In 2007, during his famous speech in Munich, the Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed to the inevitable rise of a multipolar world.
He started out by defining the opposite state:
However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.
It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.
The unilateral tendencies of the U.S. and the West in general were described as dead ends:
[W]hat is happening in today’s world – and we just started to discuss this – is a tentative to introduce precisely this concept into international affairs, the concept of a unipolar world.
And with which results?
Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension.
…
We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?
He pointed to the inevitable changes in the world that were arising to counter this trend:
The combined GDP measured in purchasing power parity of countries such as India and China is already greater than that of the United States. And a similar calculation with the GDP of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – surpasses the cumulative GDP of the EU. And according to experts this gap will only increase in the future.
There is no reason to doubt that the economic potential of the new centres of global economic growth will inevitably be converted into political influence and will strengthen multipolarity.
There it is, multipolarity, the 'bad word' that the U.S. did not dare to take serious. Putin was laughed at, and then condemned, for making those very clear predictions.
But today multipolarity has risen.
Today we live in multilateral world. We see Russia, China and many smaller countries united in their will to preserve their rights and security. The cold-war is gone. The somewhat unilateral decades which had followed it are now over. We are in need a new world order.
In the U.S. that penny has finally started to drop.
It has not yet reached the ground. We do not know on which side it will land.
Two days ago U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at a campaign even. Among lots of the usual blah-blah this paragraph stood out:
We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. Sort of run out of steam. It needs a new — a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.
There it is - one can see the penny, slipping out of his hand and falling down.
The time for the U.S. to preserve some of its influence in the rising new world order is short:
Look, we’re at an inflection point in history — literally an inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or five decades look like. And that’s — that’s a fact.
The Ukrainian news site Strana, which was first to point to Biden's acknowledgement of global change, describes the implications of that thought (machine translation):
It should be noted that the "damn good" post-war 50-year peace that Biden spoke about arose as a result of the most brutal war in the history of mankind. It also appeared due to the agreements of the USSR and the United States, which essentially divided the spheres of influence in Europe.
If we proceed from this historical context, then Biden, it turns out, offers either to win a military victory over the Russian Federation and China, with which the United States is currently at enmity, or to negotiate with them and arrange a "new Yalta" with the division of spheres of influence.
On which side will the penny land? The side of a new global war? Or on the side of new negotiations?
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We do not know.
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Putin had predicted that the pursuit of unilateral power would automatically lead to the end its pursuer. As Biden acknowledges, the U.S., in its delusion, is ripping itself apart.
Prior to the campaign event Biden had given a public speech from the White House.
Adam Tooze reflects on it:
Biden:
The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circle.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.
He describes the negative global consequences of delusional U.S. thinking to then muse about the outcome:
What is the impact of a dysfunctional US political system, where the more reasonable wing of the ruling elite cling to ideas about America’s role that are systematically self-deluding. You could say that hypocrisy is normal. It is the besetting sin of liberalism. But in light of the scale of looming global problems and the shift in the balance of power that has already taken place, let alone that which may still to come, how long can this tension be maintained and what will be the price?
He seems to ask if the now falling penny will ever hit the ground:
The only thing that seems for sure is that we should avoid falling into the trap of what I’ve called fin-fiction or fin-fi, which assumes that because these tension seem unbearable they must therefore resolve in some logical way, for instance in the speculation over the end of dollar hegemony, or what appears be the Biden fantasy of a return to the normality of American leadership.
I am skeptical even of invoking terms like “interregnum”, signifying a temporary hiatus between orders of power.
What gives us confidence that our current situation is temporary and that some new order, like the old, will emerge?
Is that not another version of the kind of thinking that says the world “needs organizing” by a power sitting at the head of the table – in “America’s place”?
That question, to me, seems to miss what multilateralism really means. It does not mean unilateralism with a different country in the lead. It means a somewhat democratic UN system, with an expanded Security Council that includes the large population countries of each continent.
It means to follow international law.
Will the U.S. come back into that system? Or does it need a global war to decide the outcome?