The silhouette of an American flag, Las Vegas, Nevada, May 2016
David Becker / ReutersForeign Affairs has recently published a number of articles
on the global balance of power, the future of U.S. hegemon
y, and how great-power competition is playing out in the
developing world. To complement these essays, we asked
a broad pool of experts for their take. As with previous
surveys, we approached dozens of authorities with expertise
relevant to the question at hand, along with leading generalists
in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed
or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level
in their opinion. Their answers are below
DEBATE STATEMENT
The global distribution of power today is closer to being unipolar than it is to being bipolar or multipolar.
Adriane Lentz-Smith
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor of History at Duke University
The language of “poles” does not offer much room for nuance when talking about how power works. Yes, certain states...Read MoreAli Wyne
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Senior Analyst for Global Macro-Geopolitics at Eurasia Group
The United States remains the leading power in the international system. It is the only country that can deploy military...Read MoreAbraham Newman
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
Amitav Acharya
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Distinguished Professor at American University’s School of International Service
Polarity (unipolar, bipolar, multipolar) is an old-fashioned and inadequate measure of power, as it reflects only military and economic strength,...Read MoreAndrew Bacevich
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Ayşe Zarakol
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge
The question implicitly assumes that power is only material (military strength, etc.). By that sense, yes, the world is still...Read MoreBarry Buzan
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
The United States was never, or at best only briefly, a unipole. It is rapidly losing both the will and...Read MoreBarry R. Posen
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Polarity seems like an easy thing to measure because it is meant to rely on an objective measure of the...Read MoreBilahari Kausikan
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore
Dan Altman
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University
Answering this question requires first making a difficult judgment about whether economic power or military power matters more in international...Read MoreDani Rodrik
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 3
Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School
We are clearly in a world of transition. China’s rise, as well as that of middle-income developing countries such as...Read MoreDaniel Nexon
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Professor in the Department of Government and at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University
The United States—or, more accurately, a cartel composed largely of G-7 states—no longer exercises the kind of global hegemony that...Read MoreDeepa Ollapally
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Research Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Rising Powers Initiative at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs
The Ukraine war is accelerating global multipolarity despite the initial transatlantic unity. The real question is whether Asia will become...Read MoreDesh Girod
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University
The United States surpasses all other nations (including China) in military and economic metrics, in part because of its centuries-long...Read MoreEvan A. Laksmana
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia Military Modernisation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
The era of global unipolarity where the United States is unrivaled and unchallenged across different policy domains is certainly over....Read MoreFrancis J. Gavin
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies
Power is hard to define and measure. To many, the United States appears in relative decline, yet in key metrics...Read MoreGideon Rose
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Mary and David Boies Distinguished Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
China’s rise is real, but U.S. decline is oversold. Washington’s dominant position in the international system remains impressive (resting on...Read MoreHappymon Jacob
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament Studies at the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University
The global distribution of power is far more diffused today than during the Cold War bipolar system or immediately after...Read MoreIvo Daalder
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs
While the United States remains the strongest and most influential power in the world—and will likely remain so for decades,...Read MoreJack Snyder
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University
Polarity is far more complicated than this question implies. Second-strike nuclear deterrence is multipolar. Economic power and conventional military power...Read MoreJacqueline Hazelton
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Executive Editor of the International Security Journal at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
If I couldn’t answer “Agree,” I would have answered “Strongly agree.”...Jakub Grygiel
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Professor at the Catholic University of America and Senior Adviser at the Marathon Initiative
The unipolar moment is long over. We are in a great-power competition, which by definition means that there are two...Read MoreJames Fearon
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University
Polarity-talk is usually a way of arguing over whether political influence is becoming less concentrated in the international sphere. People...Read MoreJennifer Lind
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College
In the Cold War, the United States and the USSR were deemed superpowers because (1) they had tremendous economic and...Read MoreJoseph S. Nye, Jr.
