The Unpolar Moment

2024.03.15

I forget the dude’s name, but after Fukuyama wrote “The End of History,” the guy wrote an article called “The Unipolar Moment.” And his point was basically that because the Soviet Union had collapsed and the US was the only remaining great power, the world was experiencing a unipolar international system. To me, this is just self-evidently true. That was the world I grew up in. We didn’t pay attention to anyone else’s worldview because the United States’ worldview was the only one that mattered. (It helped that I lived in Canada where we knew the US’s worldview was the only one that mattered, even though we hated that fact.)

But over the course of the last decade, that truism became harder and harder to believe in. I don’t know exactly when it became clear to me that the US didn’t call the shots anymore, but there are specific moments that stand out. Obama’s red line speech and when he said, “We will respond at a time of our choosing” after North Korean hackers rolled up Sony because of The Interview – those moments stand out. Also, this photo had something to do with it:

Anyways, somewhere between 2014 and 2022, I realized that America is not the hegemon I thought it was. And I became aware that others were acknowledging that same reality. But I think that those others are still missing the significance of what is going on. They are still using what I consider a Cold War framework to try to understand what is happening to the world order right now.

In the Cold War, we lived in a bi-polar world: there were two great powers (the US and the Soviet Union) who were trying to dominate geopolitics. Some think we have returned to that bi-polar world, but the poles are the US and China. Some think we are in a multi-polar world because the US, China, and Russia are contending for global hegemony. There are also those who see a multi-polarity because the international system is dominated by struggle between the US, China, Russia and upstarts like Iran, India, and North Korea.

I understand these arguments, but I think they are stuck in a thinking dominated by precedents. In the world that has existed since the founding of nation states, the international system has only comprehended one or two or a handful of “great powers.” So, we are constantly searching for the “polarity thread,” the logic of great powers that explains the world order. But I think we have left that world behind. There are no poles now. The international “system” is a Hobbesian war of all against all. We are entering the unpolar moment. There are no poles now. The world of nation states is truly anarchic. There is no leviathan that can tame the US, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, Hamas, the Houthis…

This really sucks if you’re a so-called “middle power,” like Canada. We have always just assumed there would be some higher power that would bring stability to the earth – even if we didn’t like that power. Now we’re unmoored.