2024: An Emerging Multipolar World Order

Washington Summit 1 June 1990 with President Mikhail Gorbachev, President George H.W. Bush, and State Secretary James Baker (Photo: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library).

[This paper was presented at the University of Vienna in December 2023. It uses material from my article in Bulletin of Peace Proposals (later Security Dialogue), December 1991: “Bush’s Brave New World: A New World Order – A New Military Strategy”, where I present the U.S. vision of a Unipolar World Order. I also use material from a paper and a book chapter, “US Strategy for a New World Order” discussing the Multipolar versus the Unipolar world order (presented at the First Xiangshan Forum, China Association for Military Science in 2006; and a shorter version at the U.S. East-West Institute & China’s Institute of International Studies conference “Trialogue21” in Washington in 2008). The second section of this paper uses my 2023 article on Substack “Did Russia violate International Law?”; a paper and a book chapter on Unipolarity and a “proto world state” (presented at the Third Xiangshan Forum in 2010) and a report for the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre NOREF from December 2014: “China’s thinking on peace and security”. I will attach this latter article as an appendix to this article on my Substack].

From Bipolarity to Unipolarity

After World War II had divided Europe, the Soviet Union was confronting the United States and Western Europe, and this Bipolar World Order dominated Cold War up to 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this bipolarity became history. Some scholars started immediately to talk about a “new multipolar world”, where economic power would have a more significant role than military power, but in a famous article in Foreign Affairs 1990-91 the US neoconservative analyst Charles Krauthammer argued that this was an illusion. Some scholars had spoken about Japan and Germany/Europe, China and a diminished Soviet Union/Russia in addition to the U.S. as the new pillars of a new Multipolar World Order, but “since the first shots rang out in Kuwait”, the economic powers, “Germany and Japan, […] have generally hidden under the table”, Krauthammer wrote. When the war started, these powers immediately subordinated themselves under U.S. rule. According to Krauthammer, the war revealed the real power structure of the new world, there was only “one first-rate power” on the global scene: the United States.

Krauthammer’s article “The Unipolar Moment” from 1991 became a manifesto for the new neoconservative elite that has come to dominate Washington for three decades. This was the leading security elite in the U.S. but soon also in Europe. For the neoconservatives, the U.S. was the global hegemon and Krauthammer continues:

“’Europe’ does not yet qualify even as a player on the world stage, which leaves us with the true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the United States and behind it the West [...] Iraq, having inadvertently revealed the unipolar structure of today’s world, cannot stop complaining about it. [...] There is much talk about a new multipolar world and the promise of the United Nations as guarantor of a new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the United States and the United Nations. The United Nations is a guarantor of nothing. Except in a formal sense, it can hardly be said to exist. Collective security? In the gulf, without the United States leading and prodding, bribing, and blackmailing, no one would have stirred.”

After the military confrontation of the Cold War, actually already in September 1989, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe presented a new strategic concept. A global war with the Soviets was no longer a priority, and the U.S. started to prepare for “regional contingencies”. A year later, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said that we are now focusing on “regional contingencies” like “the threat to the Persian Gulf”. Cheney’s a Draft Defense Planning Guidance document from April 1992 said that US defence strategy should “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival” and “prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”. To control of the Persian Gulf was seen as vital to control the flow of oil to China, Europe, and Japan, and to prevent them from developing into rival powers to the United States. The U.S. should act unilaterally “when collective action cannot be orchestrated”, the document stated. Crowe’s replacement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, said: “We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for. What we plan for is that we are a superpower. We are the major player on the world stage with responsibility around the world, with interests around the world.” From mid-1990s, the US Special Forces conducted 2000-3000 deployments, including training missions and covert operations, in more than 130 countries each year. U.S. Special Force teams were responsible for one continent each. They had a global reach. The United States was not a regular nation state. It was, similar to the United Nations a global entity, but with “a supranational political-military authority” that was “bribing and blackmailing” individual states, to quote Krauthammer. The U.S. was an authority that operated military forces covertly all over the world. We are the single superpower, Powell said.

American security analysts started to talk about a “Unipolar World Order”. The U.S. was the single pole of world power “at the apex of the industrial West”. We could have had something of a multipolar world because all the economic powers had their own interests, but when the war started in the Gulf everyone had to bow to military might. This is the lesson that the U.S. neoconservative elite had learned from the 1991 Gulf War. Cheney’s close assistant Paul Wolfowitz said that we learned that the Russians didn’t do anything. They did not intervene. We could and should go to war against one state after the other to take out these regimes that had been leaning towards Moscow. This was his conclusion, and later in the 1990s he and his colleagues mobilized for a war against Iraq within the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC). From 2000, this neoconservative elite argued in a document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, that the necessary military transformation “is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event”.

