The war in Gaza has not only resulted in a ghastly loss of life for Israelis and Palestinians, but it has also added to the burdens the United States faces in a world it no longer dominates. Conflicts rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, the Sahel, Sudan, and potentially in Taiwan and Iran. Right-wing populism is rising in rich and poor countries, dividing societies into militant camps of the people versus the elite. Three decades after the Cold War ended, the envisioned community of nations linked together by a rules-based system of international relations modeled on America’s liberal-democratic values now seems like a gossamer dream.

The convergence of regional crises and far-right populism presents a formidable challenge for the United States and the stewardship of President Joe Biden. As explained in the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, global peace and prosperity require containing countries that combine authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy, strengthening alliances in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and building partnerships in developing regions.

Alas, the Biden administration is seeing the trees but not the forest. Like every administration that has preceded it since the end of the Cold War, it is stovepiping the world into a discrete set of regional problems that it seeks to manage with rhetorical exhortation and technocratic ingenuity. What elected officials from the Left to the Right fail to see is that the turbulence we are experiencing is part of a panoramic upheaval on the part of emerging and developing states that seek a redistribution of global power. They may favor a rules-based order, as Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said, so long as it does not compromise their interests. A “world order that is still very, very deeply Western,” he bluntly put it, is giving way to a multipolar world.

Although it is unclear what framework will emerge from the current geopolitical disorder, the United States must prepare for a world in which power politics rather than liberal ideals will prevail. To preserve international stability, the United States and the West will need to devise new rules of the road in concert with autocracies such as China and the middle powers so that they will become stakeholders in the global order they helped create.

Dominance and Decline

Military Might: For some scholars and policy analysts, multipolarity is an oversimplification of reality. Given the competition for primacy between the United States and China, political scientist and former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Joseph S. Nye, Jr argues the world is also bipolar. On a military basis, he maintains, it is unipolar. To be sure, China is developing its nuclear arsenal, Nye points out, but America’s military footprint is unmatched. With 750 bases in eighty nations and a network of alliances and partnerships, the United States fields a technologically innovative fighting force that receives 12 percent of all federal spending.

Even so, the U.S. military might not have inhibited Russia from invading Ukraine or China from threatening to bring Taiwan under its control by force. Indeed, the prospect of a larger war in Europe or a clash with China has understandably prompted caution in Washington. Competition from America’s adversaries is still more worrisome. Despite slowing economic growth, China is steadily chipping away at America’s dominance. It is rapidly modernizing its military, including an expanding nuclear force of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the construction of some 350 new missile silos, longer-range sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and new DF-17 medium-range missiles equipped with hypersonic glide vehicles.

Benefiting from an average of more than 9 percent GDP growth since the late 1990s, China now possesses the world’s largest navy, one that aspires to blue-water capability. Its Jin-class nuclear submarines are equipped with longer-range SLBMs, which can target the northwestern part of the United States as well as Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii. Despite China’s sagging economic growth, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is projected to have 356 battle-ready vessels by 2033, while the United States expects a reduction of its fleet to 290 by the end of this decade. China persists in militarizing atolls and islets in the South China Sea and is expanding its military presence in the Middle East, Africa, and the South Pacific.

Russia’s militarily disastrous invasion of Ukraine aside, Moscow continues to update its nuclear force. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) anticipates economic growth of 2.6 percent in 2024 thanks to continued energy exports. Moreover, Russia will allocate one-third of its budgetary spending to defense this year. It plans to modernize the dual-capable Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile system, which is deployed in Kaliningrad, and develop new delivery vehicles such as the land-based (and dual-capable) 9M729 cruise missile Washington has declared a violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Russia is also developing the Sarmat ICBM, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, and a submersible nuclear-powered drone releasable from submarines to attack carrier groups and potentially cities along the U.S. coast.

Other U.S. adversaries’ military arsenals are also growing. Iran has increased its defense cooperation with Russia since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, including the supply of drones and possibly surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. Iran intends to acquire Russian technology and military equipment to increase the accuracy and lethality of its short- and medium-range ballistic missile forces, naval forces, and air and defense assets. As for its nuclear program, Iran has increased its enrichment of uranium up to 60 percent uranium-235, which is close to weapons grade. To sustain combat operations in Ukraine, Russia has also turned to North Korea to supply it with artillery shells and other munitions such as rockers and howitzers. The price Kim Jong-un will likely demand for such assistance is Russian missile and satellite technology. With its successful test of a solid-fueled hypersonic missile, North Korea now has a delivery system with the range, reliability, and maneuverability to strike American territory. Although the size of its nuclear arsenal is unknown, it is estimated that North Korea could have enough fissile material for more than 100 weapons.

