“Who needs allies?,” asked the cover of Foreign Affairs last summer. Adorned by an American Eagle, the title question was intentionally sarcastic, implying that American foreign policy simply cannot proceed alone. The issue’s contents, authored by a tired round-up of familiar names from the former foreign policy establishment, either derided notions of American unilateralism outright or “raised concerns” about its possible pitfalls as it reasserts itself in President Trump’s second term. The piece made for depressing reading but repeated a generation-long insistence that a multipolar world has replaced or is destined to replace a fleeting unipolar moment of American hegemony.
Ideological attachment to multipolarity is strong and multifaceted. Liberal internationalists champion it as a desirable model for managing an American national decline that they assume is inevitable and overdue as shifting economic patterns, perceived national weaknesses, altered establishment priorities, and an aversion to military solutions accommodate what they see as the rise of new centers of power. Anti-American forces celebrate multipolarity as just desserts for what they resent as an overly assertive American hegemony that might be challenged by potential new poles of power and their rogue client states in the developing world. Institutional globalists advocate multipolarity as an ideological framework for containing American wealth and power within international institutions largely led by third world bureaucrats empowered to redistribute it. Some traditional conservatives find comfort in multipolarity because it veers away from neoconservative adventurism, allows for a domestic retrenchment of attention and resources, and offers to restore a familiar nineteenth-century-style balance of power system that they find comforting. Academic specialists in international relations often advocate multipolarity in a broader historical context, viewing American hegemony as a fundamentally ahistorical moment that was artificially inflated by the power vacuum that followed the devastation of World War II and briefly extended by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But as different as these approaches are, as of the mid-2020s – and likely far into the future – their common conclusion has proved embarrassingly elusive, consistently flawed, based on limited or misleading data, and ultimately simply incorrect.
To begin with only the most obvious deficiency in theorizing the emergence of a multipolar world, no new poles of international power have emerged in the decades since they were first envisioned in such acclaimed studies as Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) and Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy (1994), accessible, bestselling books penned around the end of the Cold War by U.S.-based but foreign-born luminaries that virtually anyone drawn to international relations eagerly read, usually without skepticism or critique. Both of those studies, and many in between, expounded the same general argument: Global hegemonic status is fleeting, unsustainable, and, arguably, morally wrong. Losing global hegemony is inevitable, realistic, and, arguably, morally just. The only people who would try to arrest self-evident and praiseworthy hegemomic decline are belligerent ignoramuses whose obtuse greed and misguided patriotism would condemn themselves and the world to a cataclysmic war that had to be avoided at all costs, and that could be avoided by leaders wise and self-effacing enough to break the cycle of rise and decline. The best America could hope for in such a world was to abandon its traditional ethos of exceptionalism, graciously demote itself to one important power among several – alongside a resilient Japan, a revitalized Russia, an ever-closer European Union, a rising China, and (possibly) an assertive India, – and participate in the management of world affairs with humility guided by prescribed rules.
Breaking the previous cycle of hegemonic rise and decline sent the Washington mandarinate on a feel-good quest to find or manufacture evidence to fit the theory: i.e. belief or information that America was in decline while other powers were ascending. Recall Barack Obama’s transparent rhetoric attempting to recast America as a “primus inter pares” on the world stage and his glib assertion that “American exceptionalism” was no more distinctive than “Greek exceptionalism.”
Some trends seemed to fit the multipolar picture, with scads of studies purportedly showing that American educational achievement, labor efficiency, investment rates, consumer habits, family values, mental health, cultural levels, civicmindedness, and other indicators of national greatness were not merely in absolute decline, but in decline relative to those of the supposedly rising powers. Dire warnings in the 1990s about how many hours Japanese students spent studying overlapped with scolding ranking systems of the 2000s that boasted of European prowess in elementary school mathematics before yielding in the 2010s to tall tales of the massed brilliance of Chinese engineers. America’s share of global GDP, which reached as high as 50% at the end of World War II, experienced relative decline as other economies recovered in the postwar decades. On that basis, it was intuited to decline further as smarter, leaner, and more efficient rivals grasped at the hegemonic mantle. Military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which was notably carried out “without allies,” suggested that American strategic vision was wasteful, corrupt, and ultimately hapless, especially in cases when it departed from the “rules-based” international order that establishment thinking believed it was destined to follow.
Yet for all the elite handwringing, none of the other potential poles ever rose far or fast enough to become a viable alternative to American hegemony.
Despite Kennedy’s prediction that Japan and its hardworking youth would replace the United States as the world’s next hegemon, it instead spent the 1990s stagnating into near irrelevance beyond its decades-long American alliance and trade relationship.
Russia’s post-communist revitalization pulled it out of chaos, buoyed almost entirely by periods of high energy prices, but its economy ranks lower than Spain’s, its population remains smaller than Bangladesh’s, its military operations within the former Soviet Union have been challenging and inconclusive third-world affairs, and its power projections beyond former Soviet space have almost all vanished. As we have seen in recent months, Moscow – which had already been unable to save its leftover Cold War clients in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya – could barely utter a word of opposition as its next generation of clients in Damascus, Tehran, and Caracas fell or were kneecapped by resurgent American power. Even within former Soviet territory, conflict resolution has become a matter for Washington. American negotiators are parlaying the ongoing peace talks in Ukraine, where foreign minister Andrii Sybiha recently said “Only Trump can stop the war.” Trump also quickly resolved almost 40 years of near-war conditions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, lands that had been under Russian control or influence for centuries but whose leaders in 2025 agreed that the President of the United States should win the Nobel Peace Prize for ending their conflict.
Despite fervent hopes and confident predictions, the European Union remains a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with 27 constituent parts of varied histories, cultures, traditions, and interests jostling for an ever-elusive consensus. Its supranational institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg suffer from a self-confessed “democratic deficit,” which leaves millions of Europeans in resentful disenfranchisement and ever more drawn to nation-state models of authority. Any member-state can veto continent-wide legislation. History was made in 2016 when Britain voted to abandon the project altogether, with increasingly powerful political movements in many other EU countries advocating nationalist solutions of varying urgency.
European economics is largely an affair of abstruse and often unaccountable central planning. Its broadly leftist-governed institutions led the continent’s promising postwar recovery into a morass of stagnant growth, bureaucratic overregulation, low entrepreneurialism, chronically high unemployment, and an unprecedented migrant crisis that its traditional elites seem unable or unwilling to control. Eighty years of protection by America’s nuclear umbrella created an intergenerational culture of security dependency characterized by embarrassingly small national defense budgets, militaries of marginal significance, supply chains that frequently and in many cases irreplaceably lead back to American defense contractors, and high obstacles to intra-EU defense cooperation. Establishment insecurity in Europe drives both an unconvincing claim to the moral high ground and a crackdown on speech and expression critical of the status quo – two postures that rarely complement great power status.
China, with growth rates long predicted to overreach America’s, has slowed down to stagnation, with an authoritarian leadership solidifying control across national life. Even a more robust China capable of creating durable economic relationships around the developing world never succeeded in building the military and security structures to safeguard those positions, protect its trade routes and supply lines, or defend its rogue anti-American states in the face of U.S. power. China’s main geopolitical aspiration – reconquering Taiwan – has remained elusive for nearly eight decades and seems impractical without at least another generation of military development. And even then, all a successful recapture of the strategic island would do – especially in light of Trump’s reshoring of strategic tech industries there – is breach the first island-chain barrier of the mainland’s containment, a development that would almost certainly invigorate already strong regional defense arrangements oriented toward the United States.
“America Forever” may sound quixotic in our 250th year, but in our unipolar world there would be little point to exclaim anything else.
