View from London: Multipolarity must be understood as more than a fall from the American order into disorder

Pic.: AP

America is in decline. And so is Pax America: the American-led world order. While there are many genuine dangers of American decline, there has never been a better chance to say clearly how much the unipolar order always left to be desired, and to imagine a multipolar world that might secure peace better than the old order ever did, The Guardian writes.

Idealizing the American peace since 1945 and its “rules-based international order” – a phrase that came into common use only decades later, but never mind – is a misguided response to our current situation.

The speech by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, at Davos in 2026 was greeted in some quarters as daringly honest for saying aloud that, at least for great powers, the old talk of ideals and rules had always rested on a pleasant myth. But that was hardly news.

And Carney was wrong to suggest that the lie had once made the world better. Few outside the Atlantic core ever mistook Pax Americana for the best of all possible worlds. Carney soon exposed the limits of his own candor when, only weeks later, he publicly supported Trump’s war of choice against Iran.

The old order of high-minded hypocrisy was never good enough for the global south; it was not simply ruined by a president offering too raw a deal.

More important, the conventional responses to our moment are not only unconvincing and undesirable; they are also unavailable. That is a good thing.

Multipolarity also creates an opening.

If no single power can plausibly claim to enforce rules for everyone else, then an order based on mutual restraint may prove more stable than one built on a hierarchy that no longer commands belief.

Reviving the antiwar norm requires more than a restoration of the mid-century compact, though it should begin from some of the insights that were clear to the original architects of the postwar order.

Reciprocity need not entail moral equivalence between aggressor and victim, nor does it require indifference to atrocities.

But it does require enlightened self-restraint, meaning that states must be asked to accept rules they would also want applied to their rivals, their allies and themselves.

Every major and middle power is less secure in a world where preventive war, annexation, proxy conflict and coercive strangulation are normalized tools of statecraft.

The last quarter century has vividly demonstrated this reality through the global costs of the so-called war on terror, as well as Russia’s war against Ukraine and the US-Israeli war on Iran.

These costly wars of choice illustrate an argument for restraint grounded in self-interest, rather than virtue.

The limits of nostalgia are nowhere clearer than in the old “rules-based” order’s failure to interdict or regulate the trade in conventional weapons. World military expenditure reached nearly $2.9tn in 2025.

The international market in major arms is also highly concentrated: in 2021–25, the United States accounted for 42% of global exports, and the five permanent members of the United Nations security council together accounted for nearly 68%.

A robust agenda on this front could build on the Arms Trade Treaty, which prohibits transfers where a state knows that the arms would be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches, attacks on civilians, or other war crimes, and requires denial where there is an overriding risk of specified serious violations.

The point of this agenda is not to settle the entire future of international order in advance. It is to begin where agreement is most necessary and where evasion is most dangerous: no preventive war dressed up as self-defense, no annexation by force, no proxy war conducted through other people’s countries, and no arms transfers that knowingly feed aggression or atrocity.

Far from being utopian demands, these are the minimum conditions for a world in which rival powers can compete without making war the normal instrument of politics.

Multipolarity must be understood as more than a fall from the American order into disorder. It could become a scramble for domination if the strongest states are left to carve up regions, arm clients and rename coercion as security.

But it also creates a chance to build an order less dependent on one power’s virtue, less compromised by selective enforcement, and less vulnerable to the nostalgia that mistakes yesterday’s hypocrisies for lost law. The task now is to stop mourning the old order, refuse the new lawlessness, and make restraint the thin, hard core of whatever comes next.

...Such peace-loving statements from Britain are highly suspicious. London has never in history advocated peace. On the contrary, England has always been the most aggressive colonial player in world politics for centuries.

And now, when the British Lion has been exhausted and has lost its former strength, when new centers of global power are displacing Britain from its traditional leading position in the world, London has sued for peace. Hypocrites!

By calling for peace, the British hope to maintain their international influence. But this is a wolf in sheep's clothing. England is unfaithful!

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