Tag: multi-polar world

A Multipolar World Order

Guest Post by Nick Giambruno

Russia, China, and Iran are the primary geopolitical challengers to the US-led world order.

While they resent US dominance, Russia and China have a seat at the table in the current US-led world order as junior members. They have permanent seats at the UN Security Council and are members of core international organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, etc.

Further, China and Russia are the only countries with sophisticated enough nuclear arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the military escalation ladder, a concept to describe how the severity of a military conflict can increase.

In other words, the US military can’t attack Russia and China with impunity because they can match each move up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the military escalation ladder.

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The Penny Drops – The World Is Multi-Polar

Guest Post by Moon of Alabama

In 2007, during his famous speech in Munich, the Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed to the inevitable rise of a multipolar world.

He started out by defining the opposite state:

However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

The unilateral tendencies of the U.S. and the West in general were described as dead ends:

[W]hat is happening in today’s world – and we just started to discuss this – is a tentative to introduce precisely this concept into international affairs, the concept of a unipolar world.And with which results?

Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension.
…
We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?

He pointed to the inevitable changes in the world that were arising to counter this trend:

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The Capital Of The Multipolar World – A Moscow Diary

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

In Moscow you feel no crisis. No effects of sanctions. No unemployment. No homeless people in the streets. Minimal inflation.

How sharp was good ol’ Lenin, prime modernist, when he mused, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. This global nomad now addressing you has enjoyed the privilege of spending four astonishing weeks in Moscow at the heart of an historical crossroads – culminating with the Putin-Xi geopolitical game-changing summit at the Kremlin.

To quote Xi, “changes that haven’t been seen in 100 years” do have a knack of affecting us all in more ways than one.

James Joyce, another modernity icon, wrote that we spend our lives meeting average and/or extraordinary people, on and on and on, but in the end we’re always meeting ourselves. I have had the privilege of meeting an array of extraordinary people in Moscow, guided by trusted friends or by auspicious coincidence: in the end your soul tells you they enrich you and the overarching historical moment in ways you can’t even begin to fathom.

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