The great international relations debate that no longer matters

How many great powers can dance on the head of a pin? Sounds like a crazy question — one more redolent of late-medieval scholastic obsessions with theological issues than with modern geopolitical analysis. But, as the erupting debate on polarity in the international affairs literature clearly and tellingly reveals, that’s precisely the kind of crazy question many of us international relations specialists are now being forced to grapple with.

Without getting bogged down in the tedious details, the contemporary geopolitical debate runs something like this. In one camp there are those who argue that the current international order is multipolar. That is, that it is shaped and defined by the presence of a number of great powers, each able to exert their influence both regionally and around the globe. In another, there are those who insist that the current order is bipolar, shaped and organized around two superpowers — the United States and China — who between them determine the key lines of conflict and cooperation in the international system. And in yet a third camp are those who dismiss both of these views, arguing instead that the current international order remains essentially unipolar, with the U.S. continuing to lead, defend and uphold an essentially liberal international order, with no real challengers in sight.

But my argument is this: there is simply no value added to the analysis of contemporary international order by these increasingly arcane, abstract and overly technical metaphysical claims about the number of great powers that can fit on the head of a geopolitical pin. Instead, like those early moderns who pushed past the obscuritanism of the late-medieval scholastics, we should forgo these debates and simply get on with the task of specifying the realities of the world as it actually exists. And those realities are obvious.

First, the post–Cold War order has definitively passed from the historical scene. Where once the U.S. unambiguously dominated the international order, the hard reality is that the international system is increasingly fragmented, defined by the now-conventional shorthand of “great power competition.” Some of the great powers that dominate and define the new international order have truly global reach; some are merely regional in their aspirations and influence. Some seek to uphold the status quo, while others strive to revise it. But all define an order that is radically different from the one the crystallized in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago. 

Second, the vast majority of these powers have no interest in being drawn into a new Cold War. Instead, almost all are seeking nonalignment, pursuing strategies of hedging that involve positioning themselves between great powers so that they are dependent on none yet benefiting from the support or patronage of two or more.

Third, de-dollarization has begun to erode what Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Economy, once called America’s “exorbitant privilege.” Many countries are now denominating their international economic transactions in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, undermining America’s singularly advantageous ability to supply cash or safe assets needed by the rest of the world in exchange for goods and services or long-term assets.

Fourth — and this is something many observers in the global West simply cannot grasp — taken together these developments sound the death knell of the liberal international order’s mini-me successor, the so-called “rules-based international order.” That successor order is also crumbling, faced with challenges from China, India and other rising powers that accept neither its fundamental assumptions nor its institutional architecture.

And, finally, all of this has effectively eliminated the stage upon which traditional middle powers sought to play a modest but consequential role in international affairs. The demise of the liberal international order has shrunk to the vanishing point the institutional space within which “moral superpowers” like Canada and Norway could once upon a time “punch above their weight” and act as “helpful fixers” upholding that system.

At the end of the day, whether we call this system multipolar, bipolar, vestigially unipolar or something else entirely doesn’t really matter all that much — that’s something best left to latter-day scholastics obsessed with debating the contemporary equivalent of angels and heads of pins. Grasping the nature of today’s actually existing geopolitical order is far more important than imposing abstractions on it of which we have no need. Let’s hope our political leaders, if not our neo-scholastic foreign policy cognoscenti, understand this.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.