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
It is neither. Closer to unipolar in global military; multipolar in global economics; dispersed on many transnational issues....John Mearsheimer
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
Whether the world is unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar depends on how you define what a great power is. Of course,...Read MoreJohn Mueller
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Political Scientist at Ohio State University and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute
I find the concept of polarity to be unhelpful and misdirecting. The international arena seems, rather, to be the disorderly...Read MoreJonathan Kirshner
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College
To see the world today as unipolar is suggestive of a shallow conception of “power” in world politics. The ultimate...Read MoreJorge Heine
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University
One of the most significant trends in the course of the past two decades has been the movement away from...Read MoreJoseph M. Parent
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame
It all depends on what you care about. Power comes in lots of forms and can be used in lots...Read MoreJoshua Shifrinson
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor of International Relations with the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute
Social science exists to impose order on a messy reality. So it goes with polarity, a concept used to help...Read MoreLindsey O’Rourke
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College
Proponents in the debate about the polarity of the international system often speak past one another because there are so...Read MoreM. Taylor Fravel
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at MIT
Manjari Chatterjee Miller
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations
The world is not multipolar. But is it unipolar or bipolar? It’s complicated. Military capabilities matter but so do perceptions....Read MoreMariano-Florentino Cuéllar
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
For the last century, the United States has had outsized global power because of the size and relative openness of...Read MoreMark Leonard
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations
The post-post–Cold War world is coming to an end. And two big trends are replacing it: a drive toward polarization...Read MoreMathew Burrows
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Program Lead and Distinguished Fellow in Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy at the Stimson Center
The war in Ukraine is further confirmation that most of the world’s population does not want to align with the...Read MoreMichael Mazarr
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation
The international system as a whole is not uni- or bi- or multipolar: distinct patterns prevail on different issues. A...Read MoreMiguel Centeno
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Executive Vice Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University
Better to think of more complex network structures—no poles, but solar systems: the United States, China, the EU....Moisés Naím
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Nathalie Tocci
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali
The international system is no longer unipolar. Militarily, the United States remains the global leader by far, but China increasingly...Read MoreOliver Stuenkel
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo
Oriana Skylar Mastro
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Polarity captures the distribution of great powers in the international system—and those countries do not have to have the same...Read MorePaul K. MacDonald
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College
Polarity is one of the more mushy international relations concepts, yet by most of the empirical metrics that are available,...Read MorePaul Poast
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Nonresident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Being a major power is determined by economic and military power, along with a country’s willingness to exert both within...Read MorePaul Staniland
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
There is no doubt that the United States retains huge power advantages in the international system. But it’s also the...Read MorePeter Feaver
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University
The distribution of power in the international system is in flux, shifting away from unipolarity and seemingly moving toward some...Read MorePhillips O’Brien
NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews
It’s certainly not unipolar anymore, but the United States with its allies remains the dominant pole. The most important question...Read MoreRachel Myrick
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Douglas and Ellen Lowey Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University
To some extent, differences of opinion on this question reflect conceptual disagreement over the definition of unipolarity rather than disagreement...Read MoreRajan Menon
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities
Ranjit Lall
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford
Richard Caplan
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford
Unipolar tending toward multipolar on the basis of the material capabilities and the dispositions of the United States, Russia, and...Read MoreRichard Fontaine
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
CEO of the Center for a New American Security
The unipolar moment was just that—a moment—and it passed years ago....Robert D. Kaplan
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Even if Russia loses the Ukraine war, the power of China under Xi Jinping, the need for Europe to conduct...Read MoreRobert O. Keohane
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton University
Rohan Mukherjee
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Assistant Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
Although China’s economic and military power have grown tremendously, it is still far behind the United States on a global...Read MoreRonald R. Krebs
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota
The world today is not unipolar. If we measure polarity in terms of objective power-resource indicators, the United States remains...Read MoreRose McDermott
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
University Professor of International Relations at Brown University
The United States is no longer a unipolar hegemon, even if no other single state is yet in a position...Read MoreRosemary Foot
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Professor of International Relations, Emeritus at the University of Oxford
Questions about polarity emphasize shifts in material power among states, but we need to think not just about the diffusion...Read MoreSara Bjerg Moller
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Associate Teaching Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service
In the traditional (i.e., Waltzian) sense in which the distribution of power is measured according to a state’s capabilities, yes,...Read MoreShivshankar Menon
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
Visiting Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University and Former Indian National Security Adviser
This is a world adrift between orders: the global economy is multipolar; the world is still unipolar militarily though regional...Read MoreStacie Goddard
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 3
Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College
Certainly, the United States does not command the relative advantage in economic capabilities that it had in the 1990s. At...Read MoreStephen Brooks
STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Professor of Government at Dartmouth College
As argued in my recent “The Myth of Multipolarity” Foreign Affairs article written with Bill Wohlforth, the world’s largest-ever power...Read MoreStephen Walt
STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School
Debates about polarity are difficult to resolve because there is no consensus on how polarity should be defined or how...Read MoreStephen Wertheim
AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 4
Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School
Because of the United States’ military and monetary preeminence, the current distribution of power is more unipolar than bipolar or...Read MoreTim Murithi
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
Head of Peacebuilding Interventions at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and Professor of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University in South Africa
The emerging geopolitical tension that has reintroduced polarization has triggered a global inflection point. Nonalignment is not a choice between...Read MoreTong Zhao
DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
China’s GDP has surpassed 70 percent of the size of the United States’ GDP, a considerably higher ratio than what...Read MoreWilliam Wohlforth
STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College
The reason I can be so confident is that the question is not asking to forecast some inevitably uncertain outcome;...Read MoreYan Xuetong
STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University
To clarify, I strongly agree only to the assessment that the global distribution of power today is becoming bipolar, not...Read More
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