The world we used to know no longer exists: when Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the already dying Unipolar Moment breathed his last and the Multipolar Transition began, leading, almost three years later, to a world where Westerners are no longer safe and where the US is no longer seen as a symbol of invincibility and untouchability.
By openly challenging the American hegemony over Europe and resorting to force to change the so-called rules-based liberal international order, Russia kick-started a violent process of change oriented to redistribute power globally. This move encouraged other players, defiant of the US, to follow its steps: Azerbaijan invaded Karabakh, ending Armenian de facto control; Serbia-Kosovo tensions escalated to deadlier confrontations; Venezuela threatened to invade Western-allied Guyana to retake the disputed Essequibo; the Polisario Front in Western Sahara received weapons and training from Iran; and the so-called Axis of Resistance launched a multi-country assault on Israel. Meanwhile, global instability continued with the increasing escalation over Taiwan and a series of coups in the Sahel region. And there has been nothing the US could do to prevent this super-arc of crisis from becoming reality and expanding globally.
World peace has never been so fragile, and the global policeman, the US, seems unable to exert its influence as it used to do and, what’s more, its rivals act as if they are no longer scared of repercussions. The fact is that the global hegemon is increasingly less global, is increasingly less hegemon, and this is leading an heterogeneous number of players, from states to non-state actors, to take advantage of the moment. The time for the Multipolar Transition is now or never.
Facts have proven the coalition of the willing for the Multipolar Transition right: Azerbaijan retook control over the Karabakh and faced no repercussions for obliging dozens of thousands of Armenians to flee, most of the world didn’t join the Western-backed Ukraine-related sanctions regime, the Israel-Hamas war over Gaza turned into a Middle East-wide extremely violent conflict involving tens of Iranian proxies, the US didn’t manage to build an international coalition to fight the Houthis’ war in the Red Sea, even though they severely damaged the EU and Israeli economic and energy interests by striking every Western-linked ship crossing the main sea of globalization.
It’s impossible to understand why the world turned post-American without taking a few steps back in time. Indeed, today’s world is the unwanted consequence of the War on Terror and its children, the Arab Spring, that should have helped the US make the 21st century the new American century. Conversely, that conflict-rich season, born out of the neocon belief that the End of History was a reachable horizon, not a childish illusion, laid the foundations for the current global disorder. It’s been the several armed attempts to shape the international order in the image and likeness of the US, from the NATO campaigns in Yugoslavia to Libya’s 2011 regime change, that eventually encouraged three natural-born rivals, Russia, China and Iran, to forge an alliance oriented to overthrow the American global hegemony and its main pillar: the dollar.
The US isn’t prepared to cope with the multipolar challenge because it reads the world through old lens. The US leadership believes the world barely changed from 9/11 onwards – and it is no exaggeration: Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan declared that the Middle East was at its safest in years just a few days before Hamas assault on Israel, the casus belli of a wider conflict that is destined to deeply and negatively impact on global peace.
The truth is that today’s world is much different from the post-9/11 era, which saw the Unipolar Moment reaching its peak. Today’s world is far from being a safe place for Westerners. The Houthis spare Russian and Chinese ships while targeting Western ones. Western allies, from Ukraine to Israel, face unprecedented military threats. The G7 is increasingly a voice in the desert, unable to exert significant influence over international affairs, while the BRICS continue to expand and solidify their structure. The declining role of the U.S. economy in the global market, coupled with the lost battle for productivity and trade surplus, particularly from East Asia and China, further underscores America’s waning influence. While the dollar remains the dominant currency, more countries are turning to their own currencies for trade: for example, the Chinese renminbi is steadily gaining traction as a preferred alternative.
The US is still the dominant power. No other military can be as present around the world as the American military. No other currency has the same appeal as the dollar. No other rising power has something like NATO or as many military bases across the globe as the US does. But its dominance is increasingly challenged by emerging powers, who no longer fear to attack the US asymmetrically or to attack its allies directly, as Russia’s Ukraine invasion and Iran-backed Hamas assault on Israel show, and who are ready and willing to resort to force to put an end to the American order.
The US no longer is the undisputed hegemon on the so-called emerging technologies. China strongly leads from artificial intelligence to quantum computing, and its soft power could do nothing against the rain of renminbi that flooded Africa. Hollywood keeps doing an excellent job when it comes to making people dream or entertain, but the US has seemingly forgotten that weapons and money rule the world. It’s a bit of a paradox if one considers that the US built first its regional hegemony and later its world order by using force.
The truth is that the so-called Pax American meant Pax mostly for America and its allies, and this is the main reason why the world is now turning against the West. The US attempts to keep the Unipolar Moment alive will hardly succeed, and there’s nothing wrong about this: no order lasts forever. The time has come for a new world order. It actually started on November 12, 2024. 🙂