The Contested Birth of Multipolarity

My essay on the changing nature of the world order and whether we are on the path to multipolarity...

Creation myths are central to human societies. Across cultures, they often begin with chaos yielding to structure—an episodic balance of forces that allows humanity to progress. Some of these arrangements endure for centuries, others only moments, until the balance inevitably breaks and the cycle begins anew. What is often overlooked, however, is that creation rests on destruction: the old must give way for the new to emerge. And as it is in the heavens, so it must be on Earth. This destructive flux of creation is what global politics is contending with today. To understand the nature of this churn, however, it is first important to answer the question: what constitutes world order?

Realists view order from the perspective of the desire for power and security in an anarchical world. From the realist prism, nation-states that are driven by self-interest are the primary actors, navigating immutable anarchy, managing conflict and seeking cooperation in a competitive global arena. In this sense, world order refers to the distribution of power, which gives rise to structures, relationships and patterns of activities in order to manage competition between states. Orders, therefore, change or evolve based on the shifts in the distribution or balance of power. The liberal institutionalist perspective emphasises the importance of transnational institutions, global agreements, treaties and regimes, and even international civil servants that regulate various aspects of global politics and governance.

While states remain the primary actors, their behaviour is moderated and mediated through an institutional architecture that facilitates communication, provides a framework for cooperation and manages conflicts. This, in turn, endows these institutions with personality, interests and agency. Consequently, they have a critical role to play in shaping the contours of the world order. Finally, for constructivists, ideas, norms and values have a constitutive impact on the self-perceptions and behaviour of states. This in turn leads to the establishment of structures of order that organise state action and guide patterns of behaviour.

If one is to distill these arguments, it is evident that power is a necessary ingredient to construct an order. But it is insufficient to ensure its acceptability and sustainability. What is further needed are certain shared beliefs, values, norms and institutions. These have a constitutive effect on perceptions of the self and others, thereby shaping and regulating the behaviours of states, which impacts the emergence of order. Therefore, to understand the state of the world order at present and whether there is today an inexorable march towards multipolarity, it is essential to examine three factors: the distribution of power, the ideologies animating great powers, and the norms and institutions that are being shaped.

The Distribution of Power

The past decade has witnessed the gradual re-emergence of great power competition, with the US and China being the chief protagonists. While there exist significant disparities, assessed on broad metrics of power, the two countries are today the dominant global actors. As true as this is, it doesn’t capture the full complexity of the world.

Rather, what persists today is a state of tremendous fluidity. This is a product of the uneven distribution of power across different domains, along with the outcomes of decades of economic globalisation, which created deep networks between the American and Chinese economies and an unprecedented web of interconnected supply chains, powering the global economy. Shattering these is a lengthy and cost-intensive process.

When one looks at the sheer military capability and reach, the US remains far ahead of its competitors. Despite the tough lessons that Washington has learned over the past 25 years about the limited utility of the military instrument, no other country today has the capability to project force far from its borders like the US does. The decisive bombing of Iranian nuclear sites earlier this year was a case in point.

On the other hand, when one looks at economic capacity, technology development and research and innovation, the world is evidently bipolar. These are the domains where the US and China are locked in intense competition.

In this process, each is seeking to undercut and outpace the other by investing in domestic capacity, constraining and delegitimising the other’s actions and working to expand their capabilities through networks of partners. In doing so, both have deployed a mix of carrots and sticks. The US, in particular, has leaned heavy on the use of sticks under Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the end goal that each is pursuing is to cultivate an edge over the other.

This process has generated bargaining room for several other actors, who have been pursuing hedging and balancing, while seeking capability enhancement. In that sense, there persists a tinge of multipolarity to the distribution of power in the world today. What’s further added to this is the fact that there are certain transnational challenges, such as climate change, governance of emerging technologies, terrorism, etc., that neither great power can address alone.

These create spaces for middle powers to act, as was evident by the kerfuffle in the Western press over the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Tianjin and India’s pursuit of a new equilibrium with China. That said, the space for such manoeuvring has clearly narrowed since January 20, 2025. Domestic political and ideological churn within the US and China significantly accounts for this shift.

