalistic, and largely obsolete ways. For their part, Brooks and Wohlforth define the concept based on the experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by emphasizing formal alliances and hard measurements of power—such as a country’s military expenditures or gross domestic product—and ignoring everything else. But today, power depends as much on the way different states control critical resources, and how they informally collaborate, as it does on the size of formal alliances or military forces. And by these standards, the world is much more multipolar than Brooks and Wohlforth believe.
NO WAY OUT
The contemporary international system is characterized by a global web of supply chains of a complexity and density never seen before, one that links friend and foe alike and frequently makes that distinction ambiguous. The U.S.-Chinese rivalry and the war in Ukraine may have stressed this system, but aside from some specific technologies with national security implications, neither challenge has reversed globalization. Nor will they. The costs of abandoning interdependence are simply too high to be realistically entertained.
Some U.S. policymakers would like to see the United States and its allies separate their economies from China’s. But whatever their concerns about Beijing, no government, even the closest U.S. ally, will stop engaging with China, even as many states try to mitigate the risks of interdependence. The country is simply too big an economic actor. According to China’s official statistics, for example, the country accounted for about 30 percent of global manufacturing output in 2021, and there is a limit to how much any country, including the United States, can diversify away from what is in effect the factory of the world. (This statistic also indicates that China is highly dependent on exports, and so it, too, will have serious difficulty becoming more self-reliant.)
As Brooks and Wohlforth note, the United States has a far more powerful military and a larger economy than China does. But in today’s interconnected world, multipolarity no longer requires approximate military and economic symmetry. Any state that controls an important international resource or plays a significant international role in some domain cannot be dismissed as a bit player. For example, based on the size of its military or GDP, it is absurd to consider tiny Singapore any kind of global “pole.” But as a financial center, a port in global trade, and a critical hub for oil refining (even though it produces no oil), Singapore has a consequential international position. Larger states, such as Australia, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, have even more global influence.
TWISTING IN THE WIND
Brooks and Wohlforth are right that the United States has no peer. No other country poses an existential threat to it. Russia is clearly a dangerous power, but it is in decline. China is a formidable competitor, but it is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of post–Cold War globalization and therefore has little incentive to kick over the table and seek radical new arrangements. And even if it wanted to, it is doubtful that China has the power to totally rewrite global rules. Beijing may want to dominate the international system in order to recover the position and status it believes it lost during a century or more of weakness, but those are different matters.
Still, the lack of an existential threat is not proof that, as the authors argue, multipolarity “will remain a distant eventuality.” Indeed, in the absence of an existential challenge, the United States has no strong reason to work to uphold international order—and therefore to try to maintain its leading position. As a result, since 1991, most administrations have looked inward and focused on domestic issues over international ones. This new emphasis has made even the closest U.S. allies and partners anxious about the strength of Washington’s global commitments, as has the highly polarized, and therefore unstable, nature of American domestic politics. Concerns about Chinese and Russian behavior may keep these governments clustered around Washington for now, but they cannot trust the United States to be the ally that it used to be. In the long term, U.S. friends and partners will likely seek more autonomy from Washington and greater flexibility in their relations with China, Russia, and other countries.
These countries will not, of course, abandon the United States. Washington will still be their primary partner. But in the twenty-first century, primacy and unipolarity are not the same thing. There are many ways to measure influence, so multipolarity has become as much a subjective as an objective phenomenon. It is defined mostly by how countries—regardless of their relationship with the United States—perceive their strategic choices and exercise their agency. When Washington withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, the trade deal did not collapse. Instead, Japan took the lead in organizing a successor that features the rest of the TPP’s original members. China has since applied to join the trade bloc, and some members have suggested they are willing to let Beijing in. It is not hard to see why: they want further access to China’s market.
The international order is therefore indeed multipolar. Clusters of countries form, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves around different issues in order to promote their interests. Even on matters of great significance, no one state—not even the United States—can run the show.
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