Geopolitics Today

For roughly fifteen years after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the United States stood alone as the world's sole superpower. It had the largest military, the deepest capital markets, the most influential culture, and no peer competitor willing or able to challenge its position. Political scientists called this the "unipolar moment." Some predicted it would last a century.

It did not. By the mid-2000s, the Iraq War had strained American credibility and exhausted public appetite for intervention. The 2008 financial crisis undermined faith in American-led economic governance. China's GDP quadrupled between 2000 and 2010. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, began reasserting itself in its near abroad. Regional powers from Turkey to Brazil to India pursued independent foreign policies that frequently diverged from Washington's preferences.

The world that has emerged is what analysts call a An international system in which three or more major powers hold significant military, economic, and diplomatic influence, with no single state dominant enough to impose its preferences unilaterally. Multipolar systems are historically common — the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century is a classic example — but tend to produce more complex and unpredictable patterns of competition and cooperation than unipolar or bipolar systems.. No single state dominates. Instead, several major powers compete, cooperate, and maneuver against one another across multiple dimensions: military, economic, technological, diplomatic. The result is a world that is more dynamic, more contested, and considerably less predictable than the one most policymakers were trained to navigate.