Ideologies Animating Great Powers

Nation-states are indeed the primary actors when it comes to international relations, and policymaking is often a structured, institutionalised process. But that does not mean that nation-states are rational or even mechanistic actors that are capable of making precise cost-benefit calculations and choosing optimal policies to maximise their utility.

On the contrary, decisions are often taken in an environment of imperfect information. More importantly, nation-states, and the institutions that constitute them, are profoundly human. They are composed of individuals, and are shaped by their perceptions, cognitive limitations, and political incentives at any given moment. In that sense, state behaviour is not the product of objective rationality, but of subjective interpretation. It reflects the worldview or ideological prisms through which the humans who are in positions of authority distill the information that they receive of the world around them. It also reflects the limitations of systems and institutions that have been put in place to process and deliberate on said information. In this sense, ideology remains a central force in both the formation and functioning of states, particularly in terms of how interests are conceptualised and pursued. This, of course, has an impact on the world order.

Evidently, today, US policy appears to be riddled with ideological confusion. Is the Trumpian worldview one that seeks isolationism through scaling back America’s global commitments or one of reconsidering priorities and pursuing greater burden sharing with allies and partners as pathways to maintaining American primacy? Does Make America Great Again (MAGA) desire jettisoning the idea of America as defined by the classical liberal ideals of its founding texts in favour of a narrow ethno-religious definition of American civilisation? And by extension, is its vision for the world one that is carved into geographical and civilisational spheres of influence among great powers or one of the universality of certain values, even if not liberal values, realised through the international institutional order? One can identify elements of each of these impulses in American policy since Trump’s return to power.

On the other hand, Beijing has talked a good game when it comes to multilateralism and supporting the UN-centered international order. For all the comparisons to Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping’s global vision is unlike the revolution that Mao sought. On the contrary, it is rooted in a certain pragmatism. Xi has repeatedly talked about the need to adhere to the sovereign equality of states, pursue greater democracy in international relations, adhere to respect for diversity in international relations, resolve disputes peacefully, and oppose concepts like hegemonism and bloc mentality.

China’s actions, however, have often run contrary to the spirit of this rhetoric. This has been evident in the frothy waters of the South China Sea as it is along the treacherous terrain of the Line of Actual Control with India or even when it comes to the prickly issues of terrorism, trade and reform of global institutions. Even when it comes to the much-vaunted principle of sovereign equality, China’s actions in Ukraine fall short of its words.

Shaping New Norms

For all the high-sounding language, Beijing’s actions indicate that it views power as the fundamental currency in international relations. And the pathway to maximise its power is through dominating its periphery and leveraging partnerships to reform the institutional architecture of global governance to suit its interests.

In this quest, China has sought to expand its stake in the institutions under the UN framework. It has given new purpose to multilateral groupings that it dominates, such as the SCO and BRICS. And it has pursued the establishment of newer organisations, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and now a potential SCO Development Bank. The US, on the other hand, is renegotiating old compacts with allies, and dithering on its stake in existing institutions. This is, in large part, a product of the ideological fissure that is at the heart of American politics today, along with a politics of grievance that has led to the demonisation of the very idea of globalisation. America needs to decide what it stands for and what it wants from the world.

Beijing, meanwhile, is continuing to challenge conventional notions of concepts like democracy and human rights. This effort is as much targeted at generating domestic legitimacy as it is at shifting the global normative paradigm. The Chinese argument is that these norms must account for civilisational and material diversities. To that extent, this is an argument against norm universality. But that does not necessarily make it an argument in favour of multipolarity. In essence, it is a call designed to rally others into its orbit, such that accommodation becomes an inevitable choice for the US. In such a world, multipolarity, therefore, is likely to emerge only to the extent to which the great powers compete along with the extent to which middle powers can take advantage of this competition while building capabilities to insulate themselves from either orbit.

The myths remind us that creation comes only by breaking what came before. The shifting balance of global power, the ideological churn of populism and nationalism around the world and the normative and institutional tug-of-war between the US and China reflect the collapse of one balance and the contested birth of another. Whether this destruction yields multipolarity or a new bipolarity is an open question. The answer to this will depend on the nature of struggle between great powers, and how others utilise the spaces that it opens for them.

This essay was first published in Outlook India