Economic Primacy: America is likewise the world’s paramount economic power. U.S. per capita income is 30 percent higher than that of Western Europe and 54 percent higher than that of Japan. At the end of the Cold War, the corresponding figures were 24 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Median wages continue to rise, as does productivity, because of the efficiency of labor and capital inputs. Immigration, the expansion and mobility of the workforce, and a high fertility rate (compared to other wealthy nations) have increased the working-age population by 30 percent over the past three decades, compared to 13 and 7 percent, respectively, for Europe and Japan.

Innovation in the workplace and skill levels have also risen. More American universities and corporations are considered among the world’s best than those of any other country. Six of the world’s ten biggest corporations in terms of sales, profits, and market value are American, according to Forbes magazine, and roughly half of the top twenty. Evaluated by market capitalization alone, eight of the top ten and sixteen of the top twenty are American.

The U.S. share of world GDP has been halved from the statistically aberrant 50 percent it enjoyed after World War II. The United States currently accounts for slightly more than 25 percent of world GDP at market exchange rates, a figure that has remained relatively constant since 1990. China and the European Union (EU) each represent roughly 18 percent, and the Asia-Pacific region’s share is about 37 percent. However, at purchasing power parity rates, America does not fare as well. In contrast to the Asia-Pacific’s share of 45 percent—19 percent of which is contributed by China—the United States, like the EU, represents about 15 percent of the total.

American universities and corporations also no longer enjoy the commanding heights they have in the past. The number of American universities in the top 100 declined from forty-three in the Times Higher Education survey of 2018 to thirty-four in the 2022 compendium. In the London-based Quacqarelli-Symonds study, American universities represented half of the top ten in 2022 as opposed to six in 2010, and ninety-one of the 177 reviewed in 2022 declined in rank. A comparable trend is discernible in the rankings of American corporations. Measured by market capitalization, American firms accounted for eight of the global top ten in 2022 versus six in 2000. Using metrics such as revenues, profits, and assets, however, Forbes ranked only three American corporations in the top ten and five in the top twenty in 2010. In the 2023 global list released by Forbes, China accounts for three of the top ten.

China is not the only rising economic power in the global transition. Although only one of its corporations is ranked in the world’s top fifty by Forbes, India accounts for nearly 7.5 percent of global GDP. It is now the world’s fifth-largest economy at market prices and third-largest in purchasing power parity. With a younger and highly educated labor force and annual economic growth forecasted by the IMF to exceed 6 percent over the next five years, Morgan Stanley expects India to become the third-largest economy by 2027, surpassing Germany and Japan.

China and Europe are also encroaching on America’s technological dominance. In 2020, the United States accounted for about 25 percent of global R&D investment versus 69 percent in 1960. China has increased its share from 4.8 percent of global spending in 2000 to 23 percent in 2020, and Europe accounts for around 22 percent. China is far and away the largest producer of patents, more than double that of the United States. It is also the largest market for electric vehicles. It sold 22 million passenger vehicles in 2022, compared with less than 13 million in Europe and the United States. Fearful of the competition from cheaper and technologically superior Chinese cars, the European Union is threatening to raise tariffs on its imports, which Beijing is countering by opening a factory in Hungary. The Biden administration may follow suit, prodded by pressure from the bipartisan United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to ban an array of imports.

As growth of 4.9 percent in the third quarter of 2023 attests, the United States has nonetheless continued to demonstrate its economic resilience despite the great recession of 2008-09 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Powered by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the United States has created roughly 14 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and unemployment has declined to 3.7 percent. China, meanwhile, is stagnating under massive government debt and deflation from an unraveling property market, slowing exports, an aging population, and inflexible leadership.

Still, it may be premature to herald the new American renaissance as New York Times columnist David Brooks has done. The increase in America’s GDP relative to Europe’s is partly a function of the euro’s declining value. And while China’s sputtering economy may replicate the economic crisis in Japan after its asset bubble burst in 1990, regional growth rates historically fluctuate. Asia produced 61 percent of world output in 1820 compared to 25 percent from Europe, only 20 percent in 1950, but 48 percent in 2018 versus Europe’s share of 15 percent.

To be sure, declining energy prices and the apparent end of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes have increased the prospect of a soft landing. Even though inflation fell to 3.1 percent by the end of 2023, the message from the index of leading economic indicators is that a recession may lie ahead, according to the Conference Board. U.S. growth is further likely to be hampered by China’s continuing economic struggles. China is the largest trading partner of some 120 countries, including Japan, South Korea, the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the EU. It is America’s third-largest export market and the largest purchaser of U.S. treasury bonds. While China’s deflationary spiral has benefited countries battling inflation, anemic demand has hurt exporters of industrial goods as well as the tourism industry.