According to this elite, the events on 11 of September 2001 opened for a war against Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said hours after this catastrophe that they should bomb Iraq (there were no “decent targets” in Afghanistan worth a cruise missile, he said). Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Wesley Clark, said that the final decision to go to war against Iraq was taken already ten days after 11 September. A couple of weeks later, Rumsfeld had decided to also “take out Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and then finishing off with Iran”. The United States was going to have seven wars (eight with Afghanistan) in five years, and for two reasons: There was a “window of opportunity”. Military forces should be used not for deterrence, but to attack others, as Wolfowitz had said already ten years earlier. But also, the U.S. should continue with one war after the other to force the economic powers “to hide under the table”, to use Krauthammer’s words. U.S military hegemony with close to 50 % of the world’s military expenditures could not be translated into political influence unless there were wars or threats of war. The primacy of war was the basis for the U.S. Unipolar World Order, the Pax Americana. The U.S. now declared unipolarity and permanent war, “The War on Terror”, as the world of the future.

At the time, this idea of a Unipolar World Order, a Pax Americana, dominated the U.S. Republican Party, but largely also the Democratic Party. Bill Odom, former Director of the National Security Agency, and former Military Assistant to President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, described the United States as a “supranational political-military authority”, a kind of “empire”. And this thinking was alien to many Europeans. In previous decades, in contrast to American liberalism, European political leaders believed in power politics and war as a political instrument (“War as a continuation of politics by other means”). In the early 2000s, however, the Europeans considered themselves more “peaceful”, while the Americans were preoccupied with their push for a war against Iraq. In 2003, the Europeans – the Germans and the French – stopped the U.S. attempt to use the UN Security Council to back a U.S. war in Iraq. The Americans were shocked. There was still some European descent against the U.S. Unipolar Order. The American neoconservative ideolog Robert Kagan said: “Americans and Europeans have traded places – and perspectives. This is partly because [...] the power equation has shifted dramatically”. And he continues: “Powell and Rumsfeld have more in common [despite their differences] than do Powell and the foreign ministers of France, Germany and even Great Britain”. Europeans and Americans were living on different planets. The Europeans were from Venus and the Americans were from Mars, he argued.

Kagan highlighted the difference, and during the Kosovo War 1999, 99 % of the proposed targets were provided by US intelligence sources, while the UK, as the major European force, contributed with only 4 % of the aircraft and 4 % of the bombs dropped. Europe did no longer focus on military but on civilian matters. However, this cannot, in my view, be explained just by Europe’s military weakness. Europe’s recent history of economic-political integration within the EU – as a process of reconciliation after World War II – is very different from the U.S. experience. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the European states were preoccupied by integration and coordination of government policies and political cultures (including those of the former East European countries) to avoid a possible revival of nationalism and militarism. Indeed, the ambition of the EU project was to transcend such logic of nationalism, hatred, and war. Since the loss of the “Soviet Other” as an external threat in 1989, Europe had to find what Ole Wæver terms a “new Other”: its own nationalist and militarized past.  World War II taught the Europeans that they had to transcend nationalism and war through economic and political integration, while the corresponding “World War II lecture” taught US presidents that they had to go to war to fight “evil regimes” to end wars – on American terms. Probably, these different experiences played a formative role to their respective policies after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the U.S., presidents have used rhetoric and deception to convince a sceptical population about the “necessity” to go to war, while Europeans have tried to avoid wars perceived as dangerously close to their own homelands.

BRICS Summit 2014 in Brazil with from left to right: Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Dilma Rousseff, Xi Jinping and Jacob Zuma (Photo attributed to the President of the Russian Federation, Wikipedia).

The Russian and Chinese Response

To Moscow, President George W. Bush’s warrior rhetoric was not just appalling, as it was to the Europeans, but also worrying. When Bush stated in February 2004, “I am a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind”, his words reminded the Europeans of their own dark history. To the Russians, this dark history was even more worrying, because this reminded them about the attack by Nazi Germany and about the more than 25 million Soviet citizens that had lost their lives during the war. At a Xiangshan Forum military conference in 2010, a most prominent U.S. neoconservative intimidated his Chinese and international audience (incl. myself): “I have participated in three wars, and I liked it”, he said. A U.S. Pax Americana, the United States as a global “political military authority”, that had been launched by the U.S. neoconservatives appeared as an empire led by a warrior state as preoccupied with fighting wars as an 18^th century Charles XII or a 19^th century Napoleon.

