For decades, the promise of multipolarity was sold as an antidote to American hegemony. A world with multiple centers of power, the argument went, would be more balanced, more just, and ultimately more stable. Yet as we survey the global landscape today, a darker reality has emerged: the multipolar world has not ushered in an era of peace, but rather normalized the threat of violence across every continent.
The Illusion of Balance
The unipolar moment following the Cold War, whatever its moral failings, provided a certain predictability. American dominance meant that major conflicts required Washington’s approval or at least its acquiescence. Regional powers operated within guardrails, and the cost of major aggression was understood to be prohibitive.
Multipolarity has shattered these constraints. Today, we live in a world where China challenges American influence in the Pacific, Russia reasserts itself in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, regional powers like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia pursue independent agendas in the Middle East, and even middle-tier states feel emboldened to act without superpower permission. The result is not balance, but chaos.
The Breakdown of Deterrence
In a unipolar system, deterrence was relatively straightforward. Cross certain red lines, and you face the world’s dominant military power. But in a multipolar world, deterrence becomes ambiguous and contested. Whose red lines matter? Which power will actually respond? Can aggressive states play rivals against each other?We see this breakdown everywhere. Russia calculated that a fragmented West and a rising China provided sufficient cover for its invasion of Ukraine. China probes Taiwan’s defenses, testing whether American commitments are real or rhetorical. Iran expands its influence across the Middle East, confident that no single power can afford to fully confront it. North Korea launches missiles with impunity, knowing that regional powers are too divided to coordinate a response.The old deterrence framework assumed clarity about who would enforce order. Today, there is only uncertainty, and uncertainty invites aggression.
Regional Conflicts Go Global
Multipolarity has also meant that regional conflicts can no longer be contained. Every local dispute becomes a proxy battlefield for great power competition. Yemen’s civil war draws in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and indirectly the United States and China. Syria’s conflict attracted Russian, Turkish, Iranian, and American intervention. The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for Western resolve and Russian ambition, with global economic consequences.When multiple powers have interests in the same region, conflicts escalate rather than resolve. Mediation becomes nearly impossible because every party has a patron willing to sustain the fight. Ceasefires collapse because rival powers see advantage in continued instability. The incentive structure has flipped: in a unipolar world, prolonged conflicts threatened American interests in stability; in a multipolar world, they serve the interests of powers seeking to weaken their rivals.
The Normalization of Violence
Perhaps most disturbing is how multipolarity has normalized low-level violence as a tool of statecraft. Cyberattacks, assassinations, border skirmishes, drone strikes, and covert operations have become routine. Because no single power can credibly threaten consequences for these actions, states engage in them with impunity.China harasses Philippine vessels in disputed waters. Russia poisons dissidents on foreign soil. Iran attacks oil tankers in the Gulf. Israel strikes targets across multiple countries. The United States conducts drone operations worldwide. Each incident is too small to trigger major retaliation, but collectively they create an environment where violence is simply another diplomatic tool.The taboo against the use of force, already weak, has further eroded. When great powers themselves routinely employ violence below the threshold of war, smaller states take note. Why shouldn’t Armenia and Azerbaijan fight over Nagorno-Karabakh? Why shouldn’t Ethiopia pursue military solutions in Tigray? Why shouldn’t Myanmar’s military seize power by force? The international order offers no compelling answer because the powers that would enforce that order are busy undermining it themselves.
The Return of Spheres of Influence
Multipolarity has also revived the concept of spheres of influence, a doctrine that treats neighboring countries as pawns rather than sovereign actors. Russia demands a veto over Ukrainian foreign policy. China claims authority over its “near abroad” in Asia. Turkey intervenes in Libya and Syria to shape its periphery. Iran cultivates militias across the Middle East.
For the countries caught in these spheres, sovereignty becomes theoretical. Their choices are constrained not by international law but by the tolerance of nearby powers. And when they resist, violence follows. Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, Ukraine in 2022—each represents the enforcement of spheres of influence through military means.The international system, supposedly based on sovereign equality, has fractured into zones where might makes right. And because multiple powers now claim spheres, these zones increasingly overlap, creating flashpoints where great power interests collide directly.
The Failure of Institutions
International institutions were designed for a world where major powers shared a basic commitment to stability. The United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization—all assume that cooperation serves everyone’s interests.But in a truly multipolar world, cooperation becomes a sucker’s game. Why would China support sanctions against Russia when it benefits from Russian energy and sees Western power as the real threat? Why would Russia allow humanitarian intervention when it sets precedents that might one day be used against it? Why would any rising power strengthen institutions designed to preserve an American-led order?
The result is institutional paralysis. The UN cannot respond to atrocities when permanent members commit them or support those who do. International law becomes selectively enforced, binding only the weak. Treaties are abandoned when inconvenient. The architecture of global governance, never particularly strong, has become ornamental.
The Coming Escalation
The most troubling aspect of this multipolar disorder is that it appears to be accelerating. As powers test boundaries and find them porous, they grow bolder. As institutions fail to respond, faith in diplomatic solutions erodes. As violence becomes normalized, the threshold for what constitutes unacceptable behavior rises.
We are not yet in a new world war, but we are in a world where war has become ubiquitous—not as a single cataclysmic event but as a constant background condition. Somewhere, always, a conflict is escalating, a border is being violated, a population is being displaced, a city is under siege. The question is no longer whether violence will occur but where it will erupt next.
A World Without Order
The uncomfortable truth is that multipolarity, absent some mechanism for coordination and restraint, tends toward instability. History offers little comfort here. The multipolar systems of the 19th and early 20th centuries produced the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the scramble for Africa, and ultimately two world wars. Balance-of-power politics did not preserve peace; it merely distributed violence more widely.
We may be witnessing the same pattern today. As American power recedes and no single state can impose order, we are returning to a world where force is the ultimate arbiter. The liberal international order, for all its flaws, at least aspired to constrain violence through law and institutions. The multipolar world that is replacing it has no such aspirations. It is simply power politics, operating at global scale, with nuclear weapons in the background.
What Comes Next?
The arc of multipolarity does not bend toward peace. Without shared rules, enforceable norms, or a credible arbiter, the international system devolves into competition where violence is simply one tool among many. And because violence works—because it achieves objectives that diplomacy cannot—states will continue to use it.The threat of war is now ubiquitous not because humanity has become more savage, but because the structure of the international system has removed the constraints that once checked our worst instincts. In a multipolar world, there is no sheriff, no referee, no ultimate authority to say “no further.” There are only competing powers, each pursuing their interests, each willing to use force when advantage permits.
We were promised that a multipolar world would be more just. Instead, we have discovered that it is simply more violent. And until we rebuild some framework for collective security—or until one power once again dominates sufficiently to impose order—the violence will continue, spreading like a contagion across every region, every dispute, every border. The age of multipolarity has arrived. So too has the age of ubiquitous war.