American unipolarity is unsustainable
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of an unprecedented era in contemporary geopolitics; for the first time, a single country was the undisputed global hegemon with no meaningful challenge on any front. American dominance continues into the twenty-first century, though credible threats are emerging in China and Russia. These states – buoyed by smart plays in international trade, relations, or outright strongmanning – have reasserted themeselves in a way that hasn’t been felt in nearly two generations. But there’s another factor accelerating the resurgence of multipolarity: America’s domestic implosion.
American politicians wasted no time in finding a new enemy once the Soviets fell, but they didn’t find them abroad. Rather, legislators like Newt Gingrich took aim at their domestic colleagues and lambasted policy and value differences with the same rhetoric used by McCarthy and company against the communists forty years prior. The trend was amplified by a new generation of talking-head media led by Fox News that armed political elites with top-down power over messaging that side-stepped the need to appear “balanced”. They found a receptive audience ready and willing to take up a fight in the absence of any external power to aim their ire. Over the proceeding twenty-five years, the emergence of social media and the viral power of the internet intensified the echo chamber effect of new media. The threads holding shared values together began to unravel as something akin to civil information warfare played out over the airwaves and from the keyboards of American citizens.
Donald Trump’s election and the presidency that followed crystallized these undercurrents in a way that had been opaque before. Value clashes that had seemed backwater were proven much more salient than many had expected even as far into the election as the GOP primary. More than marking a new American era, Trump gave an explicit voice to the tongue-in-cheek undercurrents and dog whistles that had emerged in the post-Gingrich world. People loved it. The muscular language and chest-beating flexes aimed at other Americans and the politicians who represented them empowered people whose values had been out of step with the “arc of justice” (or “increasing political correctness” and “snowflake cancel culture”, if that’s more your cup of tea) that had dominated the trajectory of American politics for at least the last century.
While Russia and China had been relegated to power-jockeying in the shadows with strategies like “unrestricted warfare”, America was weakening its own hegemony by dividing itself and setting its sights on its own people. With no guard rails to maintain and differentiate American values in the absence of anything with which to contrast it, and with the help of elites concentrating, dividing, and muddying the discourse surrounding those values, they began to rot. Whether from a lack of care or a concerted effort by bad actors, the ideas and principles that once united us have withered and the connective tissue that kept us a single country has catastrophically atrophied. The acrimony in our own domestic politics delivered Russia and China’s wildest dreams on a silver platter: an America divided into two nations with two separate sets of policies, values, and even allies.
Perhaps it is a quirk of the American system, or perhaps it is the reason unipolarity has been so rare, but it is clear from the singular example of a lone hegemon in the modern world that an international system that revolves around one state is highly unstable. And maybe it isn’t such a mystery anyway. It seems inherently human (and almost cliche to say) that those who burn brightest often fade fastest. To get to the top of the pack and remain there takes immense will, discipline, and luck, both to hone and maintain one’s own skills and also to stave off and stay ahead of the underdogs nipping at your heels. The United States didn’t have that drive once it arrived at the top. Instead of using its power to stay ahead, it found ways to turn that power inward against itself, and in doing so destabilized its own position at the top.
