The Biden administration is striving for a unipolar order that no longer exists.
US President Joe Biden reacts during a meeting on “the Build Back Better World (B3W)”, as part of the World Leaders’ Summit of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2, 2021. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
After the United States moved from the darkness of the Cold War into the pleasant glow of the so-called unipolar moment, a diverse array of scholars, pundits, and world leaders began predicting, yearning for, or actively seeking a return to a multipolar world.
Not surprisingly, Russian and Chinese leaders have long expressed a desire for a more multipolar order, as have the leaders of emerging powers such as India or Brazil. More interestingly, so have important U.S. allies.
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder warned of the “undeniable danger” of U.S. unilateralism, and former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine once declared that “the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one.”
Current French President Emmanuel Macron’s support for European unity and strategic autonomy reveals a similar impulse. … READ MORE from Foreign Policy
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
Published by Foreign Policy
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com
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