By the same token, the prospect that China will recover from its current malaise should not be dismissed. According to a study by the Australian Strategy Policy Institute, it enjoys a technological lead over the United States in thirty-seven of forty-four fields, from AI to robotics. China graduates 1.4 million engineers annually and dominates the supply chain of rare earth materials, controlling 70 percent of their extraction and 90 percent of the processing.

The threat to American economic primacy presented by China’s trade-distorting subsidies and theft of intellectual property is only one of the reasons the Biden administration has opted for industrial policy. Bidenomics also aims to produce new manufacturing jobs for working- and middle-class Americans. Critical of the inequality produced by unfettered free trade, Biden avers that industrial policy will lead to a more egalitarian and geopolitically secure society.

Both propositions are dubious. China has already responded to Washington’s ban on the export of computer chips by restricting exports of gallium, germanium, and graphite—elements used in semiconductor manufacturing, fiber-optic networks, and military kits—and more recently, graphite, a component of electric vehicle batteries. Expanding supply chains to other producers of rare earths is economically prudent. But even if the United States can find alternative sources in, say, Vietnam, Australia, India, or Peru, it is not likely to erode China’s dominant position or alter the reality that America’s Indo-Pacific partners remain dependent on their economic ties with Beijing. Industrial policy is far more likely to reinforce the tit-for-tat dynamic that is playing out between Washington and Beijing and divide the world into competing blocs.

Industrial policy will also undermine the efficiencies of the international trading system that lowered the cost of goods and raised real incomes during the 1980s and 1990s. While it is true that cheap Chinese imports destroyed manufacturing jobs in the industrialized world, the decline mainly resulted from the labor-cutting efficiency of modern technology and shifting comparative advantage. The cumulative effects of economic nationalism will raise the cost of goods to American consumers and inhibit innovative research on climate change. Industrial policy has already prompted the EU to launch a “Buy Europe” project to incentivize the domestic production of green technology and semiconductors. India, South Korea, Australia, and Canada are acting correspondingly.

The United States and other wealthy nations’ gravitation toward protectionism and deglobalization will further create hardships for low-income countries, which lack the ability to provide lavish subsidies to domestic producers. Worse, it will erode the economic progress they have made since 1990 in raising the incomes of the world’s poorest populations. Protectionism will constrict participation in global value chains, deprive poor countries reliant on farming of export income needed to pay for imports and cover debt service for loans and create more failed states, thereby sabotaging economic development and intensifying global instability.

Political Authority: In confronting the geostrategic challenges posed by Russian revanchism and Chinese militancy, the United States remains the keystone of its alliances in Europe and Asia. However, the uncontested political power that it wielded during the Cold War and in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire is fading. Shifting geopolitical interests and alignments among emerging regional powers who demand a voice in global governance is a major reason. Dissention between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia on a host of global threats is another.

Intent on asserting their views, countries in the rich and developing world have increasingly impugned Washington’s policy preferences. In some cases, dissent has been broad-based; in others, powerful voices have stymied the United States. Undeterred by President Bill Clinton’s opposition, Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy challenged the world to ban landmines, which produced 164 signatures to the Ottawa Treaty in 1997. Though many countries joined the “coalition of the willing” in the second Gulf War in 2003, U.S. military action was publicly opposed by France, Germany, Russia, and the European Parliament, as well as by Latin America, the Arab League, and the African Union.

The collapse of the Doha Round of trade negotiations in 2008, on the other hand, resulted from Sino-Indian insistence on agricultural subsidies over U.S. objections. In 2010, Brazil and Turkey defied President Barack Obama’s decision to ratchet up sanctions on Iran, reviving earlier proposals for a fuel swap deal. Although the Obama administration proceeded with its sanctions resolution, Turkey and Brazil had both contested Washington’s authority and elevated their international status.

Continuing criticism of the West for its quasi-colonial dominance of the international economic and political order further reflects the Global South’s clamor for a voice in international decision-making. Irritated by the persistent gap in GDP per capita between North and South, developing countries have long sought to curb the de facto veto power the United States and Europe enjoy as respective heads of the World Bank and IMF. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank created by China in 2016, which now numbers 109 countries, and the BRICS Development Bank have emerged as a sort of second Bretton Woods to challenge the West’s dominance.