The American push for a NATO expansion with the inclusion of Poland, Czechia, and Hungary from 1999 and even more states from 2004 was perceived as increasingly threatening to Russia. All the Western leaders had in 1990-91 promised President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east of West Germany, which was the precondition for his withdrawal of 350,000 Soviet military forces from East Germany and for the unification of Germany. One 1991 document from these negotiations, for the 2+4 Agreement (The two Germany plus France, the UK, the U.S. and Russia) summarized the case for Central Europe: “We could not […] offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others.” And the U.S. representative said: “NATO should neither formally nor informally expand towards the East”. As the Wilson Center historian Joshua Shifrinson writes: the Bush Administration had presented “a cooperative façade” in its talks with Gorbachev, while covertly pushing for Western expansion. And in the words of national security advisor Brent Scowcroft already in late 1989, the U.S. should place itself in “between Germany and Russia in Central Europe”. The U.S. should expand NATO. In other words, the Bush Administration should take advantage of the situation, which they all had promised Gorbachev not to do.

From early 2000s, the U.S. and the Western countries were definitely in breach with their agreement with Gorbachev from 1990-91. In 2004, the Western backed “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine forced Ukraine to accept new elections that replaced an elected president from Eastern Ukraine with a president from the West. When the U.S. from 2008 pushed for a Ukrainian membership in NATO, the Russian collaboration with the West was definitely over. According to then US Ambassador to Moscow, current CIA Director William Burns, all actors in Russia, not just Vladimir Putin, said that NATO membership for Ukraine was a “red line”. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “[From Putin’s] perspective, an expansion of NATO to Ukraine would be ‘a declaration of war’”. Everyone knew it meant war: “[It] is the brightest of all red lines”, as Burns wrote to his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Already in 2008, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke about NATO enlargement to Ukraine as a “military threat”. It would open for a Ukrainian civil war. Russia would have to intervene to save the Russian speaking population in the east. It would “leave the US and Russia in a classic confrontational posture”.

Henry Kissinger proposed a “Finnish solution” with a neutral Ukraine, but the neoconservative elite in Washington wanted to force Russia to adapt to the U.S. Unipolar Order. Washington knew that Ukrainian access to NATO almost certainly would lead to war. It had nothing to do with who was in charge in Moscow, but the neoconservatives believed that they could handle it. When Putin now talks about the war as “existential”, it’s because Ukraine is about to become a U.S. military bridgehead at the doorstep to Moscow. The U.S. would be able to strike at the “heart of Russia”. It is like the south-eastern United States with Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and others had become independent states fully armed by Russia. Washington would never accept it. The U.S. moved its positions with new weapons systems, step by step, all closer to Moscow. It would be difficult for Russia to defend itself. A single step cannot legitimize a military response, but in sum it signifies a major geopolitical shift. It is a “salami tactic” similar to the Israeli one. With every new settlement, Israel conquers more and more of Palestinian land until almost all of it is gone. It is also parallel to the U.S. strategy towards China. The U.S. says it recognizes China’s “One-China policy”, but at the same time, it allows U.S. top officials to visit Taiwan and they welcome Taiwan’s president into the U.S. as if Taiwan was an independent state. One takes several small steps until one has reached a fait accompli.

The Unipolar World Order, as defined by the neoconservatives already in the 1992 document was to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”. Every potential rival should be disciplined, and the U.S. dealt systematically with Europe, Russia, and China. In Europe, terrorist bombings forced people trade freedom for security. Fear of bomb attacks has an enormous psychological impact, persuading people to turn to the state for protection, and the U.S. overwhelming intelligence hegemony made their services able to enter the European states through their “back doors”. U.S. and UK services blamed Russia for poisoning agents and for shooting down the Malaysian airliner MH17 over Ukraine. To the media, Russia now appeared as an “evil empire”, and Europe turned instinctively to the U.S. for protection. In just a few years’ time, the U.S. had been able discipline Europe while simultaneously turning to Russia and China. The U.S. pushed them by using rightwing proxy forces to provoke conflicts in their neighboring Ukraine and Japan. From 2013, U.S. policy for Ukraine was run by Kagan’s wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. She initiated the violent coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014, which forced the elected President Viktor Yanukovych and his prime minister Azarov to flee the country. A new prime minister was appointed after instructions of Nuland (the tape-recording of her instructions was even published by BBC). It was all about “weakening Russia” and force Russia to accept U.S. supremacy, to accept the U.S. Unipolar World. However, the same U.S. policy that the U.S. Administration was pushing for on its eastern periphery, in Ukraine, the U.S. was also conducting in the Pacific in Japan against China, and at more or less the same time. The U.S. was no longer speaking about China as a “responsible stakeholder” on the global scene but rather as a future rival, and the U.S. would not accept that China would develop into an economic competitor and that China started to collaborate with neighboring states without U.S. permission.

