Congratulations, the Multipolar World You Ordered Is Here.
And Now We All Get to Suffer the Consequences.
For several years now, there has been much talk about the end of the post-war order and the coming of a multipolar world. The desirability of this wonderful new arrangement has been pushed by three groups: naive woke leftists, similarly naive isolationists and, of course and above all, our enemies.
Each had their reasons.
Western progressives view the world through a simple, warped but powerful lens. Their approach to global politics is exactly the same as their view of domestic politics, and is based on the appealing but misguided idea that success is always and everywhere the product of unearned, ill-gotten privilege. Their antipathy towards the West, white people, men, Jews and “the rich” stems from this basic formula: whoever is doing well must be doing so at the expense of others. To them, any imbalance in wealth, income, influence and so forth is necessarily bad and to be corrected.
At the domestic level, the culmination of this worldview is their demand for “social justice”, a forced redistribution of wealth, influence and opportunity from the “oppressors” to the “oppressed”. You don’t need to be a Robin DiAngelo acolyte to see how this Marxist dynamic extends to global affairs: “social justice” at home becomes “global justice” abroad. If the world is unequal, which it is, then that must be corrected. Their extraordinary ignorance of the world beyond the borders of the safe, peaceful, civilised countries they live in is extremely helpful, because it prevents them from seeing that peace, stability and prosperity are the products of culture, science and innovation. Instead, they argue that the West’s recent dominance is the product of colonialism, racism and imperialism. They hate the West for being successful and want a multipolar world as both a punishment and a corrective.
The isolationists are primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one which has spread to other parts of the West along with every other aspect of American culture. I have some sympathy for their instincts, even though they are, in my view, as misguided as the woke left about the way the world actually works. Having travelled extensively around America, I understand the feeling of a man living a comfortable life in rural Ohio being asked to care about events happening half way around the world. When I sit on the porch of my AirBnB somewhere in America I find it much harder to care about those events too.
For this reason, among others, isolationism has always existed in American history and was particularly powerful in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who orchestrated America’s support for Britain during WWII and his country’s eventual full involvement in the conflict, had to tread extremely carefully around this faction until Pearl Harbour.
The outcome of that war - an overwhelming moral and military victory over indisputable evil - kept isolationists quiet for some time. But the horrors of Vietnam, compounded by the trillion-dollar disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, have understandably produced a powerful backlash against interventionism. “America can’t be the world’s policeman,” went the cry.
Unfortunately, simple slogans are rarely true and inevitably leave out much-needed context. America accounts for 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its GDP. Much of this is due to geography, natural resource wealth and the ingenuity and drive of her people. But much of it also stems from the fact that America is the world’s most powerful country, an advantage she uses with great skill to get the best deals, secure access to resources and shape global affairs in a way that benefits her and her allies. To pretend that Americans can continue to enjoy unprecedented prosperity, security and peace as their country completely withdraws from global affairs is to misunderstand the way the world works.
There is a strange irony here. The two groups that have most celebrated the coming multipolar world are now also the ones complaining the most about its consequences. And that is because, despite their good intentions, woke leftists and neoisolationists have served as useful idiots to the people who are actually driving the multipolarity narrative: hostile foreign powers that feel it is their moment to end American hegemony.
China’s economic growth and Russia’s recovery from the collapse of the USSR occurred at precisely the same time as the collapse of the West’s moral, economic and military authority. The shifting balance of power naturally produced a hunger for a different arrangement. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the terrorist attack of October 7 and China’s increasingly open coveting of Taiwan are all signs of a deeper geopolitical realignment. For the moment, the demographic and economic tide has swung powerfully against the West. Our enemies are emboldened by their growing strength, encouraged by our weakness and no longer constrained by international law—which was only ever worth the paper it was written on while the US was willing to act as the world’s policeman.
Europe, and Britain especially, are particularly responsible for this sorry state of affairs.