Thirty-five countries have more recently registered their resentment toward the rich world by abstaining from censuring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the United Nations vote in October 2022. Many have chastised the United States for provoking the conflict, deriding the hypocrisy of the rules-based order that sanctions Russia but ignores Israel’s unremitting absorption of Palestinian territory.

Emerging powers are also becoming more transactional in their relationships with global adversaries. Although Indian prime minister Narendra Modi implicitly reproached Russian president Vladimir Putin in the fall of 2022, saying, “Today’s era is not an era of war,” India has expanded its trade ties with Russia. Along with China, Turkey, and Brazil, it has massively purchased discounted Russian oil, which helps Moscow sustain its war. A founding member of the BRICS, India has joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue along with the United States, Australia, and Japan to counter China’s growing influence in Asia. Yet India remains reliant on China for cheap consumer goods and the critical semiconductor chips and circuit boards on which its industries depend.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is equally keen to give Turkey the global status the Ottoman Empire once held. Defying Washington’s warnings, Erdogan purchased the S-400 missile defense system from Russia. He has denounced Russia for its invasion of Ukraine but abstained from joining the West’s sanctions regime lest it provoke economic reprisals from Moscow. Even so, Turkey and Russia have backed opposing sides in the civil wars in Syria and Libya. Erdogan displayed similar transactional behavior in the summer of 2023 when he agreed to support Sweden’s accession to NATO to ensure the purchase of F-16s from the United States, which followed in January.

Other emerging and developing countries that favor a multipolar world order are similarly inclined to straddle tensions between the West and the China-Russia strategic partnership. Though it is a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States, Brazil has opposed the dominance of the U.S. dollar in international trade. During a visit to China in April 2023, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for the de-dollarization of international trade and urged the BRICS group of nations to devise their own currency. Aspiring to a larger role on the world stage, Indonesia, an emerging power in Asia and chair of the 2022 G20 summit, has indirectly chided the United States for its “megaphone diplomacy” on Ukraine and refused to take sides in the Sino-American competition. However, it has criticized China’s claims in the South China Sea, conducted military exercises to safeguard its maritime interests and increased defense spending by 20 percent in November 2023.

Concerns about the impact of U.S. sanctions on Russia have prompted some countries to settle payments in renminbi, as Singapore and Malaysia have done. However, the main reason for the Global South’s interest in de-dollarization is the growing trade with and aid from China. ASEAN’s trade with China more than doubled in 2022, now accounting for one-fifth of the region’s global trade. Trade between Brazil and China rose to $154 billion in 2022. Not only is China the lender of first and last resort for many developing countries, but it is also the principal supplier of developmental aid to sub-Saharan Africa. Brazil is also increasing its commercial presence in Africa. India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are also involved.

Even smaller countries assert their interests in a world that seems increasingly unmoored. Tiny Qatar, home to a U.S. air base and a haven for exiled Hamas leaders, has assumed a surprising diplomatic presence in the world. It helped to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover in 2021 and mediated the release of Israeli hostages and wounded Palestinian fighters in the war in Gaza. At the other end of the spectrum, the Houthis, a militant Shia sect in the failed state of Yemen financed by Iran, have attacked commercial vessels in the Red Sea in retaliation for Israel’s offensive in the Gaza war. To protect shipping through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, the United States and the United Kingdom have launched airstrikes against Houthi missiles, which could provoke a military response from Iran.

Depending on their outcomes, a raft of global elections in 2024 could exacerbate turbulence in world politics. Though Xi Jinping has thus far exercised restraint, the victory by the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan’s presidential election on January 13 will certainly increase friction between Beijing and Taipei. The U.S. presidential election in November 2024 will likely have a more profound effect on international stability.

A second term for Biden would result in a continuation of policies pursued during the past three years. International turbulence would persist, but sufficient guard rails would be in place to contain it. If Donald Trump regains the White House, however, a winners-versus-losers standard would replace Biden’s democracy-versus-autocracy argument, which would redound to the benefit of Xi, Putin, and other tyrants. Trump’s continued indifference to democratic values would reinforce the Global South’s perception that the rules-based order is a hypocritical contrivance to justify Western dominance. The planned 10 percent tax on all imports Trump has proposed would cripple global trade, provoke beggar-thy-neighbor policies not seen since the interwar period of the twentieth century, and set relations with Beijing on a collision course.

Moreover, America’s support for Ukraine would wither, as would any prospect of negotiations. The prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end, and the United States would abandon any interest in the Middle East save for drawing closer to Saudi Arabia. America’s alliances in Europe and Asia, which Biden has restored, would languish or cease to exist. Putin would expand westward, probably starting in the Baltic States. The United States would avoid a conflict with China, however, because Trump is likely to concede Taiwan to China.