In an appendix to this article, I write that in 2009, Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama government, the first government to be formed by the Democratic Party (Japan’s more left-wing party), announced closer ties to China, including deepening of defense relations. Japan would rely less on its ties to the United States. Prime Minister Hatoyama had supported the popular demand of the Okinawa Island to close down its U.S. military base. However, Hatoyama was not trusted in the U.S. and had to resign in June 2010 after being unable to close down or move the base. Three months later, a collision between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese Coast Guard vessel in disputed area of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands (just northeast of Taiwan) became a huge media story. Media claimed that the Chinese boat had rammed the Japanese vessel (the video films seem to show the opposite). The incident was presented as a major Chinese intrusion, despite the fact that incidents with fishing boats entering the disputed area had a long history. This time, however, it was used to initiate a campaign for a Sino-Japanese split. Shortly afterwards, a Chinese-Japanese defense ministers’ meeting agreed that this incident should not disturb the relations between the two countries, but the media whipped up a nationalist hysteria and turned nationalists in both countries against each other. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added fuel to the fire by confirming that the islands fell under the U.S. Security Treaty for the defense of Japan, something the U.S. had not stated previously to not upset the relations to China. Similar to how the U.S. in 2014 had used an extreme rightwing Ukrainian elite to mobilize against the elected Ukraine government and against Russia, the U.S. had used a rightwing Japanese elite to mobilize against the Japanese government and against China.

From 2010, but even more so from 2014, the U.S. pushed in praxis both Russia and China to collaborate and look for alternatives to the U.S. Unipolar World Order. Both countries were too large to develop into a strict alliance, but they both concluded that they had to build up their military forces and continue their economic collaboration within the framework of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). From 2014, they initiated a New Development Bank and they soon started to trade in local currencies, not in US Dollars. The US Dollar had from mid-1970s been dependent on the use of the Dollar as reserve currency and in international trade, not least as “petrodollar”. In 1974, after the United States had been forced to leave the gold standard, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, convinced Saudi Arabia and then OPEC to trade their oil in U.S. Dollars to increase the global demand for the U.S. currency and to force the OPEC countries to invest their surplus in U.S. treasuries. The “petrodollar” has been “one of the most powerful forces driving the U.S. bond market and the dollar”, Reuters wrote. This made it possible for the United States to print dollar bills without having inflation. In praxis, it meant that the U.S. could cover the costs for its many wars by printing dollar bills. When some oil-producing states wanted to leave the “petrodollar”, this worried the United States. It is striking that Iraq was attacked by the U.S. a couple of years after Saddam Hussein stated that Iraq will no longer deal “in the currency of the enemy”, and Libya was attacked shortly after it became clear that Muammar Gaddafi would establish an African Dinar (based on a large amount of gold and silver) in competition with the Dollar and the Euro and the Yuan. However, from 2024, the BRICS countries will include new states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia that will trade in local currencies replacing the “petrodollar”. The Chinese negotiated deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023 and their admission into BRICS from January 2024, will change global politics. The ongoing de-dollarization will challenge the U.S global hegemony. Some years back, a U.S. negotiator to Moscow and most celebrated neoconservative told me that the Russians did not understand the U.S. strength: “We control the mass media, and we control the financial system”, he said. Years later in 2024, we have to add: the Russians understand it. They will no longer submit to the U.S media and financial system. BRICS has a much larger population than the West and soon half of the world’s GDP. The Unipolar World Order with “the United States at the apex of the industrial West” will no longer be “the true geopolitical structure” of the world, to use the words of Krauthammer 30 years ago.

The United Nations Security Council (Photo: in the public domain).

