Unipolarity

I’ve been avoiding this topic for a long time because it is complicated, but I suppose I need to say something about it. The subject is the end of unipolarity, as reported in Glenn Diesen’s Substack post. Well, the end of unipolarity was really announced by Marco Rubio; Diesen was merely commenting on it. He quotes Rubio from an interview with Megyn Kelly (1/30/25):

it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

And further:

And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem

I want to say, first, that this is a useful observation by Rubio. It is useful to recognize the end of unipolarity, and it is useful to recognize that unipolarity is not an unqualified good thing. The tendency to try to solve every problem that he notes is just one issue.

I also want to mention that unipolarity is, of course, a relative term. Obviously, the U.S. was not then the only power in the world. It was the pre-eminent power, but it was not in a position to pursue its goals unilaterally or absolutely. It appeared that way in some circumstances, such as the expansion of NATO, in contrast to the rivalry with Russia that had been such a dominant feature of European foreign relations up until that point. But it’s not as though the U.S. suddenly began supporting Taiwanese independence, for example. Moreover, I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed since the 1990’s. If anything, the U.S. has grown in strength compared to European countries, including Russia. China has gained ground, but more by means of aggressive expansion of capabilities than fundamental economic growth. But after U.S. defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, everyone is more focussed on the limits of American power, so the world seems more multipolar.

Diesen makes a good point about the expansion of NATO in the 1990’s and 2000’s, which completely disregarded Russian security concerns. I have probably mentioned before a talk I attended at Yale by General Odom with the same title as his article: “NATO’s Expansion: Why the Critics Are Wrong.” I remember being genuinely concerned by pushing NATO aggressively, not only into former Warsaw Pact countries, but right up to Russia’s borders. It didn’t seem to have any immediate consequences, but it has definitely created a festering resentment and can be seen as the background to the Ukraine War.

The willingness to ignore Russian security concerns still echoes in those who argue against a negotiated settlement in the Ukraine War. They feel that the only appropriate result is a complete Russian withdrawal, which, I concede, would be the most just conclusion, but also an extremely unlikely one. It is time for people to realize that we are no longer in a position to impose settlements. We are back in the same position Europe was in for centuries, where there were multiple centers of power and everything had to be negotiated. It is especially important that people recognize this because we are now in a nuclear world where unwillingness to negotiate can have disastrous consequences.