Toward a More Stable World

The turmoil that engulfs today’s world is the antithesis of the liberal-democratic order that Washington confidently envisioned would reshape the world in America’s image. As it happened, the United States failed to see that resurgent nationalism, historical grievances, and, beginning with the Yugoslav wars, recurring violence were incompatible with a world bounded by America’s values. The current disorder may presage a return to the balance-of-power system that maintained an uneasy equilibrium prior to World War I or succumb to the anarchy of the Hobbesian state of nature. But it could transmute into a stable world order, the emergence and persistence of which will depend on a mutuality of interests to sustain it rather than a vague rules-based order that lacks universal consent and thus validity in international law. Determined by non-Western and Western countries, democracies and autocracies, the rules must be consensual, enforceable by the stakeholders when disruptions of peace occur, and subject to dispute settlement by the principal parties to the dispute and the larger international community.

Restoring America’s commitment to the United Nations as the global forum for reasoned debate and conflict resolution will contribute to stability. The United States should cease its penchant for responding to the collective will of the UN, a body it conceived as an option rather than an obligation. It should further assume a leadership role in extending UN Security Council membership on a permanent and/or rotational basis to countries from the developing world so that every region shares a stake in preserving international stability.

Even though it will no longer be the sole rule-maker, the United States will still play a vital role in ensuring the stability of the evolving world order. Militarily, it will be incumbent on Washington to balance the competing interests of major adversaries such as China and Russia and regional powers. Both to deter countries from unwelcome actions and to respond to threats, it will be important for the United States to maintain a robust and operationally ready military force, restrict access to certain dual-capable technologies, and champion arms control agreements. Strengthening relations with America’s allies in Europe and Asia, as the Biden administration is doing, and, in concert with China, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to control its destructive power will be critical to preserving U.S. security and geopolitical stability.

Maintaining a dialogue with America’s adversaries is essential. This is especially important with China, where the United States has a codependent relationship in trade and investment. Unfortunately, partly out of ignorance and partly out of fear that U.S. global preeminence is ebbing, Americans on the Right and Left have demonized China as the latest anti-Christ. If its history is any guide, it seems unlikely that Beijing’s ambition is to control the world, its military modernization and power projection in the South China Sea notwithstanding. More plausibly, China wants to be recognized by Washington as a great power with core interests no less important than those of the United States.

The thaw in U.S.-China relations that has followed the Biden-Xi summit last November is a positive sign. But it beckons more than opinion-page cheerleading to evolve substantively. At the very least, the Biden administration should end its industrial policy and unwind trade sanctions against Beijing, which are bad for American business and the public and unlikely to impede Chinese trade with Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Protectionism intensifies bilateral hostilities and elevates the risk of military confrontation.

Restoring free trade will pay economic as well as geopolitical dividends. In an increasingly competitive world, creativity and innovation will be the key to comparative advantage. Instead of raising import barriers to contain China’s rise, the United States should seek to regain its former leadership in science and technology by increasing government R&D spending in semiconductors, robotics, quantum computing, AI, and medical science. The objective should be to increase investment to the level it had reached two decades ago.

Lastly, the United States can remain a powerful force for political and economic liberalism in the world. Liberalism has not outlived its purpose, as Putin self-servingly claimed before the G20 summit in 2019. True, only 8 percent of the world’s population lives in a fully functioning democracy, but more than half of the world’s population will go to the polls in 2024 to voice their individual opinions. Rather than lecture the developing world to practice democracy, like nineteenth-century circuit riders preaching the gospel in rural America, the United States can again become a model for others to emulate. To do so, it must dampen the culture wars that divide the country into hostile camps, reduce crime, resolve the border crisis, increase educational opportunities and skills training for women and minorities, acknowledge the reality of value pluralism, and increase developmental aid to the most vulnerable societies, as China and other countries have done.

Good intentions aside, when all is said and done, cynicism may triumph, and this century will look no different from the previous one. However, the more concretely people everywhere can envision a future of shared responsibility to preserve order in an interdependent world, the more likely the prospect is that the nascent multipolar era will be a stable one.

Hugh De Santis is a former career officer in the Department of State. He also chaired the Department of National Security Strategy at the National War College and served as senior advisor for Asian regional integration at the CIA. He is the author most recently of The Right to Rule: American Exceptionalism and the Coming Multipolar World Order. He thanks Stanley Katz and Carolyn Fuller for their constructive comments.

Image: Shutterstock.com.