An Emerging Multipolarity

In the long run, the BRICS countries will not constitute a single pillar. We will most likely not have a new bipolar world order, “The West against the rest”, to quote Samuel Huntington from his New York Times article in 1993. These countries will represent several poles in an emerging Multipolar World Order relying on a multilateral dialogue in the United Nations, what Krauthammer in 1991 had called an “illusion”. The BRICS countries claim the supremacy of the UN and International Law, while the now rather narrow Unipolar West follows the U.S. initiated “Rules-Based International Order”. The latter is primarily based on U.S. institutions and global reach, in an attempt to re-establish a global Unipolarity, which now seems to disappear as sand flowing through our fingers. We are witnessing an international divide, a clash, between the Western countries (incl. Australia) that all speak about “Rules-Based Order” and the BRICS countries (or the Global South) that speak about International Law. The BRICS countries may in 2024 become a strong force opposing the U.S. run unipolar structure of the world, and there may initially be a new bipolarity, as proposed by Huntington. The rising China and the BRICS may confront the declining Unipolar West, and if we accept the “Thucydides Trap” as a real tendency, the ruling U.S. power may feel tempted to attack China similar to why Sparta attacked Athens in the fifth century BC, but I am not going to elaborate on this topic.

While the U.S. pressure on China and Russia, particularly from 2014 made them collaborate individually and within the framework of BRICS, the U.S. pushed for the concept of a “Rules-Based International Order” as a “legal framework” to bypass a Russian and Chinese veto in the UN Security Council. The U.S. is not a party to several “multilateral treaties that constitute an essential feature of international law” (the Law of the Sea Convention, the Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court). The U.S. has always made selective use of International Law and of UN Security Council decisions, and one has often tried to punish dissident states by the use of economic sanctions to isolate them, and in the final analysis to make them accept a U.S. orchestrated regime change. However, according to the UN Charter, such sanctions cannot be decided unilaterally by a state or a group of states but has to be agreed to by the UN Security Council, where Russia and China can use their veto. These sanctions, as practiced by the United States, are, to quote the UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, “comparable to medieval sieges of towns with the intension to forcing them to surrender. Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town but a sovereign country to their knees.” When the U.S. enforced sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, this led to starvation and death of half a million children. In 1996, a journalist asked the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, about all these dead children: “Is the price worth it?” Albright responded: “It is a hard choice, but we think the price is worth it”. U.S. sanctions are a form of warfare in violation with the UN Charter, and the U.S. accordingly had to establish separate set of rules, a “Rules-Based International Order” making selective use of International Law and the UN Charter. U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis spoke about “Rules-Based Order” in June 2017, but primarily from the very last years, this concept has been used all over the Western world as a substitute for International Law. The current war in Ukraine appears to be an expression of this divide. Now, the emerging Multipolar Order is confronting the U.S. “Rules-Based Order” and what is left over of its Unipolarity of the 1990s.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, all political actors had to utter the words of Chairman Mao to express their loyalty and submission. In a similar fashion, Western leaders and security analysts today utter the words of the United States and President Biden speaking about “Russia’s unprovoked attack” and “full-scale invasion” (which is nonsense; see below). In 2022, Joe Biden spoke about a “Rules-Based International Order” in The New York Times and in a Press Briefing. In the U.S. National Security Strategy of October 2022, Biden said: “the rules-based order must remain the foundation for global peace and prosperity”. In the following Atlantic Committee conference in Oslo in February 2023, all keynote speakers including the Prime Minister and the State Secretary for Defense and NATO Deputy General Secretary spoke about a “Rules-Based Order” or “Rules-Based World Order”. Countries like Norway have earlier given primacy of the UN and International Law, but now they have submitted to the language of the U.S. that signifies a selective use of International Law, what we also would call “double standards”. And this has reached such dimensions that political leaders in China and Russia have problems to speak with their Western counterparts. During the Cold War, despite the countries’ very different ideologies, leaders could talk with each other without embarrassing the other side, but today the media language and the political language are full of insults, which makes any substantial conversation impossible.

