Bruce Jones
This is the first in a series of posts by Brookings’s vice president for foreign policy that will highlight Brookings scholars’ new and ongoing work on “the new geopolitics.” More information on this scholarship can be found here. America’s politics are mired in dysfunction and division. Much of the focus is on economic questions, and much of the heat is generated by the culture wars; but real wars—and America’s role in them—are part of the debate too.
While this debate preoccupies America, the world is changing, and rapidly. We have entered a new phase in international affairs, leaving behind us the brief moment characterized by untrammeled American dominance. Many of the changes underway are beyond America’s control. However, some dynamics could still be shaped by concerted and disciplined American policy—and might. Whether we are capable of that in the current moment remains to be seen, as does the price Americans are willing to pay to do so. To paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America is entitled to decide what role we want to play in the world, but we are not entitled to pretend the world is not changing around us.
We have entered a new phase in international affairs, leaving behind us the brief moment characterized by untrammeled American dominance.
The idioms of “international order,” “American leadership,” and “America First” dominate—but often obfuscate—the debate. More charged labels such as “nationalist” and “globalist,” often just as devoid of precision, are the accompanying epithets. Peel these away, and the new geopolitics has a number of distinctive features, some illuminated by history, some potentially unique to our moment of political and technological flux.
This new phase has been variously described as a new Cold War between two major powers, or a “G-Zero,” i.e. a world of every country for themselves. By my reckoning, it is neither, though it has elements of both. In the realm of economic affairs, we are in something that resembles multi-polarity, although some of the major economic actors (like Japan) don’t really act as poles of the economic order, as that term is conventionally used. Seen through the lens of the weaponization of cyber and artificial intelligence, we’re approaching a new Cold War between Russia and the West. Both of these features are part of a wider emergence of a new geopolitics, a new “great game” of competition between major powers that is rife with risk of confrontation and deadly miscalculation, but also hardly free of opportunity for countries and private actors nimble enough to adapt.
The dynamics of economic multi-polarity obscure the central reality of what I think is best described as asymmetric bipolarity: the fact that the United States and China are the central factor in every other actor’s calculation, albeit unevenly. There’s still a huge disparity between those two actors of course, but China profits from “the shadow of the future” and from America’s present dysfunction and decisions, and is thus more equal in states’ long-term calculations.
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