Today, it is widely recognized that all Western top leaders promised President Gorbachev that NATO would not expand to the east (to Poland and the others), and that these promises were documented in the records from their respective meetings. But leaders in the West claim now that these words were just oral promises, they were never put down in a binding treaty. “The West has not violated any treaty”, they say. But this is not how International Law looks at the problem. The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties made it clear that “oral agreements may be rare, [but] they can have the same binding force as treaties”. American Society of International Law stated in 1997 that “under customary international law oral agreements are no less binding [than a formal treaty] although their terms may not be readily susceptible of proof.” In other words, you would have to have notes from conversations or meetings proving these oral agreements. The U.S. Senate writes in 2001 in “Treaties and other International Agreements” (for the Committee of Foreign Relations) that “whether a statement is made orally or in writing makes no essential difference”. Several authors refer to “the East Greenland Case”. Norway’s Foreign Minister had in 1919 promised his Danish counterpart (recorded in a notebook) that Norway would not object to Danish sovereignty over Eastern Greenland and this convinced the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague in 1933 (14 years later) that the oral statement of Norway’s Foreign Minister was “beyond all dispute […] binding upon that country”. An oral promise by a foreign minister or prime minister to his/her opposite number in another country is binding upon these ministers and these countries. Both sides may often prefer to have a formal treaty, but the oral statement is “no less binding”.

This means that NATO’s expansion east of West Germany from 1999 and onwards was a violation of an internationally recognized agreement and a violation of International Law, but the Western countries chose to be selective. They claim that NATO had and still has the legal right to expand its territory. According to NATO and according to the U.S. initiated “Rules Based International Order”, the individual state has the right to deploy weapons or accept any alliance affiliation that suites it, while the UN Charter states that every state should work for a peaceful international order and has no right to threaten other states: the security of an individual state cannot be established at the expense of others. This means that the single state cannot just see to its own security but also has to take the security interests of others into account. One has to look at the “common security”. And it seems to me that this clash in understanding of international law, security policy and world order is what the current war in Ukraine is all about.

Some people have argued that the emerging Multipolar World Order will be less stable than the Bipolar Order of the Cold War and the Unipolar Order of the 1990s and onwards. In the Multipolar world, states may join one group of states or another and shift alliance affiliations. This may change the balance of power between different entities, which may disrupt global stability. That is true as long as there are sharp conflicts between these states. If one accepts the multilateral framework of the UN, such shift of alliance affiliations can be handled. We also know that the Bipolar World of the Cold War on several occasions was close to be eliminated by a massive nuclear exchange, and the Unipolar order from the 1990s was actually based on U.S. permanent wars. The stability of the global system is not primarily about whether the world order is Bipolar, Unipolar or Multipolar, but rather whether one accepts the UN Charter or not: whether one will “take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace”, to quote the Charter. One has to refrain from the use of force but equally important, one also has to refrain from threats of using force including threatening deployments of military forces.

Some people have argued that the increased influence of an authoritarian China and Russia would limit the freedom of speech, but this argument tends to underestimate the limitations to free speech in the West. Almost every Western journalist has spoken about “the full-scale Russian invasion” trying to “conquer Ukraine”, while any serious scholar studying military capabilities and Russian strategic thinking knows that the Russian mobilization was limited, Russia had made very limited use of its air force and navy and that the small force Russia had used to enter Ukraine was a clear signal to the West that they did not want to conquer the country. The phrase, “the full-scale invasion”, was nothing but propaganda. And early on, it was clear that Russia would win the war. Russia had defined the war as existential (it was not about territory). In addition, Russia has had overwhelming firepower killing many times more Ukrainians, Russia let the Ukrainians go on the offensive to let them lose even more forces, and the population in Russia is many times larger than in Ukraine. It was obviously impossible for Ukraine to win the war but, in the West, you couldn’t speak about it. The propaganda of “the Kagan family enterprise” (Institute for the Study of War) has dominated Western media. There has been no room for a serious analysis and no room for decent. When it comes to more significant issues, the West is no more open-minded than Russia or even China, rather the opposite. Celebrated neoconservatives even claimed that they were in control of Western mass media (see above). A multipolar order would at least give us a plurality of views and make it possible to present different views in different parts of the world, which could open up for a dialogue.

After the bipolarity of the Cold War was gone, U.S. neoconservatives started to talk about a “Unipolar World Order”. The U.S. was described as the single pole of world power “at the apex of the industrial West”. Now, in 2024, 30 years later, neither Russia nor China are willing to submit to U.S. “leadership” and the BRICS countries are neither willing to submit to the U.S. mass media and financial system nor to its “Rules-Based Order”. “More than 40 countries have so far expressed interest in joining BRICS”, the South African chair, said 2023. Much of the Global South is once again opposing the Western hubris of the north. The BRICS countries will still rely on International Law. We are now, in 2024, witnessing a “tectonic shift”, a new geopolitical divide. The current wars appear to be expressions of this divide.